Doing disability through charity and philanthropy in contemporary South India

Abstract

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, this article explores the relationship between charity and disability. Despite a stereotype of philanthropic aid as reproductive of existing power structures or symptomatic of state failures to eliminate poverty, closer investigation exposes a more multi-layered picture. Disjunctures in donor and recipient perspectives on charity are shown to create spaces in which recipients might challenge the very characterisations that allow them access to aid in the first place, revealing both the potential and the limitations of charitable aid to bring about social change for disabled people.