Disabled Intimacy: Navigating Desire in Rabindranath Tagore's "Subha"

Author(s)	Ms. Sayantika Sarkar
Country	India
Abstract	This essay argues that Rabindranath Tagore's "Subha" (1893) challenges the ableist assumption that disabled people are asexual and undesiring. Desire remains underexplored in disability research, and disabled people are frequently cast as asexual or pitiable, which denies them recognition as sexual subjects. The essay reads Subha as an embodied character rather than a symbol of female voicelessness. Drawing on disability studies and Indian scholarship on disability, gender, and stigma, the essay traces how the short story gives her an interior life, a non-verbal intimacy with animals and nature, and a bond with another excluded character, Pratap. It then examines what happens to that desire in a society organised around marriageability and productivity. The essay concludes that while Subha's tragedy mirrors real injustice, narratives of pity risk producing aesthetic nervousness, and that literature must also imagine desiring disabled lives with agency and joy.
Keywords	desire, disability studies, Tagore, "Subha," normate, narrative prosthesis, India
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-10-11
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.89357

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