Beyond the Ramp: Caregiving, Cosmology, and Gendered Selfhood in Shivani Gupta’s No Looking Back: A True Story

Abstract

No Looking Back: A True Story (2014) by Shivani Gupta, is an autobiographical novel. It deals with her transformation after a fatal car accident that left her tetraplegic. It presents her own experience of acquiring disability following a car accident, also documenting her journey towards becoming one of the best-known disability access experts in India and finally her widowhood. Generally, the novel can be read either in the spatial politics of the built environment or in the general western frameworks of trauma and resilience, the exercise of power in the context of informal caregiving relationships, the Hindu cosmological vocabulary through which disability is socially interpreted namely that of karma, pity and ritual purity, the gendered arc of courtship, marriage and widowhood that shapes the memoir’s closing moves. A close reading of the novel from the perspective of disability studies, combined with an intersectional and stigma theory, demonstrates that Gupta’s story does not follow a linear, redemptive trajectory that is assumed by models of adaptation and post-traumatic growth but it instead constitutes a negotiation with cosmological explanations of disability and with the unevenness of caregiving itself. The analysis explores two conflicting models of care, contextualises the frequent motifs of almsgiving and ritual exclusion within India’s karmic understanding of disability, and reads the memoir’s trajectory from courtship to widowhood as a critique of an adaptationist model that assumes only one direction of movement. The article concludes by reflecting implications for training for special educators and rehabilitation counsellors.