Sexuality of the disabled still suppressed in India

The soon-to-release Margarita With A Straw (MWAS) brings into sharp focus the way the differently-abled are treated as asexual, and their families and caregivers are unable to cope with their sexuality. MWAS tells of a wheelchair-bound spastic protagonist Laila, a Delhi University student and writer who falls in love with a fiery activist Khanum in New York, and goes on to discover her sexuality. 

Back home, though, parents of the cognitively-challenged are struggling to comprehend it. A TV producer father admitted he avoided going out for a few years when his son began “indulging in 'socially inappropriate behaviour' like plunging his hands into his pants to scratch, or more.” It took the parents a while to work out a way to explain that this can only be done in privacy. 

India is home to over 21 million challenged people. Of these, over 2.16 million are cognitively challenged. Developmental Paediatrician Dr Koyeli Sengupta said, “Education about sex and proper personal hygiene is important so that they don’t pick sexual norms which could lead to ‘inappropriate’ behaviour,” she says.

Echoing her words, Dr Srilatha Juvva of the Centre for Disability Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, said even well-known institutions which care for the challenged can take too moralistic a view of the issue. “Recently, one of them rusticated a few students because they had touched each other inappropriately in the bathroom,” she says.

Also read: 'Margarita With A Straw' and the sexuality of the differently abled