In June 2024, I came into contact with Seema through an online network. Seema is a disability rights activist and a mother of children on the Autism spectrum who operates across multiple Indian cities.Footnote 1 Our encounter was prompted by her leadership in a residential initiative designed for families with members on the Autism spectrum and Down syndrome, though the project’s vision also extended to adults with other intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).Footnote 2 In our conversation, Seema explained how the project was structured economically and socially. Within this model, each participating family would purchase an independent residence within a shared compound and, in parallel, acquire a studio apartment intended as a lifetime living space for their ageing son/daughter with IDD, designed to accommodate a resident care worker. Parents were expected to contribute a non-refundable deposit and commit to recurring payments that sustained collective services such as, medical care, everyday supervision, infrastructure maintenance, and organized social engagement. The projected outlay, according to Seema, was roughly one crore rupees (about USD 110,000) as an initial investment, and an additional thirty-five to forty-five thousand rupees (USD 400–500) in monthly contributions per family. Evidently, these figures mark the project as a premium model of care.
During our ninety-minute conversation, Seema consistently articulated her desire to bring together a community of parents as their children with IDD and they themselves get older. This aspiration for a community was grounded not merely in her personal experience but also emerged relationally, shaped through dialogues with other parents navigating parallel uncertainties about the future of care. Drawing on her existing role heading a vocational training organization for adults on the autism spectrum, Seema had mobilized networks, secured funds, located land, and by the time we spoke, construction was underway with at least 10 families committed.
While Seema’s vision carried a strong affective and moral appeal, our conversation gradually revealed the cultural contours shaping it. She described how the residential project would include a Hindu temple and how the residents intended to celebrate festivals (implied as Hindu festivals) together, which she envisioned as practices that fostered solidarity and community feeling among “like-minded” families. Notably, she also emphasized that this community would be strictly vegetarian. These articulations, while initially framed as expressions of shared values and lifestyle preferences, drew my attention to the boundaries through which belonging was being imagined. What seemed, at first, like pragmatic efforts at community-building later came to signify deeper social processes that surfaced repeatedly across my fieldwork. In conversations with other parents of ageing adults with IDD, similar idioms of purity and shared culture recurred, revealing how caste and class affiliations subtly organized visions of care, inclusion, and security in later life.
1. Laying the context: Disability and caste
Scholarly engagement at the intersection of disability and caste in India, while significant, remains relatively limited. Existing research, however, demonstrates that experiences of marginalization, discrimination, stigma, and restricted access to basic rights among persons with disabilities are further exacerbated when such individuals belong to caste-oppressed communities.Footnote 3 While this scholarship has made important contributions, it has foregrounded the experiences of the oppressed and marginalized. As Mehrotra has argued, systematic documentation of lived experiences at the intersection of caste, gender, and disability is critical for generating data that can inform meaningful policy interventions.Footnote 4
Nonetheless, I argue that an equally pressing task lies in examining the operations of caste and class privilege in the everyday lives of persons with disabilities. Dalit rights activism and critical caste scholarship have consistently emphasized the need to invert the analytic gaze; to examine not only caste-based oppression but also the mechanisms through which caste privilege and dominance are sustained and normalized in everyday life. Satish Deshpande has argued that dominant castes are often perceived as transcending caste, becoming casteless. This erasure effectively obscures the persistence of caste capital, allowing economic, social, and cultural advantages accrued through caste privilege to remain unmarked and thus reproduced across generations.Footnote 5 Attending to such privilege reveals how caste and class habitus, alongside the gender of the person with disability, are reproduced within emerging, market-mediated systems of disability care in contemporary India.
2. Laying the context: Class, gender, and disability
Evident in the scholarship is that class and gender social locations fundamentally shape disability care in India.Footnote 6 In rural, low-income households, disability is frequently experienced as catastrophic due to immediate economic burdens: lost earnings, increased care time, and costs for treatment or assistive devices.Footnote 7 In contrast, caregiving for women with disabilities from class-caste privileged families often involves confinement to domestic spaces, driven by fears that external visibility would tarnish family honor. Furthermore, sexual abuse of women with disabilities constitutes another critical concern for caregivers from economically marginalized as well as more privileged families: mothers of children with intellectual impairments must maintain constant vigilance for their children’s safety, as they remain vulnerable to sexual abuse throughout childhood and adolescence.Footnote 8 I return to this concern later in this article.
This article conceptualizes caste and class as co-constituted identities that jointly shape social location, particularly given that all interlocutors mentioned in this article belong to the dominant Brahmin caste with accompanying class privilege. It has been demonstrated that this group has historically managed to convert caste capital into modern forms of capital.Footnote 9 While this article treats caste and class as co-constituted, it is analytically important to resist collapsing them into a single, undifferentiated axis of privilege. They operate through distinct, if intertwined, logics, and attending to their differences illuminates dimensions of care decision-making that a blunt intersectional account might otherwise flatten. This article demonstrates that caste structures belonging, cultural recognition, and the moral ordering of bodies and spaces. It determines who is perceived as sharing a natural community, whose dietary and ritual practices count as the unmarked norm, and whose presence is experienced as a disruption to that norm. Class, by contrast, operates primarily through the differential capacity to convert economic resources into material care arrangements—to purchase residential spaces, hire workers, and insulate oneself from the inadequacies of state provision. These, while related, are not reducible to one another. Attending to this distinction, rather than treating caste and class as simply additive, allows this article to trace the more nuanced ways in which privilege is reproduced within disability care infrastructures in contemporary India. This focus on privilege is not intended to minimize these families’ real anxieties, but to locate them within wider structures of inequality.
To undertake this intersectional analysis, this article builds on the disability justice framework introduced by Mia Mingus, alongside other disability activists who have advocated for the adoption of this framework as an alternative to the individualized disability rights paradigm.Footnote 10 The disability justice framework foregrounds the imperative of recognizing the intersectionality of multiple, co-constitutive systems of oppression, such as ableism, racism, sexism, and classism, that collectively reproduce and reinforce structural inequities.Footnote 11 Consequently, an intersectional analytic lens becomes indispensable for deconstructing ableist social arrangements and envisioning emancipatory futures.Footnote 12 While this intersectional approach is critical to unpacking the experience of communities who are marginalized through multiple disadvantaging social locations, my approach further nuances this perspective by interrogating not only the experiences of how marginalization is shaped through diverse oppressive systems but also the ways in which social privileges associated with particular positionalities influence the modalities and cultures of care afforded to disabled individuals. This dual focus enables a more comprehensive understanding of power dynamics within disability care practices.
3. Methodological Reflections on Absence
This article is part of a larger ethnographic work on ageing of people with IDD and practices and politics of care futures and disability in India. Fieldwork was anchored predominantly in Bangalore, India between January 2024 and February 2025, but unfolded through a networked set of relationships that extended beyond the city as interlocutors moved across urban centers.
Research participants included: parents of adults with IDD; care workers engaged in direct support roles; and leaders and administrators (who were sometimes themselves parents) of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) who were envisioning residential care infrastructures for adults with IDD.
The ethnographic process privileged situated modes of encounter, wherein I spent time with participants in their domestic settings, residential communities, and NGO office spaces, tracing how everyday practices of care and kinship were shaped by, and responded to, social, institutional, and infrastructural constraints. However, attuned to participants’ care responsibilities, I maintained methodological flexibility; phone and virtual interviews were woven into the research as part of an ethical commitment to participant-centered practice.
This article stems from the 22 in-depth life history interviews with parents of adults with IDD, supplemented by 8 follow-up conversations with select participants. Each encounter spanned between one and two hours. The interviews, conducted in English and occasionally intermixed with Kannada or Hindi, were audio-recorded with the consent of all participants. Except one who did not consent to the recording of the interview but consented to note-taking. Although this article draws on all the interviews conducted, it focuses on two detailed interviews with mothers of adults with IDD, supplemented by insights from the broader set. Notably, these two interlocutors were unconnected to each other or to the same organizations, yet their stories displayed resonances shaped by intersecting privileges.
A significant methodological boundary requires explicit acknowledgement. Although this article concerns care arrangements for adults with IDD, the adults themselves are not primary interlocutors; the analysis draws instead on the accounts of parents, care workers, and administrators. Anthropology’s foundational critique of social evolutionism—the rejection of the idea that non-Western societies represented cognitively inferior stages of human development—established cognitive equivalence across societies as a core anti-racist methodological principle.Footnote 13 This was a politically necessary and intellectually productive move. Yet this same commitment carried an unexamined consequence. As McKearney and Zoanni have argued, because the discipline built its foundations on the principle that all human action is culturally intelligible and that no society’s cognitive capacities are inferior to another’s, it became difficult to attend to neurocognitive difference within societies without appearing to reintroduce the very hierarchies of cognitive worth that anthropology had set out to dismantle.Footnote 14 The result was not a principled methodological position but an unexamined theoretical gap: the discipline that was well-equipped to challenge the pathologization of non-Western thought became hesitant to engage with intellectual disability as a form of cognitive difference that also demands ethnographic attention. This hesitancy is further compounded by structural and institutional constraints: research ethics committees in India, as elsewhere, frequently presume that adults with IDD are unable to provide informed consent, creating barriers that constrain researcher access independently of scholarly intent. Beyond these institutional constraints, the research questions of this article locate future care planning in the domain of neurotypical caregivers and are therefore appropriately addressed through their accounts. This does not resolve the tension that disability studies scholars and activists have rightly named: that research conducted without the direct participation of disabled people risks reproducing their erasure from academic and public discourse. I take that critique seriously. What I can offer here is a deliberately bounded scope, an analysis of the cultural and structural logics that shape how families plan care futures, alongside an explicit call for future work that centers adults with IDD as primary interlocutors, engages with their non-verbal and embodied forms of communication on their own terms, and draws on the methodological innovations that scholars such as McKearney and Zoanni have begun to develop for ethnographic work with people with intellectual disabilities.Footnote 15
Throughout the project, ethical protocols of informed consent and confidentiality were rigorously maintained. Hence, all names and identifying details in this study have been anonymized. To indicate the presence of the dominant caste location of my interlocutors, I have replaced their Brahmin last names with alternative, caste-adjacent surnames from the region. However, in one context, where the participant’s last name aligned with mine, I have retained that since it directly impacted the nature of our conversation but have anonymized other details. This was done to preserve privacy but also to recognize that sometimes surnames, along with other sociocultural markers, are integral to demonstrating one’s caste location in India.
4. Care context for ageing adults with IDD in India
What will happen to them after us? This recurring question encapsulates a profound concern voiced by nearly all parents of children with IDD whom I encountered during my fieldwork. The issue gains particular urgency in the case of older persons with IDD, whose needs and vulnerabilities remain marginal within broader disability rights discourses and policy interventions. My research indicates that families of adults with IDD are frequently left to devise individualized strategies and infrastructures of care that reflect neoliberal care systems. A cursory engagement with the everyday worlds of PWDs and their families reveals that ageing constitutes a persistent preoccupation that shapes family life.Footnote 16 For families with members who have IDD, this question takes on heightened significance given the intersections of shrinking kin networks, especially in urban contexts, and the absence of robust public or community-based care systems. These conditions render the anticipation of “after us” not merely a personal fear but a structural predicament embedded in the broader politics of care and social support for PWDs in contemporary India.
Care regimes are ambiguous and are entangled within the state–market–family–society dynamics that produce care practices in India.Footnote 17 Since the neoliberal turn of the late 1980s, state expenditure on social programs including care has been consistently reduced. Although laws, schemes and social security programs focused on providing care for adults with IDD have emerged, such as the National Trust Act, their implementation and everyday functioning have been piecemeal and haphazard, similar to the implementation of other social security programs.Footnote 18 Furthermore, it has also been noted by disability rights activists that welfare provisions often individualize disability, overlooking the collective and structural disabling conditions that restrict participation in society. In doing so, they reproduce power hierarchies that undermine the personhood and citizenship of people with disabilities.Footnote 19
Since the state has increasingly withdrawn from social policies, there has been no robust state-supported care infrastructure for families with adults with IDD. In this scenario, families across the social spectrum have turned to alternative and community-based arrangements to meet their caregiving needs. Shubhangi Vaidya’s ethnographic research with families of children on the autism spectrum in India illustrates that in moments of crisis, parents often rely on networks of other families with neurodivergent members rather than on their own kin or extended biological families.Footnote 20 This shift reflects an emergent reconfiguration of kinship and support, wherein sociality and care are produced through shared experiences of disability rather than through conventional genealogical ties. Organizations working with PWDs have also played a crucial role in mediating and institutionalizing these networks of mutual support.Footnote 21
While community support (informally or via disability support and advocacy organizations) has organically developed in many urban contexts in India, the question of long-term care for ageing adults with IDD has remained largely unattended. In the recent past, there have been efforts to fill this gap, as seen in the discernible growth in privately funded, residential care facilities that cater to the needs of the more privileged families with members with IDD. These facilities are typically parent-initiated, established through NGOs or disability advocacy trusts, and cater to adults with a range of IDD.
Until recently, institutional care for persons with IDD was neither the primary nor the most culturally legible option for most families in India. Prevailing scholarship has noted that caregiving practices for PWIDDs have historically been embedded within extended kinship structures and dense familial networks that provided both material and emotional support.Footnote 22 However, the demographic and socio-economic transformations of recent decades, marked by rising life expectancy, urbanization, and the restructuring of familial life under neoliberal conditions, have begun to reconstitute the landscape of care. In this shifting terrain, institutional care is increasingly being perceived as a viable, even aspirational, alternative among economically privileged families who anticipate the challenges of caring for ageing adults with IDD.Footnote 23
In Bengaluru, India, where the majority of this research was conducted, two distinct models of private residential care for adults with IDD have taken shape in recent years. The first model consists of hostel-style facilities that accommodate adult men and women with IDD without co-residence by family members. I encountered only one such facility in Bangalore. Here, residents typically share rooms, and each floor is overseen by a gender-aligned care worker responsible for supervision and basic well-being. Originating largely from parent-led associations, this hostel represents a relatively affordable option, with fees ranging between rupees 12,500 to 15,000 per month (approximately USD 138–165). The second model comprises more exclusive residential developments designed to house entire families alongside their adult children with IDD. In some cases, the arrangement includes a studio apartment adjoining the family home for the adult with IDD; in others, families reside within independent houses situated inside gated communities. These facilities cater largely to upper-middle-class and elite families, demanding substantial investment (often around ₹1 crore (approximately USD 110,000) as an initial payment) along with monthly maintenance charges of rupees 45,000 to 50,000 (around USD 500–550). Like the hostel, these projects too are parent-initiated collaborations, but these often involve property developers and networks of similarly positioned families. Driven by real estate economics, such facilities are typically located on the peripheries of Bengaluru or in adjacent towns.
In this article, I focus on ethnographic encounters with two key interlocutors, Vimala Rao and Padma Acharya. At the time I met Vimala, her son was already residing in a hostel facility whereas Padma’s family had invested in a facility that falls within the second model mentioned above. This facility was under construction and not yet operational. The analyses will focus on these two ethnographic encounters that elucidate the exigencies and rationales informing their selection of specific care arrangements, revealing not only the profound affective and logistical burdens of envisioning long-term care for kin with IDD but also the pervasive imprint of gender, caste and class positionalities on such decision-making processes.
5. Cultures of caste and class
5.1. Vimala Rao
I met Vimala Rao and her husband while visiting the hostel facility described above, which was established about ten years ago through parental investment and external grant support. What marks this hostel as distinctive within the landscape of Bengaluru’s private care residential facilities is that it accommodates a few poor residents. In contrast to the more affluent private residential facilities, this hostel provides housing for about 10 of the 50 residents under the GHARAUNDA scheme.Footnote 24
Vimala Rao and her husband were visiting their 32-year-old son, Ganesh, who had been residing there for two years. Ganesh, who has Down Syndrome, had been under Vimala’s primary care for many years prior to this transition. The couple’s initial curiosity about my presence opened a conversation that quickly revealed shared biographical ties. On introduction, we discovered we bore the same surname and that they now lived in the neighborhood where I had been raised. Vimala probed the precise location of my childhood house, situating it in relation to the neighborhood’s Hindu temples, and asked about the school I had attended, naming several families whose children had gone there. For several minutes we jointly mapped our social locations, assembling spatial and relational details that signaled markers of religion, caste, and class.
This exchange made palpable how caste and class are co-constituted and read through everyday markers. Questions about temples and proximity to particular shrines index not only religious belonging but also casteist residential patterns that organize urban spaces in India; references to specific schools and family networks signaled distinctions in economic capital, educational trajectories, and intergenerational social ties. Although the last name “Rao” does not necessarily indicate a Brahmin caste location across the subcontinent, the deployment of surnames, temple geographies, school affiliations, and known family networks functioned as vernacular indices through which social location of caste is often assessed in the Indian context. In short, the conversational mapping did more than place us geographically: it activated a dense repertoire of social cues by which Vimala and I evaluated one another’s location within India’s stratified social order.Footnote 25
Our interaction unfolded as a fluid bilingual exchange in Kannada and English, conducted informally over tea. In this relaxed setting, Vimala and her husband posed questions about my research; subsequently, I requested permission to conduct an interview with the couple. Vimala consented, while her husband declined. Gender emerged as a salient structuring element in this encounter. Feminist ethnographers have long established that gender shapes rapport in fieldwork and that care work is delegated to women (often mothers) in patriarchal societies.Footnote 26 My social location, described earlier, together with my gendered identity facilitated an extended and intimate conversation with Vimala. By foregrounding my role as a mother and articulating an interest in care, a culturally coded feminine domain, I opened a relational register with Vimala that enabled trust and disclosure. At the same time, this performative alignment with feminine care norms appears to have circumscribed the husband’s involvement in the conversation, effectively closing further dialogue with him.
Vimala and I sat on a couple of chairs in the driveway of the hostel facility while her son and other residents went to have their lunch. During our conversation, Vimala recounted their long-standing involvement with the parent association, which functioned not only as a source of emotional solidarity (especially in moments when they faced stigma regarding Ganesh’s early years) but also as an important site of bureaucratic navigation. The association had provided crucial assistance in securing Ganesh’s Unique Disability ID Card, facilitating access to state benefits and helping to manage complex administrative procedures such as establishing legal guardianship.Footnote 27 As they got older, Vimala and her husband were keen to visit their other son residing in California, USA, and working in the information technology sector. Vimala said that she and her husband felt that it would be difficult to travel with Ganesh as they were also getting older and finding it difficult to manage Ganesh’s needs. This practical consideration, entwined with shifting familial aspirations, led them to decide on Ganesh’s transition to the hostel facility. She explained that although they could manage, her son in the USA insisted on paying for Ganesh’s stay at the hostel.
In the course of our conversation, I asked Vimala what aspects of the hostel facility made it a suitable place for Ganesh. She shared that Ganesh was quite capable of managing most daily tasks independently and thrived socially, enjoying the companionship of friends around him. Yet, despite these positives, Vimala candidly expressed the persistent feelings of guilt she experienced about leaving Ganesh at the hostel as she planned to travel to the US for 6 months. She framed this difficult decision as a choice predicated on practical considerations, explaining that traveling with Ganesh would have been challenging for both her and her husband as they got older. The manageable distance between their home and the hostel was significant, as it allowed for frequent visits and sustained familial bonds. Furthermore, Vimala mentioned that she and her husband liked the culture of the hostel. When I asked what she meant by this, Vimala mentioned that they celebrate all the important Hindu festivals like deepavali, ganesh chaturthi, and dussera, which was important for her as they underscored the importance of these rituals in maintaining a sense of cultural belonging. Significantly, for Vimala, the hostel’s adherence to serving “purely vegetarian meals,” “not even eggs” as she stated, resonated deeply with their familial dietary practices and values. Besides, Vimala said to me in Kannada that although the care workers in this hostel were not from “our” (meaning hers and mine) community (read as caste location in this context) they did a good job taking care of Ganesh. Additionally, Vimala explicitly stated that the hostel was affordable for them. If they hired a home care worker, that would cost them a lot more money than the care workers cost in this hostel facility.
Several aspects of this conversation are important to unpack while understanding the role of caste and class. The building of connection based on our shared social contexts, Vimala’s comfort with vegetarian food and celebration of Hindu (mostly Brahminical) religious festivals. Lastly, her observations about the care workers. There are deep resonances with another conversation that I had with Padma Acharya, which I will recount below.
5.2. Padma Acharya
Padma Acharya was introduced to me through a mutual acquaintance, and my interest in speaking with her stemmed from her family’s investment in an emerging residential care project in Bangalore. Padma, a Tamil-Brahmin woman over fifty years old, is mother to Geeta, a 25-year-old daughter diagnosed with cerebral palsy resulting from a brain stroke she suffered as a 10-day-old infant. Padma described Geeta’s functional abilities, noting in passing that though she sometimes experiences difficult days, she typically “manages about seventy-five to eighty percent of her tasks independently,” albeit with the need for ongoing supervision.
Padma, her husband, and Geeta had been living in Bangalore for roughly six years. Prior to coming to Bangalore a few years previously, Padma worked as a science professor at a local college in another metropolitan city, and Geeta attended a “regular” school until about the age of thirteen. However, they eventually withdrew Geeta from formal schooling as she struggled to keep up academically and the school lacked the capacity to adequately support her learning needs. Following this, the family considered residential care initiatives being developed by parent groups in another metropolitan city. Padma reflected that the project they were initially considering was located at a considerable distance from urban centers, which posed challenges in securing reliable domestic and care workers, a critical issue for families residing in those facilities. Acknowledging these logistical and care worker-related constraints, they ultimately decided to opt for a residential facility situated in Bangalore, aligning better with their needs. At the time of my conversation with Padma, they were waiting for the construction of this gated community to be completed. She explained that they had used the money from selling a house in another metropolitan city and invested the same in this residential facility.
The residential institution Padma’s family selected was a gated community exclusively designed for families of persons with IDD. Within this enclave, families had the option to purchase independent homes, thus creating a semi-autonomous space that simultaneously ensured security and communal belonging. According to Padma, this arrangement was not merely spatial but also temporal and relational: it was envisioned to provide continuity of care and habitation such that, upon the eventual passing of Padma and her husband, Geeta could remain living autonomously in the same house, supported by a designated caregiver.
Padma emphasized that a defining feature of the residential facility they chose was its location—situated amid surrounding villages. This rural–urban interface was crucial for Padma, as, she explained, it enabled access to affordable labor essential for the maintenance and care work required to sustain the facility. The proximity to villages allowed for the recruitment and training of women as care workers who could provide appropriate support, including the possibility of working in private homes.
For Padma, the gender of these care workers held particular significance given that she had a daughter, reflecting how kinship, gender norms, and local socio-economic geographies intersect in shaping care arrangements. Padma’s profound concern, a worry echoed by many mothers of daughters with IDD, centered on the potential for sexual abuse if her daughter were placed in any residential facility without her supervision. She expressed this fear particularly with regard to government-run institutions, where there had been reports of such violence, and so a private facility where the parents could live alongside their adult daughter was seen as a safer option. Padma stated: At least until we die, we can protect Geeta, but I worry what will happen to her after we are no more.
Significantly, similar to Vimala, Padma also articulated that a central factor drawing her to this residential facility was its cultural appropriateness for her family. When I sought elaboration on this, she conveyed that the other families residing there would be similar to hers, and they would be able to do poojas and celebrate festivals together. Additionally, she underscored that the facility maintained a strict vegetarian dietary regime, which aligned with her family’s values and practices. In my conversation with Padma, it was evident that the cultural ethos of the facility was not a peripheral consideration but a fundamental aspect shaping her decision-making, reflecting how kinship, ritual life, and dietary norms are inseparable from the configurations of care and belonging in disability residential contexts in India.
6. Negotiating safety: Intersections of gender and class
At least until we die, we can protect Geeta, but I worry what will happen to her after we are no more. Padma Acharya’s words crystallize the profound and gendered nature of care anxieties that shape how families of daughters with IDD envision and plan for the future. Her statement is not merely an expression of maternal worry; it indexes a specific configuration of vulnerability that sits at the intersection of disability, gender, and class. Feminist disability studies scholarship has demonstrated that women with IDD occupy a doubly fraught position within patriarchal societies—their bodies are simultaneously constructed as asexual and incapable of reproductive or maternal roles, and yet are subject to disproportionately high rates of sexual exploitation and abuse relative to non-disabled women.Footnote 28 This apparent paradox, sexualization alongside heightened sexual vulnerability, is not a contradiction but a structural condition produced by the same logic that renders disabled women’s bodies as objects of management rather than subjects of desire or autonomy.Footnote 29 It is within this structural condition that Padma’s fear takes shape: not as an irrational or merely personal anxiety, but as a socially produced and empirically grounded response to a deep understanding of sexual precarity faced by women with IDD in the Indian context.
Padma’s family’s decision to invest in an expensive private residential facility reflects how having a daughter with developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy irreducibly shapes care imaginaries and practices. They funded their entry into this gated community by selling a house in another metropolitan city, converting accumulated real estate capital directly into a “safe” care arrangement for their daughter. Among mothers I interviewed, the fear of sexual abuse in residential care was a repeatedly expressed profound concern, particularly regarding government-run institutions with some documented abuses. This anxiety supported preferences for private facilities, which were, as in the case of Padma’s family, seen as a safer option, although the worry of Geeta’s safety after their demise continued to plague Padma. Unlike Vimala’s choice for her son, the facility Padma’s family chose was not a hostel where daughters would be left alone but a residential community where parents continue to live alongside their daughters until their demise. This difference in model is not only a difference in institutional form, it is a difference produced by the gender of the adult with IDD. The co-residence model that Padma’s family chose is made necessary by the specific vulnerability Geeta faces as a disabled woman and made possible by the class resources that allow her parents to purchase proximity as a form of protection. Vimala, by contrast, can afford the emotional and practical distance that the hostel model requires, in part because her son’s gender does not carry the same weight of sexual risk. The high financial requisites expose how class privilege mediates access to particular care futures that promise relative safety, cultural fit, and continuity of kinship presence. Padma’s reflections on the future care for her daughter are deeply inscribed by her family’s class position, which affords options that remain inaccessible to many, shaping both the range of possibilities and the contours of concern.
Notably, Padma’s class position and its consequent implications gets highlighted in her articulation of seeking “affordable workers to maintain the facility and also do care work in their homes.” Even in Vimala’s articulation of the benefits of the hostel facility, which was not as expensive as the one that Padma was considering, the affordability of the care worker remained an important factor. Padma’s and Vimala’s aspiration to hire affordable care workers reflects both the upper-class practice of domestic employment and the structure of India’s labor market, where domestic workers find employment close to their tenements.Footnote 30 Studies on labor and gender have also shown that the domestic care economy has grown rapidly since the economic liberalization of the 1990s and low paid service work, such as care work, are among which feminization of the labor force is taking place in India.Footnote 31 What this reveals is that Padma’s and Vimala’s class privilege operates not only through their purchasing power but through their structural position within a labor market that produces cheap, feminized care work as a feature of neoliberal India. Their care futures are made possible not simply by their wealth, but by the gendered poverty of others—a dynamic that connects the intimacy of disability care directly to broader structures of economic inequality.
It has been shown that socio-economic status and family income are significant determinants of breaking barriers to employment opportunities for people with disabilities in the Indian context.Footnote 32 Similarly, this article, building on Padma and Vimala’s life choices, demonstrates that familial economic status plays a significant role in gaining access to care workers. In the absence of robust state-supported care, class privilege becomes the primary mechanism through which parents of disabled daughters, such as Padma’s purchase not safety itself, but the conditions under which safety feels imaginable, thereby complicating the already fraught terrain of disability care provisioning in India.
7. Caste in care infrastructure
In addition to the significant roles played by gender and class, caste constitutes a crucial determinant in decision-making processes concerning residential care homes in India. Padma and Vimala mentioned “similar culture” and “pure vegetarian food” as important factors while choosing a particular facility. These were recurring points in many of my other conversations with caste privileged parents who often prioritized facilities with exclusively vegetarian food policies. Additionally, while speaking to two different residential care home administrators, they mentioned that they only serve vegetarian food in their residences. Since I had asked no questions about the nature, quality or quantity of food that they serve, the fact that they offered this information was striking. In another instance, I noted that a website advertising an upcoming residential facility explicitly promoted that only vegetarian food would be served within that gated community.
In a conversation with Nancy, a Dalit Christian woman care worker at the hostel facility where Ganesh resided, I asked what, if anything, she would have liked to be different in her work. Amongst many other things, she mentioned food. She said that some residents in the facility were Brahmins, so no meat, not even egg, was allowed to be cooked or served on the premises. Consequently, she could only eat eggs or meat rarely, during visits to friends or family while on leave. Nancy shared that she often visited a friend nearby over the weekends to cook and eat the food she enjoyed.
In a sociocultural scenario where caste is omnipresent, the recurring mention of serving vegetarian food, while not surprising, is nevertheless significant. Critically examining the labelling of food as “vegetarian” or “non-vegetarian,” Jasmine states that “Vegetarian food is not labelled as ‘non-meat’ or ‘meat-free’; rather, it is a positive, affirmative category in itself while the label of non-vegetarian is thrust upon all that lies outside the normative ambit defined by the former.”Footnote 33 The repeated emphasis on vegetarian food by many of my interlocutors serves as a salient indicator of the caste groups that these care homes predominantly cater to, or at least reflects their caste alignments. By adhering exclusively to vegetarianism, these institutions may not openly declare allegiance to dominant caste clientele; indeed, by avoiding explicit caste-coded language, they likely assert their status as private properties entitled to establish their own rules.
M.S.S. Pandian’s analysis of R.K. Narayan’s autobiography provides a useful lens here, where he states: “It does not need much of an effort to understand what ‘strictly vegetarian atmosphere’… encodes. It is caste by other names.”Footnote 34 These forms of communication, Pandian argues, simultaneously acknowledge and disavow caste by “transcoding caste and caste relations into something else.”Footnote 35 Moreover, these institutions can claim they do not explicitly bar access to particular castes. In fact, Nancy works as a care worker in a hostel and performs physically intimate and care-intensive tasks such as assisting residents with eating, bathing, walking, playing games, and grooming, all of which require different kinds of bodily intimacy. Given that the practice of untouchability is a significant marker of caste in India based on the ritual logic of purity and pollution, it is significant that Nancy and others like her are not only employed in this organization, but also do work that requires bodily intimacy with dominant caste residents. In my conversation with Vimala, she acknowledged the fact that there are non-Brahmin workers taking care of her son in the hostel facility, and she was appreciative of the work they did while remaining cognizant and aligned with the Brahminical culture of the facility.
In a debate on touch and untouchability, with Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru, Balmurli Natrajan argues the limits of reducing caste to untouchability alone, posing key questions such as: “how can caste exist (in essence alone) without untouchability (its existence)? Can it? What would its existence be?.”Footnote 36 In posing these questions, Natrajan argues that certain kinds of touch are used to maintain and assert caste dominance and keep the oppressed caste in their “place.”Footnote 37 I draw on this framework to explore the complex manifestations of caste in contexts where, as Gopal Guru notes, “it is difficult for the pure untouchable to remain in touch.”Footnote 38 Rather than an absolute avoidance of touch, caste operates through more nuanced cultural forms. For example, the intimate labor performed by Nancy, a Dalit care worker attending Brahmin residents, complicates conventional understandings of untouchability, revealing contexts in which touch is not only unavoidable but required. Simultaneously, the normalization of Brahminical caste practices, such as the exclusive serving of vegetarian food in residential care homes, emerges through implicit cultural signals that encode caste norms without direct reference. This dynamic illustrates the ongoing negotiation between caste’s overt and covert practices within everyday life and institutional settings.
Along with mentioning vegetarian food, the other recurring notion that I encountered was “culture.” As noted in the introduction, the emphasis on “shared culture” and festival celebration recurred across my fieldwork. This emphasis on “shared culture,” “similar culture,” “similar festivals,” along with the focus on vegetarianism, ought to be read as not only a code for religious identity but also as caste-coded. Natrajan explains the “culturalization of caste” as a process wherein “caste groups (led by caste elites) attempt to (re)construct and (re)present themselves as cultural groups such that caste comes to be viewed, narrated, embodied, and performed by social actors simply as pre-existing ‘natural’ cultural difference or identity rather than as socioculturally constructed relations of ascribed status and antagonism (inequality, domination and exploitation).”Footnote 39 Similarly, I found that defining normative culture via dominant caste practices (serving vegetarian food, having a temple on campus, celebrating largely Brahminical Hindu festivals that are common to most, if not all, of the residents) reinforces the notion that certain religious and caste practices are “normal.” This normative framing implicitly pre-empts the entry of the Other into these spaces and positions their cultural practices as potentially less valuable or dignified, even when they do gain access.
Embedded within these notions of “vegetarian food only” and “shared culture” is the idea of belonging; a strong reinforced idea of who belongs within these residential facilities and who would not. Exploring the concepts of “Experience,” “Social,” and the “Everyday,” Guru and Sarukkai argue against the idea that there is one universal “social” and explain that a multitude of socials characterize our societal experiences.Footnote 40 They argue that social performance becomes a way by which belongingness and the lack of it is navigated across public and private spaces. The social, for them, is a site of conviviality but an equally “contentious site, a place of exclusion, discrimination, and humiliation.”Footnote 41 Applying this theoretical framework to the context of the existing care gap for adults with IDD shows how the emergence of private residential facilities frequently reinforces rather than disrupts existing caste hierarchies. This dynamic reflects not only social stratification but also the complex negotiation of belonging through culturally coded practices.
8. Conclusion
This article contributes to scholarship at the intersection of caste, gender, and disability by showing how neoliberal care arrangements reproduce rather than challenge existing hierarchies. Significantly, this article illuminates a point previously made by critical caste scholars on how neoliberal capitalism in India has not eradicated caste but recast it in ostensibly “cultural” forms.Footnote 42 In this article, we see it in the dominant cultural markers like “purely vegetarian food” and “similar culture” that are integral to certain private residential care facilities for ageing adults with IDD, wherein these cultural markers enforce a moral ordering that upholds dominant caste superiority.
A critical clarification is necessary regarding the nature of the argument advanced in this article. The claim that vegetarianism functions as a caste code within these residential care facilities is not an argument about individual intent. The parents whose experiences anchor this analysis—Vimala and Padma—are not consciously deploying dietary norms as instruments of exclusion; they understand their preferences as expressions of familiar cultural practice, religious observance, or simply the desire for an environment that feels like home. The analytical purchase of this article lies in demonstrating how institutional forms reproduce caste hierarchies structurally, independent of the intentions of the individuals who inhabit or create them. For instance, when care facilities embed vegetarianism as policy, advertise it publicly, and articulate it unprompted, they produce a normative environment in which caste preference is naturalized as cultural common sense. This is precisely what Natrajan’s framework of the culturalization of caste illuminates; the process by which ascribed relations of caste inequality are recast as expressions of pre-existing cultural identity, rendering the structural invisible. The consequence, as this article has sought to show, is that even care infrastructures built by parents with genuine affective investments in their children’s futures can, through the logic of cultural homogeneity, reproduce the very hierarchies that a disability justice framework would demand we dismantle. Recognizing this does not diminish the real anxieties and labors of these families; it locates them within the wider architecture of power that shapes whose care is imaginable, whose belonging is assumed, and whose presence must always already be negotiated.
Beyond caste, this article shows how the gender and class location of the adult with IDD shapes care futures: the vulnerability of ageing daughters drives co-residence arrangements that higher socio-economic status alone can make possible. This article shows the vulnerability experienced by the families of ageing daughters with IDD while also demonstrating that higher socio-economic status and income help families secure care workers and mitigate (to some extent) concerns about trust, safety, and bodily integrity in long-term care. If we conceptualize disability as shaped by history, location, culture, and relations of power and domination reproducing hierarchical divisions between bodies and minds, as Garland-Thompson states: “a culturally fabricated narrative of the body,” then this article argues that it is extremely important to unpack the social and power dynamics embedded within the social category of disability.Footnote 43
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Dr. Rimjhim Bhattacherjee and Dr. Nandini Ghosh, for organising the Disability Justice conference and for creating the intellectual space in which the ideas developed in this paper could take shape. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive engagement with the manuscript. Their thoughtful comments were invaluable in helping me clarify and further develop some of the paper’s key arguments. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the participants in my research for generously sharing their time, experiences, and life stories with me. Their willingness to share their experiences has been central to the reflections and arguments developed in this paper.
Author contributions
Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing: M.R.
Financial support
Funding was received from the Azim Premji University.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no competing interests.
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