1. Methodology

This paper adopts a qualitative, field-based research methodology that is grounded in ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews for examining street performance by people with disabilities as a form of cultural labour and disability knowledge in urban Kolkata. The study approaches performers with disabilities as knowing subjects whose embodied practices generate critical insight into disability, value, and urban life. Kolkata is chosen as the site of this study because of its dense pedestrian culture, reliance on public transport, and long history of street performance. As a city shaped by both colonial urban planning and contemporary neoliberal restructuring, Kolkata shows us how ableist design, caste and class hierarchies, and cultural expectations converge in the regulation of disabled bodies in public space. Ananya Roy argues that the postcolonial city is a palimpsest of planning logics, where “there is no place for the urban poor.”Footnote ³⁷ By looking at disability justice in the lived practices of disabled street performers in Kolkata, this study seeks to move beyond abstract critique toward a theoretically grounded understanding of how disability, value, and urban life are co-produced. It draws on performance ethnography, where performance is understood not only as an aesthetic act but also as a mode of survival and resistance within unequal power structures. The study seeks thick description to understand how disability is lived, enacted, and interpreted within specific urban contexts such as local trains, streets, church entrances, and market-adjacent spaces in Kolkata.Footnote ³⁸

The fieldwork for this study was conducted between 20 October 2025 and 24 December 2025 across busy public spaces in Kolkata and its adjoining railway routes, including crowded local trains, railway platforms, streets, marketplaces, and religious sites. These locations were selected because they produce spontaneous forms of interaction between performers and transient urban audiences, allowing the study to examine how disabled performers negotiate visibility, mobility, labour, and public response within everyday urban life. The research is based on interviews with six street performers with disabilities, participant observation of performances and audience interaction. Informal conversations were conducted during or immediately after performances. The interviews were conversational rather than rigidly scripted, allowing performers to guide the narrative according to what they considered important. The six performers were selected through repeated observation of their performances and their willingness to participate in sustained conversation. Interviews were conducted in Bengali, usually after performances had concluded and performers were preparing to leave the site. Most conversations took place across one to three relatively informal sitting sessions lasting approximately twenty to thirty minutes each. The use of Bengali was important because it allowed performers to speak within the linguistic and emotional registers through which they ordinarily negotiate performance, survival, and public interaction in Kolkata. Verbal consent was obtained before every interview, and participants were informed about the purpose of the research. One participant requested anonymity and is therefore referred to through the pseudonym “Mallika,” respecting her preference for privacy. The six performers interviewed include four men and two women, performers with visual impairment and physical disability. They are from economically precarious backgrounds, including Adivasi, Dalit and working-class locations. The study pays close attention to the intersection of disability with caste, class, gender, and indigeneity which recognises that disability in India is never a singular identity but is intensified by structural inequalities.

2. Survival as performance

Suraj Oraon is a 29-year-old blind man from an Adivasi community in the forests of Jalpaiguri district. He currently lives near Lakshmikantapur and travels on local trains in the Sealdah South division to sing for money. Not blind by birth, Suraj lost his sight at the age of 11 due to an untreated illness. His family was asked to arrange nearly 2 lakh rupees for treatment, which they could not afford. As a result, his condition worsened, and he became fully blind. This is clearly a case of structural poverty and the absence of accessible healthcare; not just a problem with his body. His story exposes how disability in India often comes from economic deprivation, poor public healthcare, and unequal access to social support systems.Footnote ³⁹ Suraj primarily sings devotional and folk songs inside train compartments. He says that the songs draw more listeners and help him earn more. “When I sing these songs,” he says, “people give me money.” But this remains limited. It has been observed that often he receives money only when he personally approaches somebody. Apart from this income, he depends on a monthly disability pension of one thousand rupees provided under the Manabik Pension scheme of the Government of West Bengal. The inadequacy of this amount becomes very much salient when placed against rising living costs, food prices, transport expenses, and healthcare needs in contemporary India. The disability pensions across Indian states are minimal and often weakened by systemic flaws, limited funding, and unfair implementation.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Suraj’s case, the pension does not provide any financial stability. Rather, it functions as a partial survival support that he has to supplement daily with precarious artistic labour. Suraj is married; his wife is also blind, and they have a one-month-old son. He describes his voice as “not perfect but good enough to sing.” He continues to perform because music is the only way of survival for him. Hence, his singing emerges not only from artistic expression but also from economic vulnerability and the absence of adequate structural support for persons with disabilities from marginal social locations.

Mallika is a 36-year-old blind woman from Jadavpur. She offers a sharply contrasting narrative to Suraj. She performs by singing Rabindra Sangeet and folk songs in public spaces and lives alone. Unlike other performers, she does not trust disability organisations. She believes that everyone, including people with disabilities, is selfish and that depending on others only leads to disappointment. She expresses deep dissatisfaction with life and speaks openly about her isolation. While she earns enough to survive, she prefers struggling on her own over accepting support. This insistence on living and earning independently is significant, as it challenges the assumption that disabled lives must necessarily remain dependent on familial or institutional care. Mallika’s refusal of dependency, “I do not need anyone’s assistance. Now I am habituated managing everything on my own,” reflects a desire for self-determination. But this independence comes with conditions of precarity rather than empowerment alone. Her account reflects emotional disillusionment rather than hope. This becomes clear in the distinction she draws: She lives alone because she must, not because she chooses to.

Zinat Parveen, a 55-year-old blind woman, performs Sufi prayers using a microphone, accompanied by her blind husband and their 11-year-old son. She usually performs on local trains, at platforms, and in busy public places with high footfall. Their collective performance breaks the separation between art, labour, and care. This discloses how disability is mutually lived within a family rather than as individual impairment.Footnote ⁴¹ Witnessing a child carrying equipment makes the audience uncomfortable. It forces them to see how poverty makes even young children take on adult responsibilities. Malay Naskar, a Dalit man, also blind and aged about 40, plays folk songs through a small speaker box rather than simply singing live. He is usually seen at Southern division of the Sealdah local trains. He believes recorded music attracts more attention from the public. During observation, people were seen responding positively on his music. Some nodded to the rhythm, others smiled, and several donated money. Malay tells that people tend to stop more readily when they hear familiar recorded rhythms because the sound resembles ordinary popular music. At one level, therefore, technological mediation increases public engagement by making the performance sonically familiar and aesthetically accessible within the noisy urban environment. The recorded music appears to moderate the audience’s encounter with disability itself. The speaker does not erase Malay’s blindness, which remains visible, but it partially shifts public attention from the disabled body toward the music produced through technology.

Kanai Sardar, is also a 46-year-old blind Dalit man, performs in local trains and at the bustling Garia Haat crossing in Kolkata. He is generally accompanied by his wife, making the domestic unit of care, labour, and survival publicly visible within urban space. Like Suraj and Malay, Kanai depends on daily performance for livelihood in an economy that offers very limited opportunities to disabled persons from marginal social backgrounds. He says, “If I do not come out and sing, we cannot eat.” He also noted how audiences frequently ignore performers unless they directly approach commuters for assistance, saying, “People hear us, but very few actually listen.” He too performs Bengali folk songs, like Suraj and Malay. When asked why he sings these songs, Kanai said that he has felt deeply connected to Bengali folk music since childhood and has been singing them from a very young age.

Raja, an approximately 45-year-old Dalit man who cannot fully use his legs, draws on the streets while sitting on the pavements around the Esplanade area and near the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. He lives on the street and survives entirely on public donations. Raja said that people rarely recognise his drawings as art. Most pass by without stopping. When they do give money, it is often out of pity rather than appreciation of his work. He believes that his appearance and homelessness further marginalise his work, which is rarely acknowledged as art, “Nobody cares about what people like us do.” Unlike the other performers in this study, Raja deliberately chooses religiously significant sites such as temples, mosques, and churches because as he tells, people are more likely to donate in these spaces. He also adapts his drawings according to the religious setting, producing Christian imagery near St Paul’s Cathedral and devotional images near temples and mosques. Raja’s location also gestures toward a longer history in India where disabled performers, singers, and beggars have often occupied spaces around temples, shrines, mosques, and other religious infrastructures. His presence near the cathedral therefore reflects not only individual survival strategy but also a historical relationship between disability, religious charity, and public performance in urban India.

3. Crip performance, spectatorship, and aesthetic value

Disabled street performances in Kolkata face the social gaze through which disabled bodies are interpreted in public space. The performers observed during this study were not received through a single emotional register. Audience responses shifted between avoidance, discomfort, pity, curiosity, amusement, and admiration. These reactions demonstrate that disabled performance in public space is never encountered purely as art; it is mediated through the visible presence of the disabled body itself. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson conceptualises this dynamic through the idea of the “stare,” arguing that it is a social act through which bodily difference becomes hypervisible, culturally scrutinised, and become objects of intensified looking.Footnote ⁴² Unlike ordinary looking, staring fixes disabled bodies as spectacles of curiosity, pity, discomfort, or moral interpretation. In urban public spaces, disabled street performers therefore negotiate not only architectural inaccessibility but also attitudinal barriers produced through the ableist gaze. The stare is not merely an act of seeing but a social relation worn by power, anxiety, fascination, and judgement. It regulates who appears legitimate in public space, whose labour is recognised as art, and whose presence is reduced to spectacle, charity, or disturbance. Disability in public space thus produces a contradictory condition of hypervisibility and social exclusion simultaneously. This contradiction became evident across the case studies. Although all the performers occupied crowded urban locations, most audiences initially responded through avoidance rather than engagement. People often walked past quickly, avoided eye contact, or continued their conversations without acknowledging the performance. Garland-Thomson notes that staring and deliberate non-looking are interconnected responses through which normative society manages bodily difference.Footnote ⁴³ The refusal to engage becomes another way of regulating who belongs comfortably within public space. Disability justice draws attention to these attitudinal barriers and exclusion through social perception and aesthetic judgment. Across these case studies, a notion recurs that art does not need to conform to dominant standards of aesthetic perfection just to produce meaning or critique. The performers’ voices, movements, rhythms, and bodily gestures often depart from conventional expectations of polish, technical consistency, and disciplined control. Yet these differences are not simply signs of artistic inadequacy. Rather, they reveal how aesthetic value itself is socially organised through ableist assumptions about normative performance. Disability aesthetics, as theorised by Tobin Siebers, draws attention precisely to this relationship between embodiment and aesthetic judgement by questioning why certain bodies and forms are recognised as artistic while others are dismissed as defective.Footnote ⁴⁴

The ethnographic observations from this study suggest that spectatorship operates unevenly across different forms of disability and performance. Suraj attempts to sing emotionally charged songs inside trains to create affective connection through voice rather than spectacle. However, he regrets, “Mostly my singing is ignored. Who would want to listen to an untrained singer like me? I have no training, no instruments. They keep talking within themselves loudly while I sing on.” His statement reveals how aesthetic legitimacy is socially structured. Yet the public occasionally responded differently when he approached them directly after singing. In such moments, spectators who had ignored the song sometimes offered money. This suggests that recognition did not emerge from aesthetic appreciation alone but from the uneasy encounter between artistic labour and visible disability. So the performance hung somewhere between music and solicitation, where the disabled body swayed the reception of audience. As a blind woman, singing Rabindra Sangeet in trains and public crossings, Mallika is often looked upon by public with curiosity, mainly because her performance combined a culturally prestigious musical tradition with a visibly marginal social position. Yet this curious gaze did not necessarily translate into inclusion. Mallika herself said, “We are not welcome in public places, especially when we are out by ourselves.” Mallika’s choice to sing Rabindra Sangeet is also culturally significant within the context of Kolkata. Rabindra Sangeet has historically been associated with bhadralok cultural refinement, formal training, and middle-class respectability in Bengal. For a blind working-class woman without institutional musical training, to perform these songs in trains and public spaces unsettles the cultural boundaries through which Tagore’s music is often regulated and appropriated. She is often received through gazes of discomfort and pity rather than as an artist possessing equal cultural legitimacy. Mallika explained that she learnt these songs by repeatedly listening to the radio and later through songs on her mobile phone because as a blind woman from an extremely poor family, she was denied educational and cultural opportunities. Her performance therefore reveals not only economic precarity but also unequal access to cultural capital. This problem becomes prominent if read alongside the longer cultural history of blindness and performance in Bengal. Ishan Chakraborty notes in his analysis of the blind Baul in Tagore’s Phalguni that Tagore does not present blindness simply as a deficit. Instead, he associates it with an “inner vision,” an alternative way of perception that exceeds normative ways of seeing.Footnote ⁴⁵ Tagore himself clarifies this in the Prologue: “Because he does not see with his eyes, he sees with his entire body, mind, and soul,” which suggests that true perception is not centred in the eyes alone but involves the whole being.Footnote ⁴⁶ But this spiritualisation can also risk romanticising blindness which may ignore the real-life hardships disabled people face. Mallika’s performance problematises this contradiction. Unlike the symbolic blind singer celebrated within elite literary culture, her blind body in public space is not aestheticised as spiritual insight but strived through labour, precarity, and social discomfort. By singing Rabindra Sangeet on trains and streets, she breaks the old idea of cultural ownership that Tagore’s music belongs only to able-bodied upper-class people.

Zinat Parveen attracted responses strongly by pity. The use of microphone made the performance difficult to ignore compelling attention in spaces where disabled bodies are otherwise ignored. Audiences often stared at the family for long before donating money. Here, spectatorship turned disability into an emotional narrative for normative audiences.Footnote ⁴⁷ The family becomes visible as an object of compassion, but their labour and exclusion remain politically unrecognised. Disability justice critiques precisely this separation between affective response and structural transformation. Siebers argues, “It takes disabled artists to bring the evolution of disability aesthetics to a next stage in which disability is deliberately and explicitly represented as disability, not in the name of surrealism but in the name of a different aesthetic value–disability itself.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Malay’s performance demonstrated another dimension of crip spectatorship. Unlike Suraj or Mallika, Malay played recorded folk songs through a small speaker box. People smiled, nodded rhythmically, yet many appeared more comfortable engaging with the recorded music than directly interacting with the disabled performer himself. The technology seemed to ease public discomfort by allowing listeners to connect first with the familiarity of the music rather than the presence of the disabled body. This technological improvisation reflects an “aesthetic of salvage,” where marginalised actors repurpose available tools to create spaces of recognition and livelihood within unwelcoming environments.Footnote ⁴⁹ His performance does not simply show technology as something that empowers him. Instead, it reveals the difficult balancing act performers with disabilities must do to meet the expectations of a city designed for non-disabled senses. Raja’s art depended on visual attention. He observed that people frequently stop, stare at his drawings, even take photographs, and then move away without any interaction. Raja’s presence here generates a conspicuous, visible discomfort in the stares of passers-by. While some offered money, the donation often seemed motivated more by pity toward homelessness and bodily deformity than appreciation of artistic labour. His drawings are read as evidence of failure rather than creative labour. This shows how artistic value is inseparable from moral judgement about bodies and lives.Footnote ⁵⁰ Disability justice challenges this logic by insisting that artistic worth cannot be divorced from structural conditions of production. As James Clifford argues that the ascription of art versus artifact or labour is a political act that reflects existing social hierarchies, often denying aesthetic agency to those operating outside sanctioned cultural institutions.Footnote ⁵¹ The religious imagery in Raja’s drawings further influenced the reception. Positioned near a prominent religious site, the performance drew visitors already predisposed toward acts of charity. Charity without engagement just reinforces hierarchies of giver and receiver. Disability justice critiques this charity-based interaction for sustaining asymmetrical power relations while leaving structural exclusion intact.Footnote ⁵² These varied responses produce what can be described as visibility without recognition. Disabled performers are seen and heard yet rarely acknowledged as workers or artists. Their presence is tolerated so long as it does not demand sustained attention or disrupt urban efficiency. In this sense, street performance becomes a paradoxical condition: hyper-visible yet socially marginal.

These performances express vulnerability as ordinary social conditions rather than personal failures. Disability is not merely represented in culture but actively produced and contested through everyday bodily practices in public space.Footnote ⁵³ Rather than viewing disabled bodies as deviations from a normative ideal, this paper understands bodily action like singing, drawing, moving, pausing as culturally learned and socially regulated forms of enactment.Footnote ⁵⁴ Disability justice, in this sense, requires attention not only to access or rights but to how certain bodily ways of being are rendered intelligible, acceptable, or valuable within dominant cultural codes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cultural norms of the body are never universal. What is considered “normal” bodily behaviour, how one eats, walks, gestures, or performs, is deeply embedded within specific cultural and historical contexts. For instance, eating with one’s hands remains a socially accepted and culturally familiar practice across many regions, communities, and domestic contexts in India, but such bodily practices may be perceived as improper in Western contexts. This example reveals how bodily enactment is not biologically given but culturally produced. Disability unsettles these norms by exposing how dominant cultures naturalise certain bodily capacities while marking others as deficient or abnormal.Footnote ⁵⁶ Disabled street performers enact the body differently, not as a lack but as an alternative sensory and aesthetic orientation to the world. Blind performers, for example, engage sound, rhythm, and touch as primary modes of perception, challenging the visual dominance that structures public space and aesthetic judgement. Beauty, for them, is not apprehended through sight but through voice, vibration, memory, and response. Such enactments disrupt what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes as the “normate,” the culturally constructed figure whose body defines the standard of normalcy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Through disability justice and crip aesthetics, these performances show that disability emerges by exclusionary urban spaces, while imperfection itself becomes a critique of ableist ideas of perfection and value.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, cultural difference alone does not explain the marginalisation of disabled performers. The problem lies in how urban infrastructure and public culture are designed for a singular, able-bodied mode of enactment, rendering other bodies passive, slow, or obstructive.

4. Urban infrastructure and ableist design: How the city produces passivity

Urban infrastructure is never neutral. Streets, stairs, platforms, and transport systems embody cultural assumptions about which bodies are expected to move, wait, work, and belong in public space.Footnote ⁵⁹ In Kolkata, everyday urban design reflects an able-bodied norm that treats mobility and speed as default human capacities. Disability justice insists that when cities fail disabled bodies, the problem lies not in bodily impairment but in the design of the space itself.Footnote ⁶⁰ Kolkata’s urban landscape is dominated by uneven transport systems that assume visual acuity and bodily balance. These questions have also been raised repeatedly by disability rights movements in India, particularly by organisations such as Paschimbanga Rajya Pratibandhi Sammilani (PRPS) and the National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD), which have long demanded accessible transport systems, barrier-free public infrastructure, and implementation of disability rights legislation. Their interventions reveal that disability exclusion in Indian cities is not accidental but socially and politically produced through institutional neglect.

Suraj shared how bus conductors often resist picking him up in buses. Despite carrying a white cane, he is frequently denied assistance, verbally abused, and sometimes forced to get down before reaching his destination. Bus-conductors have told him that his blindness is “not their responsibility.” This reveals that infrastructural exclusion does not just come from bad policies, it comes from daily interactions with people as well. These experiences show that access is not just about having a seat or a ramp. It depends on relationships and attitudes as well.Footnote ⁶¹ A reserved seat means little if people are hostile. So, the city disables Suraj not only through physical barriers but also through impatience, irritation, and dismissal from others.Footnote ⁶² Suraj’s repeated forced exits from buses turn mobility for him into a site of humiliation and risk, which produces passivity not as a choice but as consequence. Importantly, Suraj also noted that not all bus-conductors behave in the same manner. Some show kindness, allowing him to remain seated or offering verbal guidance. However, these gestures remain dependent on personal kindness rather than collective responsibility. Disability justice critiques precisely this dependence on goodwill in place of rights, where inclusion remains uncertain and conditional.

The design of the city further enhances this vulnerability. Overcrowded vehicles, abrupt stops, and uneven boarding spaces demand bodily agility that blind or physically impaired passengers cannot safely perform.Footnote ⁶³ Local train compartments rarely provide auditory guidance or spatial support for blind passengers. The platforms demand rapid movement and constant vigilance. Such environments convert bodily difference into incapacity by refusing accommodation.Footnote ⁶⁴ This infrastructural bias produces “misfitting,” a condition in which bodies do not align with the material and social environment.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mallika mentions that the local train compartments are often positioned much higher than the level of the platforms. She also tells that the entrances of the coaches usually remain overcrowded. This makes boarding and movement extremely difficult for blind passengers like her. When asked, Malay told that the pavements around market areas are difficult to navigate because they are occupied by temporary stalls, roadside shops, and parked vehicles, due to which the pavements always remain crowded. This leaves no movable space for persons with disabilities. Raja similarly pointed out that moving through pavements with his physical condition becomes exhausting because pedestrians, hawkers, and makeshift structures continuously force him onto the road itself. Kanai repeatedly emphasised that he cannot navigate the city or perform without his wife accompanying him. She helps him board crowded trains, guides him through busy crossings, and sits by him during performances. This reveals how survival in the city depends upon everyday forms of care and interdependence. Their shared movement through public space challenges the urban ideal of complete independence by making dependency visible as an ordinary condition of life.

Public space for the disabled presence thus becomes a simultaneously hyper-visible and structurally unsupported site. This infrastructural neglect influences cultural perception significantly. When performers with disabilities struggle to move, their actions are often read as incapacity rather than as responses to the city’s design. Disability justice challenges this misrecognition by shifting attention from bodies to systems.Footnote ⁶⁶ The performers’ reliance on children, spouses, or fellow performers is not an ethical problem; the ethical failure lies in a city that normalises exclusion. This study affirms a social and relational understanding of disability, where impairment alone does not produce marginalisation. Instead, disability is actively produced through environments. Kolkata’s infrastructure does not simply fail to include performers with disabilities; it creates the very conditions under which they are perceived as passive, dependent, or out of place. By documenting these spatial dynamics through the performers’ accounts, the paper reframes access as a cultural and political responsibility rather than a technical inclusivity. The question is not how performers with disabilities can adapt to the city, but how the city must be reimagined to accommodate diverse ways of moving, sensing, resting, and performing. Only then can public space become a site of collective belonging.

5. Performing survival: Labour, precarity, and intersectional disability

Street performance by the people with disabilities in Kolkata must be understood not as incidental begging or informal entertainment but as a form of labour shaped by economic necessity, caste and class inequality, gendered vulnerability, and public negotiation. Anita Ghai remarks, “The economic and caste status of the family and its networks also determined the quality of the wellbeing of its members with disabilities.”Footnote ⁶⁷ For the performers interviewed in this study, singing, drawing, and playing music function as survival practices within an urban economy that systematically excludes disabled bodies from stable employment.Footnote ⁶⁸ Disability justice reframes this labour not as failure to integrate into the workforce, but as evidence of how capitalist systems restrict access to work while continuing to extract value from disabled visibility. Disability justice frameworks insist that disability cannot be examined in isolation from other axes of power such as caste, gender, class, and location because impairment is lived and intensified through these intersecting structures.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rather than presenting these performers as representative types, this paper reads them as situated lives through which structural inequalities become visible.Footnote ⁷⁰

Suraj’s life tells how disability emerges as a cumulative outcome of structural neglect shaped by caste, indigeneity, and poverty. His Adivasi identity and untreated illness due to unaffordable medical cost reflect that caste not only structures labour and mobility but also determines whose suffering is socially legible.Footnote ⁷¹ His blindness therefore reflects the political economy of disablement, where poverty and social inequality determine who becomes disabled and who receives care.Footnote ⁷² In this sense, Suraj’s disability is not only bodily but socially produced through caste-embedded neglect, cultural erasure, and urban indifference. For performers like Suraj Oraon and Kanai Sardar, singing in local trains and public spaces constitutes both economic activity and cultural expression. Their performances are not voluntary displays of talent but daily strategies for securing income in the absence of alternative opportunities. This blurring of art and survival problematises dominant distinctions between cultural labour and economic labour, revealing how disabled performers are compelled to monetise their bodies and voices in public space to remain visible at all.Footnote ⁷³ As a disabled woman performing alone in urban space, Mallika faces layered vulnerabilities that include economic insecurity, social mistrust, and exposure to harassment. Her discontent against disability communities challenges celebratory narratives of resilience. Susan Wendell cautions against this romanticization of survival while ignoring emotional exhaustion and social abandonment. She argues that the demand for an overcoming narrative serves to mask the pain, observing, “Expressions that attempt to put a cheerful face on this reality invite denial, placing social pressure on people with and without disabilities to pretend that everything is fine.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, Mallika’s performance, stripped of optimism, carries the emotional burden of living with an insecurity in the city and the dangers faced by women with disabilities in public spaces. Her refusal to affiliate reveals how disability communities themselves are not immune to hierarchy and exclusion, particularly along gendered lines. Nandini Ghosh elucidates this dynamic, noting that “the family in India acts as the primary, often compulsory, site of care and control for disabled women, simultaneously offering protection and enforcing dependency.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Street performance also functions as a form of public negotiation. Performers must constantly read their environment, choosing where to stand, when to sing, whom to approach, and when to withdraw. This labour of approach exposes performers to rejection, indifference, discomfort, and occasional abuse, demonstrating how access to public generosity remains uneven and unpredictable. Donations emerge through emotional identification with suffering, particularly the presence of the child assisting his mother, Zinat, carrying instruments and navigating crowded public spaces. Yet this emotional response remains temporary and individualised. It does not challenge the structural conditions that make such labour necessary: inadequate disability pensions, inaccessible transport, and absence of state-supported care networks. In this sense, spectatorship risks transforming disability and care into consumable urban emotion, where the audience experiences sympathy without confronting its own implication within ableist social structures. Suraj, Malay, Kanai, and Zinat travel for one to two hours daily to reach Kolkata by public transport and perform their art, which is often the only reliable means of survival available to them. They expressed exhaustion, fear of falling, and the need to rely on companions simply to access performance sites. Their dependence on exhausting travel and uncertain public donations also reveals the inadequacy of existing state support systems for persons with disabilities. Studies on disability pensions and social protection schemes in India, including the Indira Gandhi National Disability Pension Scheme (IGNDPS) under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) and state-level schemes show that although persons with disabilities are more likely than non-disabled populations to receive some form of welfare support, the actual coverage and benefit amounts remain extremely limited. Even after the implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, access to pensions, employment schemes, and social security continues to be uneven and inadequate, leaving many disabled individuals dependent on informal and precarious labour for survival.Footnote ⁷⁶ This economic precarity was reflected in the recent disability activism organised by PRPS in Kolkata, where one of the central demands was the increase of the Manabik Bhata disability pension to five thousand rupees per month. PRPS also demanded that persons with disabilities be included in the government’s 100 Days Work Scheme. This demand challenges the common assumption that persons with disabilities are incapable of labour or economic contribution. The exclusion of people with disabilities from state employment schemes reinforces the idea that disability exists outside productivity and formal work. Their demand for reservation for persons with disabilities within housing schemes such as Awas Yojana become urgently significant for people like Raja because as a disabled street performer living on pavements, his exclusion is not limited to employment or mobility alone but extends to the absence of secure shelter itself. His condition reveals how disability, homelessness, and urban poverty intersect, making access to housing a crucial dimension of disability justice and public belonging. The street performers in this study occupy precisely this uncertain position where their labour remains visible but is rarely recognised as legitimate work.

6. Conclusion: Towards an ethics of access and collective urban responsibility

This paper has shown that disabled street performance in Kolkata is not simply an act of survival or informal art, but a form of cultural labour shaped by caste, class, gender, infrastructural exclusion, and uneven public recognition. Through ethnographic engagement with disabled performers in trains, pavements, marketplaces, and religious spaces, the study demonstrates that disability is produced not only through bodily impairment but through exclusionary urban design, precarious labour conditions, and dominant cultural expectations about productivity, mobility, and normalcy. The experiences of performers such as Suraj, Mallika, Zinat, Malay, Kanai, and Raja reveal how public spaces in the city remain deeply unequal. Overcrowded transport systems, inaccessible pavements, hostile public attitudes, and limited economic support continuously shape how disabled bodies move, work, and appear in urban life. At the same time, these performers actively negotiate visibility through singing, drawing, playing music, and occupying public space in ways that challenge the assumption that disability belongs outside labour, culture, and public participation. Street performance in this context becomes both livelihood and critique. These performances expose how disabled bodies are often viewed through pity, charity, discomfort, or suspicion rather than through artistic or social recognition. The study therefore argues that disability justice in India cannot be understood only through legal inclusion or welfare policy. It must also address the everyday realities of mobility, labour, dignity, and access within unequal urban environments shaped by caste and class hierarchies.

By focusing on disabled street performers rather than institutional spaces of rehabilitation or professional art, this paper contributes to disability justice discourse by locating disability within the informal economies and public cultures of urban India. It shows that access is not merely a technical question of ramps or infrastructure but a broader ethical and political question about whose bodies are allowed to belong in public space. The study also recognises that these narratives are mediated through the researcher’s own position within the field. The interviews, observations, and conversations conducted across trains, streets, and marketplaces involved processes of listening, interpretation, and representation shaped by differences of social location and academic access. Rather than speaking for the performers, the paper attempts to foreground their lived experiences and everyday negotiations with the city while remaining attentive to the unequal structures within which the research itself is produced. Ultimately, this paper argues that disability justice requires a rethinking of urban life in India itself. It demands movement beyond charity and individual adjustment toward collective responsibility, accessible infrastructure, and recognition of interdependence as a fundamental condition of social existence. Disabled street performers do not merely survive within the city; they reveal its exclusions, its hierarchies of value, and its unfinished possibilities for justice.