Abstract: Histories of representation of disability have occupied a significant place in literary and cultural studies oriented research within the field of disability studies. Disability studies, not unlike other fields of academic research that are animated by socio-political movements, has found value in recovering literary and cultural texts that present disablement as a category of experience. Nontinatakam (‘lame-drama’/ ‘cripple-drama’?), a Tamil dramatic form that was popular between the 17th and 19th centuries has recently been rediscovered within the global disability studies framework as a performance tradition that documents something about the experience of disability. Considering that the protagonist, as the name suggests, is an amputee (nonti), a person who has lost an arm and a leg, this dramatic form has probably been identified for the potential it is hoped it would hold for an understanding of historical responses to disability in the Indian context. Concentrating on the circumstances of this renewed interest in nontinatakam as a disability text, but moving beyond the text’s content alone, the talk will attempt to foreground social contexts of the ‘marukal marukai’ (alternate leg and arm) punishment and the meanings it assumes in the forms of the nontinatakam as well as the Maduraiveeran Kathai, a narrative tradition that was popular around the same period. About the Speaker: Shilpaa Anand is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Convenor of the Persons with Disabilities Cell at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. She has an MA in English from the University of Hyderabad and a PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She trained and worked as a special educator before entering academics. Her research is on concerns related to historicizing disability and questions of corporeality and culture. Her essays on these subjects are published in Nandini Ghosh’s Interrogating Disability in India (2016), Shridevi Rao and Maya Kalyanpur’s South Asia and Disability Studies (2015) as well as Renu Addlakha’s Disability Studies in India (2013).