Jadavpur University develops Braille card game to centre disability in literature

A board game on disabled authors designed by the Department of English at Jadavpur University aims to bring disability to the centre of literary teaching and discussions through collaborative playing cards with Braille and other tactile cues.

Funded by the Global Jadavpur University Alumni Foundation based in Danville, California, the ‘Crip Lit’ card game requires players to match time period, disability, gender, and/or sexual orientation, along with other similar factors associated with the featured author, in order to score points.

Crip Lit Cards feature several tactile cues like Braille, raised portraits of the writers, roundels to hold point values, embossed English text, clear textures along the edges, and colour contrast to help players with visual disabilities.
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The deck also includes “power cards” featuring queer and transgender disabled figures, which redistribute turns, points, and choices among players to challenge assumptions about power and productivity.

“We do not usually find disabled literary figures outside of John Milton and Helen Keller in literature curricula. For instance, even though Krishnadasa Kaviraja, the canonical author of Chaitanya Charitamrita, is taught widely in Bengali literature syllabi, it is seldom taught that he is a disabled author or how his disabilities inform his writings. This card game aims at challenging ableist, normative literary curricula,” Ishan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor at the Department of English and the designer behind ‘Crip Lit Cards’ told The Hindu.

He added that the cards feature several tactile cues like Braille, raised portraits of the writers, roundels to hold point values, embossed English text, clear textures along the edges, and colour contrast to help players with visual disabilities.

The game also includes a rulebook with small biographies on each writer featured in the cards for the players to refer to.

“The front face of the cards carry the name of the litterateur, while the backside carries the dates and time period. The cards also carry embossed symbols associated with the litterateur, like for example a melting candle for Milton, referring to one of his famous quotes. The game can be played by disabled persons as well as persons without visual disability. We want them to come together to play this card game,” Professor Chakraborty, who identifies as a queer person with disabilities, said.

He added that the idea for Crip Lit Cards stemmed from the long-standing exclusion of disability from mainstream literary theory, with only ‘special modules and courses’ being dedicated to the study of disability in literature in academic spaces. He further said that the name for the card game is also a reclamation of the word ‘crippled’, a derogatory term often used to refer to disabled persons.

“If a literature course is offered without any women authors, for instance, then it would be heavily critiqued for gender bias. Similarly, why can’t we have disabled authors in all literature courses? We need to rethink the history and documentation of disabled litterateurs, and make people aware of the fact that John Milton and Helen Keller are not the only two disabled literary figures,” Professor Chakraborty said.