Paras Arora, a visiting doctoral fellow at CSH Delhi, will be delivering a talk on “Estranged Accompaniments: Siblingship Across the Spectrum of Neurodiversity in Urban India” at IIT Hyderabad on March 5, 2025. The talk will explore themes of siblingship, care, and neurodiversity.

Abstract: With a critical attunement towards generational hierarchy, sociological and anthropological scholarship on kinship and care in India has only marginally accounted for siblingship as a uniquely meaningful and socially transformative relationship. Accounts of neurodivergent conditions and family life have also accorded prime attention towards parents as caregivers and activists. In this talk, I seek to broaden the scope of studies that explore neurodiversity, ageing, family, kinship, and care in India by foregrounding the experiences of siblings, whereby at least one sibling is neurodivergent. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with siblings based in urban India alongside participant immersion in advocacy initiatives undertaken by them, I explore the contours of care that siblings perform over the life course. To begin with, I survey how neurotypical siblings pick up the expectation to care for their neurodivergent siblings as a responsibility to accompany each other since childhood and until an uncertainly marked future. Embodying this ethic of accompaniment entails, among other things, being watchful of not only one’s sibling but also the world around. Therefore, by navigating the worlds of family, kin, and friends alongside each other as spectators, siblings acquire critical insights into the social exclusion that encumbers both neurodivergent persons and caregivers. I argue that it is the stretching of this ethic of accompaniment into adulthood that splinters siblingship around the knotty milestones of labor, leisure, love, and loss. In this talk, I specifically corroborate how siblings accompany each other when relationships are forged and dissolved in adulthood. I underline how caring as accompanying necessitates questioning and reinventing the normative scripts of domesticity, family planning, loving, and grieving to accommodate for the uncertain futures that emerge in the face of cognitive differences. As accompaniments, siblings may not unconditionally embrace neurodivergence, but rather maintain distance, experience ambivalence, and embody resentments. Therefore, while not positing siblingship and its lateral orientation as necessarily liberatory or reciprocal, I insist on attending to the aspirations for equality, inclusion, and recognition that may emanate from the domain of siblingship to advocate for neurodivergent persons and caregivers.