When he isn’t working on the farm or making things out of jute, Gobinda Majumdar likes to walk to a tea stall near his home in Assam to buy sweets for his nieces. All this he explains with tactile signing, the only means of communication for the 37-year-old, who cannot speak and has no hearing or sight.
Born deaf, Majumdar then went blind at the age of two after contracting rubella. Life has its challenges but he hopes to find a wife. “My younger brother is married so why not me?” he told the photographer Vicky Roy, who visited him in Kamrup district as part of a project to share stories of people with disabilities in rural India.
“I aim to highlight ordinary people with disabilities so their relatable stories strike a chord among others like them and create awareness about disability among the general public,” says Roy. “My clear objectives are: focus on the person, not the disability; show them not as objects of pity but as ordinary human beings pursuing their simple dreams; and make sure there is an equal mix of male and female subjects.”
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Gobinda Majumdar was born deaf and went blind at the age [...]