After a 2018 road accident left her paraplegic, Priya Sharma sat in her wheelchair at her sister's wedding and, at her siblings' insistence, danced. It was "the first time I felt joy after the accident," she observed. That moment became the seed of Dance With Wheels, a platform she founded in 2024 that connects women and girls with disabilities across 16 Indian states, offering not choreography so much as a place to be seen without explanation or pity. When nine of those women rolled onto a stage in Jaipur before an audience of 350, some were making their first solo journey away from home; one told Priya afterward, "Today I forgot I have a disability." What the story quietly insists on is how much of disability's weight is social -- the shrinking invitations, the silences, the applause withheld - and how much can shift when someone decides to build the inclusive space that was missing. "Earlier, we would say I am someone with a disability," says Priya. "Now we say we're dancers."
