God Helps Those Who Persist’: Spiritual Resilience and Disability in Srikanth

Srikanth (2024), directed by Tushar Hiranandani, the biopic of visually impaired entrepreneur, public speaker, and philanthropist Srikanth Bolla, has been widely received as an inspiring narrative of inclusion, agency, and social mobility. This article reads Srikanth through a religious and spiritual lens to ask how mainstream Indian cinema represents the spiritual resources, moral imaginaries, and religious vocabularies that shape disabled persons’ lived resilience. This article argue that Srikanth stages a hybrid moral theology of disability: it displaces purely punitive or karmic interpretive frames that historically pathologize disability while incorporating vernacular spiritual practices and ethical vocabularies that legitimize agency, persistence, and collective responsibility. Close reading of key scenes family ritual moments, institutional encounters, and the protagonist’s relationship to work and mentorship reveals cinema’s capacity to reframe disability as spiritual vocation and civic calling rather than divine punishment.