This dissertation examines the relational context between special educators and intellectually disabled adults in Pune, India. It analyzes how special educators intervene in the lives of intellectually disabled people to shape or make up their personhood. This study is based on 15 months of ethnographic research within institutions such as vocational centers, workshops, and residential facilities in India that cater to intellectually disabled adults who do not necessarily communicate using conventionalized speech-based language and often require support with activities of daily life. Within these institutions, special educators and intellectually disabled adults often spent a considerable amount of time together participating in activities such as working, resting, and having fun. In this context, special educators noticed and interpreted gestures, facial expressions, behaviors, and utterances of intellectually disabled adults and decided what these meant. Further, based on their interpretations, they also decided what intellectually disabled people could in these institutions and even who they were as people. In doing so, they constructed the personhood of intellectually disabled people, shaped their own expertise as people who understood and “knew” intellectually disabled people, and maintained order and achieved workflow within these institutions. I use the concept of “intervention” to analyze the ways in which special educators interacted with intellectually disabled people because most of these interactions, despite being creative, were top-down and hierarchical in nature, wherein special educators called the shots and intellectually disabled people often did not have much space to provide their feedback. I examine how special educators intervened in the domains of communication, work, fun, and sexuality. In doing so, they made up intellectually disabled people as people who could communicate (in limited and interpretable ways), work (under supervision and on repetitive tasks), have fun (in a consumption-oriented manner), and be sexual and romantic (with direction and within limits). This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first half of the dissertation examines how special educators intervened in the lives of intellectually disabled adults on an everyday basis within institutions by communicating with them and occupying them, through productive work as well as activities of fun. In the second half of the dissertation, I shift attention from everyday interventions and consider the ways in which special educators (some of whom were also parents of intellectually disabled people and founders of institutions) imagined and implemented long term and future oriented life projects for intellectually disabled people. Across the dissertation, I engage with the articulations of intellectually disabled people that were either ignored or rejected by special educators. While the interventions made by special educators were often generous and created opportunities for intellectually disabled people, the personhood shaped through the interventions was narrow or restricted because it was often limited to these institutions, did not capacitate or develop intellectually disabled people’s skills, and did not offer them many choices regarding what they could do. In examining the hierarchical yet often responsive interventions made by special educators, this dissertation challenges western, rational, and individualistic models of personhood, adulthood, and expertise and offers an alternative that is enacted relationally through the interpretations and actions of multiple actors. It also traces lives of intellectually disabled people both within and outside institutions and offers a perspective on the marginalized and peripheral status of intellectually disabled people in mainstream Indian society. The dissertation also theorizes the concept of intervention as a complex relational practice that can be top-down as well as creative and generous at the same time.