Interrogating Motherhood 9789381345177

Table of contents :
Cover page
Half title page
Series editor page
Full title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Marketing page
Contents
A Note from the Series Editor
Introduction
1 Feminist Debates on Motherhood
2 Motherhood and Patriarchy
3 Nationalism and
Nation-Building
4 Reproductive Technology: Motherhood under Capitalist Patriarchy
Conclusion
References
Index
About the Author and Series Editor

Citation preview

Samita Sen

Professor, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University

The book analyses motherhood both as ideology and as practice, and the complexities between motherhood and mothering where the concepts are glorified but the women remain subordinate. It further explores Indian and western feminists’ insights, examines the significance of mother goddesses, discusses regulations on motherhood in the wake of nation-building, and reveals the vulnerability of motherhood to the coercion of invasive technology and pressures of patriarchy where a woman must not only be a mother but also the mother of a son.

SERIES EDITOR: Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Senior Honorary Fellow, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai.

` 295

ISBN 978-93-81345-17-7

Interrogating Motherhood

Jasodhara Bagchi was the former Chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women.

Interrogating Motherhood, the fourth title in the Theorizing Feminism series, reveals that an understanding of motherhood is vitally important to understanding Indian society. The ideas and practice of motherhood changed once India became a part of the global capitalist system.

Bagchi

…introduces the basic concepts of women's studies, of understanding the world through a gender lens….

Explores the many insights of Indian and western feminists analyses of motherhood both as ideology and as practice

Jasodhara Bagchi

Interrogating

Motherhood THEORIZING FEMINISM

Series Editor: Maithreyi Krishnaraj

SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

Interrogating

Motherhood

Also in the series

Gender V. Geetha Gendering Caste Uma Chakravarti Patriarchy V. Geetha

THEORIZING FEMINISM

Series Editor: Maithreyi Krishnaraj

Interrogating

Motherhood Jasodhara Bagchi

© Tista Bagchi and Barnita Bagchi, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. First published in 2017 by

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in

STREE 16 Southern Avenue Kolkata 700 026 www.stree-samyabooks.com

SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 11/13 pt Goudy Old Style by Zaza Eunice, Hosur, Tamil Nadu, India and printed at Sai Print-o-Pack, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-93-81345-17-7 (PB) SAGE Stree Team: Madhuparna Banerjee, Supriya Das and Guneet Kaur Gulati

This book was completed shortly before her death by Jasodhara Bagchi (17 August 1937–9 January 2015).

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Contents A Note from the Series Editor    Maithreyi Krishnaraj Introduction  1 Feminist Debates on Motherhood

ix xxi 1

2 Motherhood and Patriarchy

32

3 Nationalism and Nation-Building

51

4 Reproductive Technology: Motherhood under Capitalist Patriarchy

80

Conclusion

97

References

99

Index

104

About the Author and Series Editor

108

A Note from the Series Editor THEORIZING FEMINISM IN INDIA

Stree has already launched three critical works: Gender by V. Geetha, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens by Uma Chakravarti and Patriachy by V. Geetha. It now presents Interrogating Motherhood by Jasodhara Bagchi, who handed in her manuscript before her untimely death in January 2015. Her family have attended to the necessary tasks to bring this book to fruition. The series editor and publisher are very grateful for their support. Interrogating Motherhood is a comprehensive essay that incorporates much of the available literature and debates, placing the concept superbly in its Indian setting. It traces the history of motherhood, its connection with the Indian women’s movement, Women’s Studies, major feminist concerns and contemporary issues. Had Jasodhara Bagchi lived, she may have added more insights on this institution, so central to women’s lives; unfortunately that was not to be. The series aims at presenting introductory texts to draw in readers outside academia as well as those inside it. Written by well-known scholar-activists of Women’s Studies, the books seek to explain ideas and theories in a simple way and place them securely in the Indian context. Of particular relevance for India is the family – immediate and extended – with its hold over loyalties of members, an economy in transition to capitalism, a deeply hierarchic society stratified by class and caste, and persistent conflicts over religion, language, ethnicity and other differences. Scholars here have used standard feminist theories in innovative and imaginative ways, modifying and elaborating them and offering us a comparative perspective. Hence, a very important aim of this series is to bring together Third World feminism and feminist theorizing in the broad sense of conceptualizing social reality.

Interrogating Motherhood x

After the early beginnings of this series, new themes like sexuality, hitherto not aired in India, have come to the fore. Its connection to pervasive violence against women has demonstrated the ideological and material hold of patriarchy in its manifest forms. Feminists resorted to reform of laws and of law enforcing agencies. Despite all these efforts, the media work as eye-openers on the strength of the ideology of patriarchy in India, with its foundations still secure in caste, family, marriage practices; where female sexuality has to be curbed, where women are violated on issues of ‘honour’ or revenge or caste vengeance. The technology to eliminate female children is widely practised. Cultural preferences for male offspring is so rooted in civil society that family planning, which should have been a means to liberation, has been turned into a tool of enslavement. Motherhood is deeply embedded within these cultural preferences. For most of society, women’s sexuality is but a means to reproduction, preferably of sons. As Jasodhara Bagchi says, it is as a mother that a woman gains some agency. Jasodhara Bagchi’s book on motherhood is a significant contribution to a theme that resonates at many levels. Her insightful analysis looks at motherhood through gendered lens and draws on feminists’ responses to accepted notions of motherhood as the inevitable marker of the female of the species. The social construction of gender, builds on the biological division of roles between the human male as the sperm supplier to fertilize the egg the female carries, erects an elaborate signification of the primacy of the human male and consequent subordination of the human female. Recent work by women biologists have pointed out that the womb is not an inert receptacle but has capacity to permit or not permit the invasion of sperm. Bagchi’s contribution is an admirable approach on the joys of motherhood as against the agony of motherhood embedded in social structures. As she says right at the beginning, ‘the book emanates from the conviction that feminist understanding of motherhood has been central to the unfolding of Indian society from the moment of its insertion into the global capitalist system’. This is a teaser to the reader, who is aware that it will be elaborated in her later chapters. The author

A Note from the Series Editor

also emphasizes that the onslaught of capitalism has led to the manipulation of motherhood and its commodification. A puzzle in the social construction of motherhood is the contradictory delineation: veneration on the one hand, and on the other hand, deprivation of actual living mothers of enabling conditions that would reward their dedicated service in bringing forth- the regeneration of the human being. The jagatjanani (mother of the world) is only in temples of Mother Goddesses, in poetry and art. There is more than one kind of mother: mothers are women who inhabit or perform the role of bearing children or raising children, who may or may not be their biological offspring. Thus women may earn the entitlement of being considered ‘mother’ by virtue of giving birth, by raising children, by supplying ovum for fertilizing an embryo. We have the birth mother, the biological mother, and the adoptive mother. These concepts are not exhaustive because much depends on how social, cultural and religious discourses define these roles. Much of our information comes from upper- caste Hindu scriptures and writings from the brahmins who had ritual supremacy as the repository of knowledge and sacred rituals denied to others. Most Hindu rituals ordained the use of the kumbh: the pot (usually copper or brass) as symbol of the womb and its regenerative force. For the mother, however, it is not only an emotional, affective experience, but also an intensely physical experience through pregnancy, the nurturing of the foetus with her own blood through the placenta, and later through breast feeding. The question of motherhood as providing agency is discussed despite women clearly having a subordinate status under patriarchy. It may be said that as a mother of sons, the mother gained agency. At one point Bagchi points to a constrained agency. A married woman can avoid being impregnated by refusing sexual relations; she can resort to abortion in secret. Today in India we have a law that permits abortion if the life of the woman is under threat, but it is often used to abort the female foetus because of the desire for a son, as mentioned earlier, and often the pregnant woman is not the decision maker. The legal right to terminate pregnancy was not inspired by women’s interest but by the agenda of population control.

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Motherhood’s actual contribution is to maintain ­patriarchy: the dominance of the male through the triple instruments of control over reproduction, sexuality and sexual division of  labour. Jasodhara Bagchi explores at length the many facets of motherhood through accessing feminist debates in the West and in India. Her apology for her treatise being confined to Bengali and English material does not in any way reduce the significance and scope of her treatise to a wider audience. She explains that women surrender to patriarchy. Why do they surrender? The author points to women’s subordinate status in the family. Motherhood and mothering need support and a new mother can get it only by accepting her status in return for economic and social support from her family. The fact is that in many parts of India childbirth is under the care of the woman’s maternal family, which ensures the care of the new mother. When a woman has to bear a child in her marital home, she has less voice on asking for what she needs. The abandonment of a new mother among the working class by the father/partner is pervasive (parityakta stree). A man can run away from responsibility but only a few women ever repudiate their responsibility to their children. Gail Omvedt (1984) had done a survey of such abandoned women in almost all districts of Maharashtra. Hindu society faced criticism about its treatment of women by the colonial rulers. The Indian freedom movement is unique in its struggle against foreign rule in that the Woman Question triggered the Swadeshi movement. The Social Reform movement of the nineteenth century was inspired by the English educated upper-caste Indians, exposed to liberal values which culminated in abolition of sati in 1832 and legislation to permit widow remarriage among the upper castes in 1856. As colonial subjects, Jasodhara Bagchi forcefully argues that the social significance of motherhood straddles between the private and the public as well as across disciplines, specific cultures and links the family to the state, which summarizes the gamut of issues that motherhood generates. There is a dialectic of production and reproduction which market driven research on reproduction in a globalized capitalist world has fed into mainstream mode of production.

A Note from the Series Editor

With the advent of socialism, it was assumed that all women would join wage work and household provisioning plus care functions would be taken over by public provisioning. This never happened and women continued to do ‘double shifts’. Here it is important to recall the socialist feminist critique of Marxism for its single emphasis on production relations obscuring the relations of reproduction. ‘By reproduction we mean the sphere where people are produced both biologically and socially. It is within the latter that gender hierarchy is built. The means of production for people, that is, bringing forth new human beings, are different from the means of production of commodities under patriarchy’ (Krishnaraj 2012: 107). Bagchi has also brought out how the status of the woman as mother lies in her being mother of sons. While she talks of the strong bond between mothers and daughters, in Hindu families which are predominantly patrilocal and patrilineal, the daughter moves to her husband’s home and after marriage she has less rights in her parental home and is treated more as a guest. Despite the new law that guarantees property rights to a daughter regarding her father’s property, she does not benefit by it. As Sudhir Kakar (1980), the psychologist-psychoanalyst, has pointed out, the bond between a mother and son is strong as her power in the house is derived from her son. Kakar has pointed out this creates conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, because both seek a bond with the son and the husband, and the daughter-in-law becomes a threat to the mother. The question is: are there exceptions? Did mothers have undisputed power and authority? Was there a matriarchy as the antonym for patriarchy? (Omvedt 1984). Omvedt takes issue with Patil (1982) who has argued that hoe agriculture based pre-Aryan tribal societies and Harappan civilization were matriarchies in which women controlled the means of production which gave them ruling power in society. Only after the development of herding and plough agriculture, controlled by males, ancient matriarchies were overthrown and even their remnants – the matrilineal clans – were replaced by patrilineal clans. To claim that existing matrilineal societies are remnants of ancient matriarchies is only a hypothesis. Even the strongest Marxist feminist anthropologists postulate an earlier more

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egalitarian society and not a female dominated one (Leacock 1981). Some important considerations were overlooked in the Marxist tradition, says Omvedt. This was partly because of the Marxist’s overly economistic interpretation and equating matriarchy with tribal societies. Not all tribal societies were matriarchal; most as we know were patriarchal. Power in any one aspect does not translate into power overall aspects. Even in very traditional patriarchal societies women have some freedom in a domain marked as women’s regime which operates under the hegemony and surveillance of male leaders in the family and the community. In India in Hindu communities, women’s bonding gives only a space within the fence. When the girl/woman once married and enters motherhood, a position of authority is available only at old age, which too is subject to who owns property. Perhaps Bagchi’s perception of an idyllic bond between mothers and daughters is also a matter of context. Mothers are known to discriminate in favour of sons in upbringing; alternatively it might also be a fondness for a daughter because she will be going away. In American feminist literature Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated a woman-centred, mother- centred world. For the early feminists in North America, matriarchy and patriarchy were not a simple mirror image of each other. To them patriarchy represented power over others, while matriarchy signified an inner strength. This is very much like Mahatma Gandhi’s idea that the essential nature of women is self-sacrifice and hence ideal for being displayed in the freedom struggle. Bagchi discusses Mary O’ Brien’s view of mothers and mothering as a special source of power. It is the radical feminists who wished to reverse gender relations. Others felt motherhood is bondage and women should reject motherhood. In the twenty-first century, it has become admissible among many educated women to reject motherhood in order to be free to live without responsibility. Strangely enough, there is a reluctance to undertake this ‘sanyasa’ (renunciation) and forego the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of holding a baby and be affected by its total dependence on one. Perhaps this is a strong biological tendency ingrained in us to protect the young for human survival. Motherhood thus appears to be a double-edged weapon. In a recent study Beliappa (2013) discovers how women working

A Note from the Series Editor

in very advanced sectors of the economy like the IT sector, ostensibly imbibing the culture of individuality are nevertheless unable to give up the notion of their socially mandated responsibility as mothers and even if they have relatives doing foster care, they suffer from guilt and downplay their commitment to their jobs. We come back to circular reasoning- they imbibe the strong social expectations as mothers. Is matriarchy merely feminist nostalgia? In some ways matriliny offers a more positive situation for women as mothers and daughters. Matriliny implies that both lineage and property devolution go from mother to daughter. Matriliny is a system in which a person’s descent is traced through the mother and her maternal ancestors. The residence of a woman who is married continues in her mother’s home. This system is called the matrifocal family, where fathers play a less important role. Though only 30 to 35 percent of communities are said to be matrilineal, there are vestiges of the system among the American Indian tribes such as Cherokee, Choctaw, Gitsan, Harda, Hopi, Iroquois, Lenape, Navaga and Tingit. Other sites are in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Nigeria and Malaysia. Much better known and studied are the communities in Meghalaya such as the Garos, Jaintia and Khasis (Mukhim 2013): Women and men slash and burn a tiny area of primary or secondary forest, grow food crops from one to three years then abandoned the area to regenerate the land. With increasing privatization of land and the spread of market economy, women who traditionally held land became displaced; additionally, men began to migrate to the plains and with male income male dominance established itself (Kelkar and Wangchuk 2013). While theoretically matrilineal and matrifocal family appears as giving power to women, under changed market economy, bereft of other productive resources like new technologies, improved transport, and other inputs and market access, female farming does not reduce poverty in these areas nor are women empowered. It has increased the workload enormously. Motherhood and mothering are at a price here while men are mostly idle. Gender equality is not established by property rights alone. It is also about who does what and who has access to resources other than land. Among the Khasis there is growing landlessness today.

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Matrilineal communities exist in the southwest (in Kerala and Lakshadeep islands) and in the northeast in Meghalaya. However with the march of capitalism and inroads of the market economy, in both these cases, the system has undergone considerable attenuation. In Kerala, among the Nairs, a mother lived with her daughters in her ancestral home called the ‘taravad’. A male head – the brother of the woman who held land – did the managerial work. His own wife lived in her parental home and he was only a visiting husband to her. Over time with British colonization over much of India, men took to new professions which gave them the opportunity to earn independent income, whereas earlier they were the managers of their sisters’ properties. Over time, men broke away from the traditional taravad system. The system more or less got whittled down except for a remnant in the Malabar region. In Lakshadeep islands, matriliny sits uneasily with Muslim inhabitants (Dube 1991). In Coorg, a part of Karnataka where men were mostly warriors, Tulu-nadu had matrifocal households. A glaring asymmetry to motherhood is fatherhood. As Bagchi puts it, the agony and ecstasy of motherhood are women’s alone. Because of the social value put on motherhood, apart from the intrinsic happiness that the birth of a child might bring, a childless married woman faces not only rejection by family and community, but also she feels a sense of non-fulfilment and regards herself as a failure. We know how innumerable prayers and vows, visits to temples are undertaken to get a child. Adoption as an option is not usually welcomed as the couple wants a biologically rendered progeny. Men often marry a second time if the first wife has not given him a child. Here the time-honoured assumption is that that the woman was infertile; male infertility remains unspoken of. Motherhood through the emergence of reproductive technology is possible today by artificial insemination when a woman is unable to bear a child or if the man has a low sperm count. Given the son preference in our society – for perpetuating male lineage, for transmitting property, for ­ceremonial requirements and so on – the technology has been abused. It is used to detect the sex of the unborn either at preconception or after – and aborting the unwanted female baby. To reiterate, motherhood is acceptable only for mothers of sons.

A Note from the Series Editor

Reproductive technology has also engineered surrogacy: a woman who carries an embryo from another woman’s fertilized ovum to term. The surrogate mother’s womb may be hired because the woman whose ovum has been implanted is either unable to bear a child or is unwilling to do so. The surrogate is paid for the trouble and usually poor women opt for this as a source of income. Many legal battles have taken place as to how much payment is due. In one very recent case a surrogate mother decided to abort the child. With such advances in reproduction technologies the function of biological motherhood has become split between the genetic mother – who provides the ovum – and the woman who provides the womb. There are today frozen ova and sperm in ‘banks’. These may be used by women other than the donor or by the women who donated them for their own use later. The sperm donor also might not be the woman’s husband but could be an anonymous donor. There is thus fragmentation of the process of reproduction and its attendant commodification. In same sex relationships – lesbian or gay partners – the desire for a child is satisfied through resort to reproductive technology or adoption. Unmarried mothers give away their child to adoption agencies who find adoptive parents for the child. Maternity and childbirth are painful processes for women. As Jared Diamond (1992) explains the upright position that humans have evolved into, creates problems for childbirth. Secondly, the human child in the womb, with a gestation period of nine months, grows into a size which makes it difficult for it to be ejected through the narrow human birth canal. Unlike other animals, the human baby is totally helpless when born and learns to walk only after a year. Infant care takes a toll on the mother’s time and energy. Breast feeding imposes extra demands both on her body and her energy. Unless good public health facilities are available to all, women from poorer classes undergo greater privation. Employed women whose earnings are crucial to family survival have to get back to work without adequate rest and deprive the child of breast milk beyond a few months. Bottled milk with artificial substitutes not only do not give the child all the nutrition it needs but also endangers its health if adequate hygiene is not followed. Motherhood is treated as the woman’s

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responsibility alone – a personal matter instead of what it really is: she is creating the future worker, the future citizen, the future mother if she has a daughter. Hardly 10 percent of women in India receive maternity benefits in terms of leave from work, and resources to sustain the child. The family gives priority to the male as the breadwinner in food and fails to recognize that by denying the young mother enough food, the future adult does not prosper. Socialism in its heyday understood this and provided adequate care and rest for mothers. Except in the organized sector in India maternity benefits are scarce for most mothers. Even in the organized sector ways are found to cheat the law (Lingam and Krishnaraj 2010). Labour is a produced means of production like capital because it implies a prior commitment of resources for the purpose of keeping labour alive by women who invest time and energy and resources for this commitment. The input in to this labour is rendered predominantly by women, given the sexual division of labour. A woman exerts her body the way production requires and without hope of immediate returns. If all labour creates value why does not women’s reproductive labour? Besides, this value and the product are also appropriated by others. A mother does not ‘own’ the child exclusively as her ‘product’. This is the tragedy of motherhood. Abortion of an unwanted child often conceived outside wedlock or because of rape, poses dilemmas about how rights are perceived. The right to have or not have a child is admissible as a general principle. Once conceived, there are ethical problems about the right of a child to be born and nurtured. Admitted that a woman’s right has to be balanced against that of others, in a situation where the family and the male partner have coercive authority this right does not exist except for a few women in more enlightened families. Thus motherhood has many contexts, which have been elucidated in the book. I would like to add that for motherhood and mothering to become a fulfilling experience, we have a long way to go. The majority of women do not have a right to their own bodies and need public provision of adequate care and nourishment, of respite from onerous work, of workplaces to treat motherhood as not just an individual responsibility but the responsibility of society, of families and partners to

Bengaluru, February 2016 

Maithreyi Krishnaraj Series Editor

A Note from the Series Editor

offer a caring hand. This not easy without eliminating poverty that denudes human dignity; eliminating extreme inequality, and mitigating patriarchy. Stree and I are grateful that Jasodhara Bagchi worked on such a complex issue, providing such a cogent and concise argument on motherhood.

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Introduction I

Birthing is an inevitable marker of the female of the species. The social construction of gender has built on the natural biological division of spheres in order to build an elaborate construction of significations, whereby the gender division of labour has been perpetuated with many concomitant demands on women. Thus the biological process of birthing has been elaborately constructed into a gendered social relation around the notion of motherhood. This book will be an attempt to analyse the gendered concept of motherhood. Unlike many of the gendered relations that have already been explored in this series, such as, Gender, Patriarchy and Caste, Motherhood brings with it an association of affect, emotion and bonding that is central to women’s experience of everyday lived reality. Therefore, placing motherhood under the gender lens may look like a harsh rejection of elements of human nature that are dear to women. Feminism, in order to operate as a sustainable mode of criticality, will need to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater. So, the gender lens has to be sensitive enough to capture the ‘enabling’ aspect of motherhood as well as the ‘constraining’ aspect of it. As Maithreyi Krishnaraj had put it, motherhood oscillates between the ambivalence of ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’.1 Hence one needs to exercise one’s empathy and imagination to the full in order to understand the complex gendering process involved in motherhood. Semantically one cannot help noticing how gender is contained in ‘engendering’, a synonym of birthing. The closeness arises not merely from the masculine/feminine binary within which gender nestles, but in the idea of ‘reproduction’, central to the understanding of gender. In this case, reproduction,

Interrogating Motherhood xxii

would mean, not merely that of the species, but of the entire process of social relations in general. It is this amalgam of the biological and the social that makes the gender analysis of motherhood so fraught with rich tension. The criticality involved in this particular form of feminist theory will have to sustain itself on a terrain that is largely affective. This is the big challenge with which I enter the domain of theorizing feminism in our context. In 2004, the British Council reported that when they asked more than 7,000 learners in 46 countries what they considered the most beautiful words in the English language, the word ‘mother’ topped the list:2 a large survey of the most beautiful and beloved words in English zeroed in clearly on MOTHER. I have a feeling that in many other languages this kind of finding is likely to happen. It is not for nothing that the editor of a collection of essays on motherhood in the Indian context, in which much of my thoughts appeared as the Foreword, has spoken of the mother-child relationship as ‘the oldest love story’.3 The inevitability of the relationship, interestingly enough, also makes it one of the most controversial ones. For feminists in particular, motherhood has meant both an unmistakable assertion of women’s agency and the most obvious capitulation to patriarchal ruling. What Catherine MacKinnon had said about sexuality and labour in the context of Feminism and Marxism is truer than ever of Motherhood: that which is most her own and most easily taken away.4 A woman’s most obvious power to reproduce and nurture the species is then made into the most effective engine of her enslavement. This is one of the most central paradoxes of society that is camouflaged by the halo that usually surrounds the word ‘motherhood’. The paradox is intensified in the situation of a slave woman whose motherhood is an intrinsic part of her enslavement. Such a voice is the famous one of Sojourner Truth, whose motherhood was indeed a precondition to her slavery, because apart from her productive labour, her reproductive labour to produce more slaves was also part of the package of her enslavement: Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And

Introduction

ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman . . . Thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? (Sojourner Truth, 1851).5

As it turned out, for class- and caste-ridden societies, the hallmark of privilege lay with the women who were delinked from productive labour and relegated to the reproduction of status through procreation of the species. All the institutional build-up of motherhood, whether through upper-caste rituals, especially when a woman fulfils the expectation of perpetuating the patrilineal clan by producing a son, or through the glowing effect of the white, well-fed mothers breast-feeding healthy babies with beatific smile, are ploys for reproducing the dominant patriarchal structure of privileges. That is why it is salutary to remember the underbelly of motherhood as experienced by the black slave woman before she was freed to be named Sojourner Truth, or by the low-caste toiling Indian women among many such others in the world. What is very noteworthy is that the so-called traditional and the so-called modern converge on the myth of motherhood because it appears to give the most effective boost to patriarchal control over women, not just her body, but also her mind. In the traditional Hindu, brahminical dispensation, the ancient lawgiver Manu has explicitly used the three-stage model of socially accepted domination of women under patriarchy: women have to live under the authority of the father in childhood, under the husband in her youth and under the son in her old age. This builds up the trope that provides the compelling myth of motherhood, which we shall find being harnessed at different moments in the life cycle of individual women as well as that of nations. Under the dispensation of modernity in the West, the Freudian revolution in designating a child’s psychological development, as later feminists have pointed out, reinforced the nature-culture dichotomy – the mother standing for pre-civilizational nature. With their particular reading of Marx, both Mary O’Brien6 and Alison Jaggar and William McBride7 have taken issue with Marx for xxiii

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having accepted the distinction between reproduction and production, with motherhood occupying the private domain as mere reproduction, whereas the motor-force of history belongs to the public domain of production and politics. Just as the socialization process is assigned, under the Freudian explanatory system, to the regime of the father, in an uncritical understanding of the Marxian system, the domain of historical change is dominated by the male who clearly occupies the productive sphere. The ramifications of such distinction will be taken up more at length later in the book. A gendered understanding of motherhood, has, therefore, got to take into account the context within which such a study may be presented. I will have to acknowledge my unique location in modern day India within a women’s movement that has spawned a burgeoning literature in Women’s Studies. This, again, has led us to access gender critiques of motherhood available in English and Bengali. This study, therefore, has to admit to its limitation to materials written mostly in two languages, English and Bengali. But even with such a self-proclaimed limitation, the matter to be covered is vast. We must not forget that although in most dominant theories motherhood would be automatically relegated to the private realm, confined to ‘nature’ and the body alone, in its actual social significance it straddles the private and the public. Feminist theorizing of motherhood, therefore, will have to keep in mind the dual aspect of it. Covering as it does, many areas of life, both private and public, motherhood has broken out across disciplines touching on major issues pertaining to specific cultures, the family, state, scientific and technological experiments and the growing demand of the market. This builds up the challenge of handling the complicated and sensitive issue of looking at motherhood through the gendered lens. Motherhood was certainly a concept that was confined to the private domain. But as this book will have to argue, there were many openings that it brought upon both in our imaginary as well in our practice, which clearly breaks down the barrier between the private and the public that has been the hallmark of a patriarchal social order. In this book we shall have to range between history, literature, film, anthropology, myths, politics, economics, medicine, bioethics in order to

Introduction

illuminate the full impact that motherhood has had on our lives, to make it into a fully gendered existence. Although the book will perforce have to be divided into chapters, the walls between them will be porous. Issues that will be highlighted under certain headings will resonate in other sections, cropping up under thematics that apparently are quite different. What the book will be seriously contesting are the oppositions and binaries which have been made part of the common sense of thinking about our social organizations and the organization of our feelings and affect accordingly. The private-public divide that appears to dominate the gender divide has echoes in similar divides between reproduction and production, love and labour, emotion and reason, personal and political, and so on. To quote a rousing passage from historian Jocelyn Olcott: For decades, feminist scholarship in fields ranging from philosophy and legal theory to political science and sociology has challenged conceptual divisions between the public and the private, production and reproduction, and labor and affect.8

In this cusp, of course, falls motherhood, constructed as an extremely private experience that is made surreptitiously to seem public without an overt acknowledgement of its deep signification in the public domain. To quote from the same introductory article, ‘working mothers’ still refers to women who work in the labour market and put in a ‘second shift’ of motherhood, and the popular press has made a hand-wringing Mother’s Day ritual of calculating the value of unpaid household labour, thereby both marking it as women’s labour (or at least mothers’) and reducing its consideration to a semi-ironic Editorial wink.9 It will be the aim of this book to uncover this fudging process that accompanies the social accounting of motherhood. II

In this section I would like to indicate the main arguments of the book and then lay out the successive chapters and the ways in which the argument is likely to unfold. While acknowledging the rich legacy of the corpus of western feminist debates on motherhood, this book will try to foreground the Indian feminist perspectives in the theoretical material garnered so xxv

Interrogating Motherhood xxvi

far around motherhood. I have to confess that Bengal takes precedence over other regions in India, partly because of my familiarity with the terrain and partly also because for various reasons the feminist signification of motherhood resonates deeply with the colonizing process in Bengal. The book emanates from the conviction that feminist understanding of motherhood has been central to the unfolding of Indian society from the moment of its insertion into the global capitalist system through the colonizing process to the present day, when it is directly under the thumb of a market-driven neo-liberal regime of globalization. The many insights thrown up by the international feminist sisterhood have been both absorbed and creatively contested by feminists in India through valuable inputs into the process of unravelling motherhood both as ideology and as practice. Chapter 1 ‘Feminist Debates on Motherhood’ will try to uncover some of the salient feminist debates around motherhood in India and in the West. In the first half we shall bring out the subtle and complex ways in which feminist scholarship in India has examined motherhood in producing the gendered contours of the class-caste-ethnic boundaries in Indian society. In the second half of the chapter some salient debates on motherhood in western feminist debates have been discussed. Chapter 2 ‘Motherhood and Patriarchy’ discusses how motherhood has opened up vast spaces for feminist ‘ways of seeing’ This chapter will try to give a brief overview of some of the challenges and achievements of women (and also men) in reading women. The final culmination of this representational efficacy will be explored in the process of understanding the significance of Mother Goddesses in the evolution of the patriarchal society. Chapter 3 ‘Nationalism and Nation-Building’ picks up the theme of the Mother Goddess and its appropriation in the buildup of nationalist ideology in colonial Bengal. Using my own research in the area, I will present nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century colonial Bengal as a case study in the use of motherhood in representing nationalism. Parallel cases of nationalism in Ireland or South Africa as also in imperializing countries will be cited to bring out the varied use of motherhood. The process of nation-building inevitably

Introduction

leant heavily on regulating motherhood in order to control the quality as much as the quantity of the population. Indian women were exposed to the coercion of invasive technology that made motherhood in India vulnerable to the pressures of capitalist patriarchy, both at home and in the world. Chapter 4 ‘Reproductive Technology: Motherhood under Capitalist Patriarchy’ discusses how feminists had pitched their hope in the possible liberation of women from the bondage of inescapable motherhood through the coming of reproductive technology. This final chapter will direct our attention to the massive appropriation of technology by the most rabid patriarchal forces that have held motherhood captive to the market forces unleashed by technology going by the euphemistic name of Assisted Reproductive Technology. The Conclusion offers a brief section that will tie up the arguments presented in the book. NOTES 1. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ‘Motherhood: Power and Powerlessness’, in Indian Women: Myth and Reality, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi (Kolkata: Sangam, 1995), 34–43. 2. ‘Mother’s the Word.’ The Guardian. Thursday 25 November 2004. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/nov/25/books. britishidentity 3. Rinki Bhattacharya, ed., Janani: Mothers, Daughters, Motherhood (Delhi: SAGE, 2006). 4. Catherine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. Sojourner Truth (‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech delivered in 1851 at the women’s convention, Akron, Ohio U.S.A).. Accessed 13 March 2005. 6. Mary O’ Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1986). 7. Alison Jaggar and William L. McBride,“‘Reproduction’ as Male Ideology’, Women’s Studies International Forum (Hypatia Issue), 8.3 (1985): 185–196. 8. Jocelyn Olcott. ‘Introduction: Researching and Rethinking the Labors of Love’, American Historical Review 91, 1 (2011): 1–27. 9. Ibid.

xxvii

1 Feminist Debates on Motherhood I

In India, feminist engagement with motherhood surfaced in the context of the colonial state’s intervention with the lives of women in different spheres. Quite a lot of the formulations came about through reaction to the challenges thrown up by colonial rule. The ‘woman question’ was the moot question with which the colonial rulers justified the ‘civilizing ­mission’ of colonial rule. The alleged barbarism of the Indian male towards the womenfolk spawned a series of attacks on the ‘natives’ and the need to reform the organization of the Hindu family so that women might enjoy greater equality and freedom. A complex interplay of a drive towards autonomy and collaboration with the hegemonic powers of the ruling elite produced the broad movements in colonial India, characterized as social reform, followed by the nationalist phase. As we shall examine, in the two chapters that follow, the deployment of the Mother Goddess in the act of nation-building that characterized the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in colonial Bengal threw up a mother-son dyad that brought the entire process down to the everyday lives, meshing mythology with the family, the accepted unit of the normative social order. One may say that the ideology of motherhood served to delineate the gendered class-caste and ethnic border of the burgeoning middle-class consciousness.

Interrogating Motherhood 2

To come to grips with feminism in the Indian context the significance of motherhood is immense. There is no doubt that Indian feminists are in a unique position as far as placing motherhood at the centre. As we shall explore in the following chapter, motherhood occupies a central position in our colonial and postcolonial nation-building process in the mythical, feeding into ideological reading of it as an icon, and in the reality of women’s everyday lives as reproducers of not merely the dominant elite who could form the backbone of the new Indian society, with its admixture of collaboration and resistance, but also of the labouring poor who would help to be absorbed by the factory-based wage-labour system that marked the colonizing of India by the British in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The politics of representing gender is also closely allied to motherhood as one of its chief signifiers. Feminist theorizing in India coincided with the collective efforts that marked the emergence of Women’s Studies within the institutions of higher learning in India from the 1980s. The paradox of motherhood in the context of feminist theorizing in India was the potent contradiction between ideological glorification of motherhood as Shakti (power) and the powerlessness faced by mothers in their everyday lived reality. Hence Indian feminist theorizing has had to take on board the complex process of the ideological use of motherhood to keep the family as the regulating and regulated social order, thereby confining women to the reproductive domain of ‘home’ and denying them access to the ‘world’.1 For the mothers in the labouring poor families, as we shall see, it meant denying women the scant privileges to which they were entitled within a limited and exploited role in the productive sphere. On the whole, however, the theorizing has shown a bias towards the formation of the elite in India. Motherhood has been conceived as a culmination of the ideal womanhood, compliant towards the family elders. We have to take note, however, that by providing this idealizing contour the possibilities of breaking open out of the cage has also been provided, often using the trope of motherhood itself.2 Three major collective efforts must be mentioned in this context. The first was a residential workshop organized by Maithreyi Krishnaraj in the Juhu campus of SNDT Women’s

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

University in Mumbai in 1990, where scholars from different fields in Women’s Studies representing different regions of India gathered together to discuss the issues pertaining to ‘Motherhood in India’. The presentations were compiled as a justly celebrated number of the ‘Review of Women’s Studies’ in the Economic and Political Weekly.3 After years of circulation, the essays were published with some addition, by Routledge under the editorship of Maithreyi Krishnaraj.4 In order to get a feel of the major preoccupation of feminist theorizing of motherhood, this is an extremely valuable book. From the prescriptions on motherhood in ancient Indian scriptures,5 through the presence of motherhood in the concept of the great Indian Goddess;6 a fascinating study of the ideology of motherhood in the famous pan-Indian popularity of the television serials of the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata,7 which had swept all over India in the 1980s;8 the deployment of the image of the mother in the emergence of nationalist ideology in India/Bengal;9 an in-depth exploration of motherhood in the anti-brahmin movement in the politics of Tamil Nadu.10 It continued with the mother in Sane Guruji’s popular Marathi novel, Shyamchi Ai;11 the social construction of motherhood among the Coorgs in South India,12 an exploration of motherhood in the maternal clinics in Mumbai in the late 1980s to capture the different voices of motherhood,13 and a very valuable exploration of the debates around the Hindu Code Bill in western India to capture the uses of images of motherhood in them.14 The spread, as we see, is quite vast and theorizing covers ancient Hindu scriptures as well as ancient Indian epics as filtered through the ideological use of contemporary mainstream media, along with anthropology with its manifestations in both little and great traditions. It also considers historical phases like emergence of nationalism in colonial Bengal, or the Self-Respect movement in Tamil Nadu, social practices in an outlying region like Coorg, historical debates about women’s legal empowerment in the Hindu Code Bill, or a field-based survey in the maternity wards of a hospital in Mumbai. The entire collection is capped by Maithreyi Krishnaraj’s magisterial survey of the ‘multi-dimensional perspectives’ on Motherhood, Mothers, Mothering.15

3

Interrogating Motherhood 4

In the Indian feminist literature on motherhood there followed a spate of collective writings. The first was a collection of personal narratives contributed by twelve Indian feminists in the mode of an intergenerational testimony, A Space of Her Own.16 The essays contributed by some of the major feminists writing in India bring out their experiences of motherhood across three generations. Finally, we have the collection of essays on the authors’ own experience of their mothers and of motherhood in a collection called Janani, edited by a feminist critic and documentary film maker.17 I was not a contributor but wrote a Foreword in which some of my preoccupation had a chance to be articulated.18 What needs to be registered is that motherhood exercised in us, the feminists writing and thinking in those decades, the impulse to retrieve women’s agency embedded in the experience of motherhood that Adrienne Rich talked about so eloquently.19 An interesting offshoot of this trend in Indian feminist articulation was Bharati Ray’s five generational narrative of mother-daughter succession.20 What needs to be pointed out quite strongly is that behind this impulse of recording the experience, voice and space of mothering, as undertaken by the Indian feminist scholars in an activist mode, was, as mentioned earlier, the presence of the ideology of motherhood in the nation-building process of our colonial as well as postcolonial state, a small slice of which will be described empirically in Chapters 2 and 3. This has also been pivotal in my previous work on colonial Bengal.21 The mother who lurks within this ideology is the mother of a son and not a daughter. As such, she is the keeper of the social order by upholding the upper caste/upper class Hindu family as a hegemonic instrument in keeping the public/ private, productive/reproductive, sadar/andar (public/private) binaries intact, so that the boundaries of patriarchy are never crossed. This mother often makes appearance as a compliant daughter/wife/mother corresponding to the three different phases of her life as enumerated in the scriptural injunctions of the Manusmriti. As a chaste wife she was made to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, or, as a life-long celibate widow (often from her childhood) she had to go through enormous social exclusions in food, clothing, entertainment and even the possibility of motherhood, or be subjected to

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

marital rape as child-bride leading to premature motherhood, causing life-risks. This is the ‘woman’ in the Indian society who formed the subject of social reforms. Consequently, it was her powerlessness, fostered by the andarmahal, from which she was not allowed even to go to school, which became the public discourse of women’s ‘powerlessness’. Since Personal Laws, covering marriage, custody, inheritance, for instance, had been kept by the British rulers in the hands of the religious authorities of the religious communities in India, the ‘Hindu woman’ became the symbol of the normative order of the majority of Indian women, across the caste-class-religious divide.22 II

The role of the doorkeeper of the caste Hindu patriarchal order was easily acceded to Indian women in their role of mothers of sons, who glorified their motherhood. Motherhood thus came to acquire the paradoxical glorificatory role which was the other side of the powerlessness that surrounded the woman in so-called traditional Indian society. As the mother of a son she kept the clan/kinship/race alive by conserving the so-called ‘tradition’. This is where Indian feminists drew, very effectively, upon the internationally accessible feminist theory that the mother also reproduced the patriarchal values of the dominant class and race hegemonic order. Hence, in both the systems there was felt need to control not only the outer conduct but also the inner world of the woman. Both were subject to subtle manipulation and surveillance. Thus, while women’s schooling was tabooed by the ‘traditionalists’ for its threat of incipient widowhood, the so called ‘modernizing’ advocates of girls’ schooling likewise advocated women’s education for its efficacy in mainly producing good wives and mothers of sons. In fact, the title of the pioneering volume of feminist theorizing in India indicates the complex process of this control of women. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid derived their compelling title Recasting Women23 from the magisterial pronouncement of the reformer Kailash Nath Basu who, in his 1846 article ‘On the Education of Hindu Females’ said, ‘She must be refined, reorganized, recast, regenerated’.24 Tellingly, this pioneering volume bore the eloquent dedication ‘To our mothers’.25 5

If we want to understand the dynamics of feminist theorizing of motherhood, we have to locate it in the challenges thrown up by the ideological formations in colonial Bengal and the compulsive need to unpack the challenges in order to explore feminist understanding of motherhood in contemporary India. This is why motherhood became a determining icon in the different levels of the emergence of Indian society, both in the shaping of state formation, in large part under global dispensation, and in the impact of the ‘everyday’ in the lives of our women.26 A peculiar dialectic between the ideology of imperialism and the Indian resistance to it resulted in motherhood’s emergence as a kingpin of Indian feminism both as a myth and a reality. The pativrata, compliant womanhood, which was the ideal that permeated the discourse of colonial India, was most negatively portrayed in the Utilitarian (or sometime Christian missionary) discourse. This was most blatantly expounded by James Mill in his unashamedly colonizing discourse; justifying the civilizing mission of colonial rule:

Interrogating Motherhood

Nothing can exceed the habitual contempt which Hindus entertain for their women … They are held in extreme depredation, excluded from the sacred books, deprived of education and of a share in the paternal property … That remarkable barbarity, the wife held unworthy to eat with her husband, is prevalent in Hindustan.27

6

The same image is, however, used to uphold the image of the ideal woman as the signifier of Ancient Hindu India as the epitome of Indian civilizational superiority which is evoked as late as the 1950s during the debates around the Hindu Code Bill. In the 1940s, when the Hindu Code Bill was being debated in the Parliament, there was a fear of deviation from ‘our culturally grounded notions of motherhood as selfless understanding and not needing any rights, and of femininity as non-aggressive and suppliant’.28 Being made to represent the ‘Aryan’ woman, however, and not a mere ‘Hindu’ woman nor ‘Indian’ woman, the ideology of motherhood in India got incorporated into a caste-race nexus that had consequences, however covert, of the strengthening the existing stratification of Indian society

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

along gender-class-caste-ethnic lines. As Uma Chakravarti’s extremely generative early essay analyses this trend of feeding motherhood into the retrieval of the Aryan Vedic past, it was Dayanand Saraswati who brought out this trend in his Arya Samaj. Relying on the work of Orientalists, of whom the culmination was Max Mueller, the myth of the Aryan women grew up through writings in which the indigenous elite also contributed significantly.29 In order to maintain the pure quality of the Aryan race Dayanand had a lot of prescription for motherhood, which alone defined womanhood in his formation of the Arya Samaj. As Chakravarti says, Motherhood for Dayananda was the sole rationale of a Woman’s existence but what was crucial in his concept of motherhood was its specific role in procreation and rearing of a special breed of men.30

We shall pursue this association of motherhood with ‘a special breed of men’ further along and in subsequent chapters. Among the more vocal of the feminist scholars, Kumkum Roy has eloquently argued the case for historicizing the issues of reproduction and not shunning it as feminists because of ‘fears of being caught up in naturalist categories of analysis’ as it might ‘reinforce stereotypes about women and gender relations’.31 On the contrary, historicizing the issue may help to unmask the stereotype, just as Mary O’ Brien has argued at length for the feminist case in arguing for the dialectics of Reproduction.32 Leela Dube’s writings bring out what anthropologists have pointed out from findings made throughout India, the implications of the widespread metaphor of seed and field. ‘Two related points emerge’, says Dube. ‘First, an essentially unequal relationship is reflected in and emphasized through the use of these symbols, and second, the symbolism is utilized by the culture to underplay the significance of the woman’s contribution to biological reproduction.’33 Dube goes on to expand the significance of this in strengthening patriarchal control: While tying her down to the supreme duty of motherhood this symbolism is instrumental in denying her the natural 7

right over her own children and in creating and sustaining the ideology in which strategic resources of both types – material as well as human – remain in the hands of man.34

Feminist historians have commented on the dynamic potential of the dialectical relationships between production and reproduction that is vital in understanding the gendering process of motherhood. Kumkum Roy points out

Interrogating Motherhood

Focusing on reproductive relations may transform our understanding not only of the relationship of women to the economy, but of the economy itself.35

8

For instance, the symbol of seed and field takes place predominantly in the context of son-preference, which has far reaching implications for defining the contours of both lineage and transmission of private property. All the rituals and mantras referred to by scholars mention the need to continue the male line of descent. Even contemporary medical practitioners mention the homely advice, cited by a distinguished feminist scholar, to mothers who should try and retain their social and familial status by producing sons. As we shall examine in Chapter 4, it is this coercive male supremacism that has given legitimacy to the heinous practice of female foeticide that stoked the feminist movement to take up the issue in a big way. In India the agitation resulted in the enactment of the Pre-Conception-Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) (PC-PNDT) Act, 1994. However, in theoretical terms, it is the harnessing of motherhood to the perpetuation of a society dominated by male supremacist ideology that has brought about the social interventions from feminists. This will also need to be read along with the classism of Malthusian population control and racist eugenicist birth control in order to get the full implications of feminist theorizing of motherhood. Thus the exclusionary nature of the ideology of motherhood in the nation-building process, as Uma Chakravarti’s path-breaking essay articulates, has affected Indian thinking on motherhood and forms the main plank on which feminist theorizing has happened. The main stratification along ­gender-caste-class axis came to rely on the icon of motherhood.

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

The main excluded categories in the ideology were women belonging to lower caste Hindus, people belonging to the minority religions and the labouring poor, all breeders of inferior stock of population. As mentioned earlier, what the ideology of motherhood promoted was son-preference, and a eugenics-related quest for a strong male stock as the desired population for India. Consequently, the gender-caste-classethnic trap which became part of the middle-class common sense imbibed by men and women alike became a mode of controlling only women, seen as a reproducer of the species. Thus the mothering that Nancy Chodorov recorded as being reproduced in western societies36 reproduced an elaborate patriarchal order in which producers were all conceived as upper class/caste Hindu male. The strong breed of Aryan (read upper class, caste) male children was prioritized in the colonial agenda of motherhood. Indian feminist writings were quick to pick up the fraught area of strong masculinity and good ‘breed’ or ‘stock’ that played into the hands of both the colonizer and the elite section among the colonized. It was precisely this emphasis on good stock of the desired male population that made the native population vulnerable to discrimination by the colonizer. A eugenics-oriented racial prejudice took over the colonial attitude towards the native males who, on their part, prided themselves on being the products of the ideal mother, increasingly the signifier of the ideal (read Hindu) nation. This disjunction in the contesting notions of valour, heroism and masculinity, produced a notion of the Empress as Mother. Indian feminist scholar Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta has discussed the curious juxtaposition of Mother Victoria and Mother India.37 Feminist intervention on motherhood, therefore, had to engage itself with the arguments around the contours of the colonial state and the spectacular ways in which it spawned resistance and complicity that resulted in postcolonial complexities in the process of the gendering of motherhood. The issues at stake in the emergence of the postcolonial state were the different intersecting layers through which the image of the essentialized mother is made to serve a Malthusian Social-Darwinist agenda of the good breed of population that

9

Interrogating Motherhood 10

was the main purpose of the well-regulated motherhood in colonial societies. This particular strand in our social formation took place through a symbiosis of representational images, through nation-building process and through the impact of Technology or Motherhood under Capitalist Patriarchy blessed by the emerging neo-liberal forces of market. All the three areas are the themes underlying the three succeeding chapters on Representation, Nationalism and Technology under Capitalist Patriarchy. Contraception and abortion, which were well-marked items in feminist thinking in imperializing countries, surfaced with the ambivalence that is to be expected in a situation of imperial domination. A telling instance is to be provided by the notorious instance of Mother India by Katherine Mayo.38 This one text, published in 1927, exemplifies the diverse ways in which feminist theorizing of motherhood could cover all the three terrains divided in the three chapters that follow. It was a text that was a product of British-American collaboration to dominate Indian society. The name itself falls into the mainstream representation of the incipient nationhood of India. It, however, effectively translates the latent class hatred in Malthusian population control into a racist denunciation of native, especially the Hindu population, drawing upon the movement of American women for voluntary motherhood and contraception. The text also stands in ambivalent relationship with the liberal upper-class women’s movement that was surfacing in India, which culminated in the formation of the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in 1927. The AIWC was the first organized platform which marked the beginning of the women’s movement in India. Katherine Mayo vilified the social process of birthing that was available to the vast majority of poor women in India. She also complained about the inhuman condition in which the vast majority of poor Indian women undergo birthing, the ill-effects of traditional Hindu strictures on the age of marriage, the number of child wives and the passivity with which Indian, mostly Hindu, women undergo maternal mortality. Though Katherine Mayo was not an advocate of contraception, she certainly facilitated the movements of Margaret Cousins to bring Margaret Sanger to India to argue the need for it.

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

III

Colonial bondage produced a visible crisis in the masculinity of sons who had not been able to release the mother from bondage. Two major studies exist, both, as it happens, by feminist scholars, which perceptively analyse the crisis of masculinity that developed in the heart of colonial Bengal, which needs to be looked at, in order to capture the full impact of motherhood on nation-building. The first is by Mrinalini Sinha,39 and the other is by Indira Chowdhury.40 I will spend a little while following the analyses of the two scholars in trying to read this crisis in masculinity in relation to the question of motherhood in the making of a nation. Mrinalini Sinha has justifiably contested Ashis Nandy’s proposed binary between the colonizer’s masculinity and the femininity associated with the colonized. For her the question of colonial masculinity is a masculine one that involves crisis in masculinity at both ends of the divide and a complex interaction between the two. To quote Sinha, The historical aspect of my book, however, is meant precisely to complicate either notion of modern Western masculinity or of traditional Indian conceptions as discrete or mutually exclusive categories by recognition of their mutual implication in imperial politics.41

The ways in which this ‘mutual implications in imperial politics’ plays out in the terrain of motherhood is worked out in some details by Indira Chowdhury.42 In Chapter 4 of the book Chowdhury works out the complex myth-making around motherhood that produced the compelling icon of Bharat Mata (Mother India) that dominated the nationalist imaginary of colonial Bengal in the late nineteenth century, spilling into the twentieth. In an earlier essay in which Chowdhury anticipates this chapter, she works out a section of her argument about the ‘emerging nationalist discourse’ that constructed its own ‘symbol of resistance in the image of a motherland “greater than heaven itself”’.43 She unravels the complex process of Bengali males, self-fashioned leaders of the anti-colonial resistance around the constructed image of the motherland as Bharat Mata. This mother-son dyad takes over the construction of nation and nationalism in Bengal. 11

Chowdhury indicates the contradictions within the nationalist discourse in nineteenth-century Bengal by pointing out the symbiosis between the surrender and devotion claimed by the Mother Goddess figure, the affect quality of the mother-son relationship in a social order that is deeply patriarchal, and the loyalty demanded by the queen who heads the British Empire. In fact, the image of the Goddess, when seen in terms of a triple-faced mother figure comprising two aspects of the Bharat Mata and Queen Victoria, reveals how complex interactions between colonial notions and indigenous ones are integrated into an emerging middle-class self-image.44 It is the queen’s acceptance of family-centric values that makes her an icon of brahminical-patriarchal image of motherhood and nationhood, however incipient it might have been. Chowdhury quotes Kshitindranath Tagore to demonstrate this extraordinary symbiosis:

Interrogating Motherhood

Her pure family life and her virtuous motherliness, has made her the pride of not just the English race but also her subjects. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Victoria, empress of India, has successfully followed the ideal path of womanhood that Indian rishis have held up before us … The great Queen, is not only the Empress of India but the most suitable mother to her Hindu children … so with the grace and fairness of God she has come to occupy that place.45

12

Motherhood thus fits seamlessly into the upper-caste upperclass patriarchy of the ruling nationalist discourse. At the end of the 1980s, or the beginning of the 1990s, several of us explored the gender dimension of this practice of articulating nationhood through motherhood. Bengal was, of course, the special site chosen. Tanika Sarkar examined a number of popular songs, plays and poems in nineteenthcentury Bengal and came out with the place of prominence given to the mother image in the nationalist iconography used both by the elite and the non-elite in Bengal.46 In 1990 the ‘Review of Women’s Studies’, The Economic and Political Weekly, devoted to a gender exploration of motherhood, carried my piece motherhood as a fitting representation of motherhood, referred to above.47 Shortly after followed two

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

of our brightest feminist scholars with their valuable analyses of motherhood among the elite colonial intelligentsia, and the way the double-edged bind of labour is deployed in capturing the regulation of toiling women in colonial Bengal.48 In their nuanced understanding of gender and nationalism, this cluster of writings exposes us to the subtle embedding of the notion of motherhood in a basically patriarchal colonial consciousness. The ways in which the rhetoric of motherhood combined the notion of heroism with that of familial confinement as the nurturing, suffering and all-sacrificing mother ensured the hegemony of the emerging middle-class men of Bengal. Covertly feeding on latent son-preference of brahminical orthodoxy, for whom sons alone can make the passage to the other world smooth, the preservers of vamsa, the patrilineal line. Hence, sons are the favourites in inheritance of family property. This mother, both in her deified and the deprived quotidian forms, is only the mother of sons. She is the provider of strength to her sons who are diagnosed as effeminate, incapable of defending the mother. This orthodoxy should not be confused with principled fundamentalism. It stood for a pledge for assuming power as the hegemonic class. While the Mother Goddess of the nationalists could appeal to the cultural domain of the upper-caste Hindu, the opportunities opened up by the colonial masters were not to be whittled away by the comprador male elite. It is no wonder that Queen Victoria, the empress of India since 1858, also takes on the role of Mother Victoria, giving succour and strength to the subject sons. Ultimately the charge of absence of manliness and strength veered round to the question of employment of Hindu male subjects. It was even articulated: Muslim rulers never discriminated against the sons of the soil in matters of ‘superior appointment.’49 As contrasted to this, as a periodical complained in 1877, The Government makes a great mistake in not allowing the natives of Bengal to be employed as soldiers or officers. Their application to enter the military service are rejected on the score of their physical weakness and because they are not regarded as loyal.50

13

Interrogating Motherhood 14

Since this was in contravention of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, when she assumed the role of the empress of India, when she declared her policy that ‘so far as it may be, our subjects of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our service, duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability and integrity, duly to discharge’. It is an indication of the potency of the mother image, that the same image of Queen Victoria as the mother was invoked by the prostitutes in India when they were interviewed by two missionaries as they felt oppressed by the colonial imposition of the Contagious Diseases Act and its arbitrary repeal. The report designated the poor prostitute women as ‘Queen’s Daughters’.51 Another important historian of gender in this period, whose work has been mentioned earlier, Mrinalini Sinha, has demonstrated by analysing a number of major controversies, such as the Ilbert bill, 1883, or the Age of Consent bill, 1891, how the empire construed the subject’s ‘masculinity’ or, the lack thereof, particularly in the context of Bengal in the Victorian period.52 Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, as mentioned earlier, has worked out the varied aspects of the anxiety of ‘frailty’ that was alleged against the hegemonic male colonial subject.53 Against this male powerlessness, Queen Victoria provided the antidote of heroism and nurturance that the nationalist appropriation of the mother image was trying to achieve in Bengal. A closer look at the strange convergence between the enslaved, resistant Mother India and the enslaving dominant Mother Victoria brings out the aspiring class-caste domination by the Hindu male elite, torn between the contradictory pulls of a hegemonic future and a foreboding of the doom of dwindling opportunities and expanding exclusions. In a well-researched paper by Samita Sen,54 the author has shown the way this glorified image of the mother as the signifier of the nation is used to regulate working-class mothers in the newly expanding factory-based industries. Sen has shown the thrust of this control that undermines the agency of the mothers who try to combine their participation in productive labour and their quotidian maternal responsibilities. Instead of trying to make the lives of working mothers easier, with crèches, maternity benefits and so on, a typical upper-class prejudice marks the

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

articulation of motherhood among the working classes. Without recognizing the contribution of their labour, they are trashed for being ignorant, unsanitary mothers who neglected their children by going away to work. Rather than helping the workers in their child-bearing and -rearing the working class women were subjected to ‘mothercraft’, a eugenics-inspired training of mothers to bring up the children in correct scientific notions of health and hygiene. This controlling device has generated much feminist discussion that will be taken up in Chapter 4. For the time being let us note the complex use of the glory of motherhood in entrenching class discrimination within nationbuilding in the colonial climate of Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The colonial elite, as shown by Sen in her rich citations from the current periodical literature, had not only perpetuated class antagonism, but also had implicitly participated in colonial racism (and also native casteism) when they wrote off working mothers as superstitious, unhygienic, negligent breeders.55 The legitimate concern for maternal and infant mortality had built into it a class-based anxiety about declining reproduction of good quality labour, rather than a protest against gender and human exploitation. IV

In the West, feminist theorizing on motherhood had a variety of loci. Simone de Beauvoir’s theoretical positing of women’s eternal relegation to ‘otherness’, hence, to being the ‘second sex’, owed a great deal to her limiting herself to the ‘mere’ biological phenomenon of motherhood. This limitation was seen as the reason for woman’s inability to ‘transcend’ the world of nature. On the other hand, there was a vigorous attempt among the socialists to relate women’s oppression by the male as a parallel to the capitalist exploitation of labour.56 In trying to counter the tendency towards economic determinism there was a trend towards biological determinism, following de Beauvoir, which tried to find a solution to the problem of women’s marginalization in mechanizing the entire process of childbirth. Since motherhood was the cornerstone of women’s confinement to the everyday world of domesticity, there were attempts to open this entire phenomenon to scrutiny from the women’s standpoint. 15

It is Mary O’ Brien, however, who tried to counter the notion of production and reproduction merely as binaries and to bring out the dialectics of this relationship in order to overcome the barrier of women’s world as ‘primordial’, immanent and pre-civilizational. O’ Brien, therefore, took on both Freud and Marx, while admitting to being a Marxist. Going against certain limitations in Marx’s understanding of women’s reproductive labour in the Marxist political construct, O’ Brien has tried to bring reproduction into the orbit of dialectics that govern history, bringing men’s alienation from reproduction into this dialectical process. Having examined some of the early proponents of feminist theorizing of reproduction, Mary O’Brien says in the context of de Beauvoir:

Interrogating Motherhood

Men assign low social value to ‘mere’ biological yet value children. Uncritical acceptance by women of the male depreciation of reproductive process, however gendered by the cloth of venerated motherhood, becomes itself an instance of bad faith. The low social and philosophical value given to reproduction and to birth is not ontological, not immanent, but socio-historical, and the sturdiest plank in the platform of male supremacy.57

16

Despite O’ Brien’s persistent attempt to bring social relations of reproduction at par with those of production, the issue was not resolved and debates continued to rage through the 1980s and the 1990s. Motherhood is central to the emergence of feminism in the West in the 1970s, as it was motherhood that identified women with the sphere of reproduction. Particularly with the emergence of the sub/urbanized workforce in the service of an industrial society, women felt dumped into the domestic space appropriate for reproduction, unable to take up a position of equality with men who had access to the public world of wagelabour. The subordination of women by men got translated into this binary of reproductive and productive. This binary is fraught with a great deal of social significance. The reproductive domain ensured the reproduction of labour power not merely through procreation, but also through ensuring social reproduction by maintaining the existing social relations. Hence reproduction was the underbelly of production,

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

ensuring its long-term social existence and formed the basis of dominance of the male productive sphere over the female reproductive sphere. A deep realization of this dichotomy helped to formulate a sense of the inequality of the sexes, as the basis of gender which was seen as a stratifying register in the current society along with class, caste, ethnicity, race, and so on. This hierarchical dominance of the male over the female has been exposed in different ways by scholars committed to feminism. Since I shall confine myself to the anglophone world of scholarship, I shall go straight to the 1950s where Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was made available in English. Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation of women as the ‘second sex’ was seen as a form of biological essentialism. Early feminists like Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley confessed, in Who’s Afraid of Feminism, to making their earlier compilation The Rights and Wrongs of Women, with a view to refuting de Beauvoir’s biological essentialism, to place women in history.58 In their Introduction Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley write ‘In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir argues that … woman is a biological, not an historical, category and she thus suffers from a singular oppression which knows of no historical period that precedes it’. Faced with de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s lack of history, for some it became a prime task to discover and create a history both for women and for ‘their intellectual and practical struggle’.59 In defining the aims of their first collection, The Rights and Wrongs of Women, and the present one, the editors claim that the contributors to both the volumes belong to the women’s liberationists rather than to the early radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone, who in her Dialectics of Sex fully endorsed the biologism of Simone de Beauvoir and looked for a solution in technology. Sheila Rowbotham, a pioneering British Socialist Feminist, wrote her early feminist analysis as if she were making women visible by calling it Hidden from History.60 In the book, as the subtitle puts it, she delved into ‘300 years of women’s oppression and the fight against it’. Motherhood raged as a subject of feminist research right through the 1980s, well into the 1990s. In 1989, Ann Ferguson published her famous analysis in Blood at the Root, in which as

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a preamble to her exposition of motherhood as part of a mode of sex/affective production she produced a major taxonomy of the positions taken up by the Anglo-American feminists, mostly white.61 Starting from her own mixed position as a feminist socialist and a lesbian, she harnesses her own vantage point of a mother, stepmother, foster mother and an adoptive one, letting her multiple personal roles act as a touchstone for a philosophical theory of how motherhood, sexuality and male dominance intersect. In this intersection there appears to be two major divisions: the one is around women’s work opportunities being a reinforcement of sexual division of labour; and that of women’s ‘double shift’. With technological aids for housework under developed capitalism, a large proportion of white middle-class women either joined or aspired to join the job market. It is this body of women who faced the greatest conflict in their self-development in motherhood. Unlike some of the workingclass, mostly black, but also middle-class families in which the extended family helped the mother to retain her job (often in the unorganized sector) the middle-class white families that formed the basis of the bourgeoisie, had upheld the ideal of the ‘nuclear’ family in which maternity was a frighteningly isolated affair, where motherhood, bandied about as women’s biological destiny appeared to blot out all other aspects of her young aspiring life that was about to open out into fruition of all her multifarious efforts put in to reach a kind of life of her own. For the Socialist Feminists, therefore, it is the confinement of women into the privacy of the four walls of the household, when she had been given clear signals for joining the public sphere of work and thought, which proved to be the source of an oppressive male dominance. There remains the other aspect of the triad, that is, sexuality. Hence a large body of feminists arose, mostly Radical, who had seen motherhood as deploying sexuality to entrench male dominance. It is not as if the two were compartmentalized: there was considerable overlap; a feminist analyst like Juliet Mitchell is both a Socialist and a Psychoanalytical one. In order to assess the different positions dealing with the divide between the ‘economic exploitation’ of the Marxist Socialists and the Psychoanalytical one of Freud-Lacanians,

• • • • • •

The origin question. The persistence question. The historical reproduction of patriarchy question. The ‘difference’ question. The vision question. The political strategy question.62

These questions, as even their formulations suggest, cannot remain confined to one group of feminists and not to others. Each group gives importance to some in preference to others and the fact remains that questions overlap and cut across different schools of feminist thinking. A crisscrossing of similarities and differences mark the diverse groups of feminist thought in the West. Towards the end of the 1980s, the feminist debates on motherhood had reached a climax and we have Ann Ferguson trying to establish her own combination of Socialist and Radical Feminism as a mode of sex/affective production. She uses Alison Jaggar and William McBride’s 1983 book Feminist Politics and Human Nature63 to present the well-known classification and adds her analysis of the prominent American feminist scholars and their ‘take’ on motherhood. Ferguson claims some of the main tendencies of American feminist theory are Radical Feminism, Liberal Feminism, Marxist Feminism and Socialist Feminism. Apart from these widely discussed schools of feminist thought, Ferguson mentions Neo-Freudian Feminism that is a perspective that cuts across the liberal and Socialist Feminist divide as is Sexual Libertarian or Pluralist Feminism in the contemporary feminist sex-debates.64 Motherhood may be read as a major form of male dominance, but one still has to understand the specific processes in which this relationship between male dominance and motherhood actually works out. Ferguson, pursuing her own special reading, thinks that the understanding can come about if we examine parenting as it relates to the modes of sex/affective production rather than to take some general essence constantly underlying motherhood.65 Ferguson brings out the basic ambivalence of motherhood in late twentieth-century America:

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

Ann Ferguson has framed the issues in terms of six different questions that pertain to feminist theoretical questions:

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Interrogating Motherhood

Mothering is a complicated reality in America because, although it is an enormous liability for most women, it is also a psychological asset. In capitalist public patriarchal sex/ affective production, mothering symbolizes successful womanhood, and as such allows women self-love: an unrepressed sex/affective satisfaction with all that invokes a feeling of gender security.66

20

In their extremely sensitively etched assessment of the way the experts took over the business of child-rearing in the USA, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English trace the ways in which the White Mothers’ movement had been euphoric about the build-up of the ‘scientific motherhood’, but had been left isolated and marginalized. Thus we see the graph of institutionalizing of motherhood ultimately zeroes in with the usual male domination of capitalist patriarchy. Since the institutional aspect of motherhood gives a formal signature of patriarchy and its control, what would be important is to see the alternation of the control mechanism and its possible subversion through the richness of the experiential part of it. Ehrenreich and English, however, in their classic exposé of the emergence of the experts to advise on women’s body and mind,67 have shown in a graphic manner, the manipulation of women’s experience of motherhood by the emergence of the experts on child-rearing from the turn of the twentieth century which started off well, set to be the ‘century of the child’.68 From the boost given to mothers for being professionals, of both as being practitioners of ‘scientific motherhood’, Ehrenreich and English take us through the fascinating journey of the emergence of the individual consumer as the American citizen and hence motherhood having to be ‘permissive’ and motherhood being ‘libidinal’.69 Maternal love, unrestricted, became the call of the hour. However, the unfettered mom-centrism of the American child came under heavy attack in the days of active anti-communism such as the Korean War and the Vietnam rebels. Thus in the inner cover of the pamphlet on You CAN Raise Decent Children we are told: Some leaders still flatter ‘the kids’ of the Spock-marked generation but most parents are worried sick. Is it possible to raise

The clear patriarchal outrage joins homophobia to condemn those kids. As Ehrenreich and English brought out the irony of the situation, ‘The Century of the Child was over by 1970, thirty years ahead of time.’71 Already in the 1960s, the early rumblings of feminist protest gathered around the issue of motherhood. For within the ranks of so-called experts we have protests against the tyranny of ‘experts’. Thus Sheila Kitzinger who had helped many women in their mothering process introduces her book Women as Mothers with the following caution, ‘Mothers not only bear and, usually rear children, nor exist to give men descendants, but are people in their own right.72 She hopes her book ‘will provide a bit of an antidote to the ‘how to’ books, of which I believe, there are far too many’.73 With her wide ranging experience of helping women through the birthing process and her field surveys in relatively pre-industrial societies, Kitzinger’s book is a feminist book on motherhood with a cross-cultural perspective. The sub-title of her book makes it amply clear: How They See Themselves in Different Cultures. Kitzinger notes the ambiguity of the ways in which women look at motherhood. Some see it as a biological trap in which all their aspiration of the ‘person’ gets occluded, another group thinks of motherhood as the special power of women, which no man can aspire to perform. However, it is important to remember that motherhood must not be seen as an entirely ‘material’ phenomenon, it is, invariably, overlaid by the specific nature of the culture to which it belongs. This involves, among others:

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

children who won’t turn into hippies, drug freaks, radicals or dropouts? Two doctors say yes and show how. They spell it out … the importance of discipline, how to discipline firmly and with love. Why permissiveness spawns violence, the foundations of masculinity and femininity and how parents can reinforce them in the days of women’s liberation and open homosexuality.70

Rethinking what it is to be male and female, what it is to be a child, the role of parents and the significance of the family in that culture.74 21

Hence it is not productive to essentialize any one experience of motherhood exclusively, as is often the case with western feminists. As Kitzinger says: We have only to look at the different manifestations of the motherhood roles in other cultures to realize that mothering is also a multi-dimensional activity. There is no formula applicable to all women which can ensure that it is a satisfying one.75

For understanding motherhood, therefore, feminist theory will be severely flawed if it tries to fix its contours to any specific, however dominant, a culture. Unfortunately, traces of this essentialism remain even in a so-called cross-cultural perspective used by Kitzinger, when we find that she uses a simplistic binary between pre-industrial and industrial societies in her analysis of the understanding of the cultures that modulate motherhood. The room in which a woman has her baby in a modern hospital in the West is very different from the dwelling or forest clearing in which a woman gives birth in a pre-industrial society. Whereas the traditional mode of childbirth places the woman in the centre of the unfolding drama, modern childbirth involves advanced and sophisticated technology and cumbersome equipment, compared to which the labouring woman seemed dwarfed and insignificant.76

Interrogating Motherhood

The glorification of the ‘human quality’ in traditional childbirth may, as Kitzinger knows, has its costs in infant and even maternal mortality, but the modern childbirth is undermined for its emotive lack:

22

Although the hospital-delivered baby is more likely to survive, especially as premature or otherwise at risk, the human quality of the environment into which he is born is often inferior....77 resulting in ‘emotional deprivation from the moment of delivery’.78

The most clearly identifiable group who has a very different social context within which to look at motherhood is that of minority groups who do not count as a dominant group in the hegemonic capitalist culture of the USA:

For these mothers ‘motherhood gets transformed into reproductive labour or ‘motherwork’ and it cannot rely on individual resources for survival. As Patricia Hill Collins says, ‘This type of motherhood recognizes that individual survival, empowerment and identity require group survival, empowerment and identity’.80 By bringing ‘motherhood’ to centre-stage, Hill Collins hopes to ‘soften the dualities in feminist theorizing’ that is brought about by the rigid distinctions perpetrated by feminist scholarship. In her fuller analysis of black feminist thought, Hill Collins has a chapter on ‘Black Woman and Motherhood’ in which she quotes from June Jordan theorizing about motherhood between ‘private’ and ‘public’, family and work, the individual and the collective identity as autonomy and identity growing from the collective self-determination of one’s group.81 The dissolving of the boundaries is important for creating more spaces within the feminist theorizing of motherhood that may shift our thinking about motherhood itself.82 Hill Collins is emphatic of the need to take into account the social and political context within which each group does the mothering. Her eloquence lends a special edge to the widening of the perspective of motherhood:

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

For Native American, African, American-Hispanic, AsianAmerican women motherhood cannot be analyzed in isolation from its context. Motherhood occurs in specific historic contexts fraught by interlocking structures of race, class and gender contexts. Where the sons of white mothers have ‘every opportunity and protection’, where the sons of colored daughters and sons of racial ethnic mothers ‘know not their fate’ … racial domination and economic exploitation profoundly shape the mothering context not only for racial ethnic women in the United States but for all women.79

Examining motherhood and mother-as-subject from multiple perspectives should uncover rich textures of difference. Shifting the center to accommodate the diversity promises to re-contextualize motherhood and point us towards feminist theorizing that embraces difference as an essential part of commonality.83

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We the daughters of these Black Women will honor their sacrifice by giving them thanks, with pride, every transcendent dream of freedom made possible by the humility of their love.84

24

In 1965 the Moynihan Report had denounced roundly the mothering practice of black women. They were accused of ‘failing to discipline their children, emasculating their sons, defeminizing their daughters, and of retarding their children’s academic achievement’, they were also accused of wielding ‘unnatural power in allegedly determining family structures’. Against such stereotyping of the ‘happy slave’ or the ‘matriarch’ or the ‘super-strong Black Mother’ the black women have invited a different kind of theorizing of motherhood. In one such bid Patricia Hill Collins claims with distinct confidence that the institution of ‘black motherhood’ is both ‘dynamic’ and ‘dialectical’ and therefore, cannot be captured through any easy stereotypes. This may be accounted for by ‘intersecting oppression of race, gender, class, sexuality and nation’. One has to assess, within these, the efforts by AfricanAmerican women to ‘define’ and value their own experience with motherhood. One of the ways in which this is done, makes sense to someone like me, coming from a non-western culture. The distinction between the biological mothers and others who lend their support in looking after them is marked by ‘fluid and changing boundaries’.85 These extended families were both a ‘continuation’ between Africa-derived cultural sensibilities and functional adaptation to the intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class and nation, mentioned earlier. The persistence of white hegemony is borne out by two major surveys of maternity as part of the social sciences in the USA that appeared in the feminist journal Signs in 1995, the year of the Beijing Conference on Women. Presenting the two review essays the editors of the journal, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett make the following statement. Given our ongoing interest in the practice and theory of interdisciplinarity – and our growing awareness of the complexity of such an agenda – we hoped that observations made from

In these review essays, Alice Adams, a literary scholar, and Ellen Moss, a social historian, look at a set of published books on maternity and motherhood. In the first, Alice Adams writes ‘Mothers are discussed as a source of anger and emotional pain for their children, especially daughters. Most treatment of mothering, feminist or not, emphasized that the primary task of the prototypical middle-class daughters was to separate.87 She refers to Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture to maintain ‘the discourse of mother-daughter relationships is now almost entirely psychological rather than social.88 Winding her way through medical, psychological, literary and oral history, Alice Adams takes us through the multiple understandings of maternal bonding, mostly mother-daughter, except in the case of Shelley, the mother-son bonding. In the case of Marie Langer’s Motherhood and Sexuality she has interpreted labour pain as a fear of the separation from the foetus, there appears to be a shift from the biological-psychological to the social, and pinpoints the difficulty of contextualizing motherhood under different historical situations. A study of post-war Germany shows the fear of communism being whipped up through the maternal representation of a destructive, all-consuming mother.

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

different disciplinary locations would enrich our understanding of new bodies of feminist research and writing. And where would the expectation be more appropriate than in scholarship on motherhood, a subject that has been and continues to be, a central problematic in feminist thinking.86

Perhaps one of the motivating factors behind bonding theory – and its prescriptive corollary that demanded that women remain in the house to bond with their children – was the fear that a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ who mothered with one foot in each world might obviate the need for fathers to facilitate their sons’ entrance into the public sphere and their daughters’ transfer from the paternal home to the husband’s home.89

I find deep resonances with the last named anxiety in my own society. Adams seems to think that all these issues about bonding, separation, and so on, ultimately endorses the 25

Interrogating Motherhood 26

‘heterosexual male’ as the ‘guarantor of order, a gatekeeper between public and private spheres, while women especially mothers, represent the disorderly matter and must be sorted out assembled and dissembled, bonded and broken down.90 She ends up by acknowledging ‘mothers in real life’ who bring about an inevitable and necessary balance between the emotional/biological and the social/economic levels. She concludes, ‘in that sense, mothers have brought about profound social and economic changes that outstrip the interpretive of the representation of motherhood’.91 The other important survey to be published in the same number of the same journal was by Ellen Ross entitled ‘New Thoughts on “the Oldest Vocation”: Mothers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship’ which traces the trajectory of representation of motherhood in feminist writings. Ellen Moss sees in the 1970s ‘skeptical probings of the social and subjective meanings of motherhood.’92 The 1980s saw a celebration and reaffirmation of motherhood. Ann Snitow plotted a trajectory to this discussion that ‘gave less and less voice to women without children, who rejected motherhood or who were denied children by biological and social accident.93 There are multiple complexities, as she reminds us ‘the always unstable legal and social meanings of motherhood are even more so today, given the biological ambiguities created by artificial insemination, womb and egg donors, surrogacy and so on.’ One of the reasons behind the resurgence of studies of motherhood was that seeing her as ‘a subject, a person with her own needs, feelings and interests’ was a crucial way of fighting the ‘dread and devaluation of women’ spreading all across private and public arena’.94 With the eyes of a social historian Ellen Moss focuses on books dealing with the ways mothers are seen in policy making, science, literature and popular media. Though they do not conform to Moss’s chosen criteria of ‘mother-standpoint’ books, they have unearthed the ‘uncharted significance of projections of the maternal in the social and political world.95 Her impassioned conclusion is Just as any public identity has to be claimed and actively created rather than merely assumed to exist, mothers of all kinds

NOTES 1. This binary has been iconized by Rabindranath Tagore in his famous novel Ghare Baire translated as The Home and the World. Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, translated by Surendranath Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1919). Using this cue Sambuddha Chakrabarty wrote Andare Antare: Unis Satake Bangali Bhadramahila (Kolkata: Stree, 1998). 2. See the following chapter. 3. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ed., ‘Review of Women’s Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly (henceforth EPW) 25, 42–43 (30 October 1990). 4. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment (Delhi: Routledge, 2009). 5. Sukumari Bhattacharji, ‘Motherhood in Ancient India’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 44–72. 6. Kamala Ganesh, ‘In Search of the Great Indian Goddess: Motherhood Unbound’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 73–105. 7. Prabha Krishnan, ‘In the Idiom of Loss: Ideology of Motherhood in Television Serials — Mahabharata and Ramayana’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 106–157. 8. Ibid. 9. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 158–185. 10. C.S. Lakshmi, ‘Mother, Mother-Community and MotherPolitics in Tamil Nadu’, Motherhood in India: 186–227. 11. Shanta Gokhale, ‘The Mother in Sane Guruji’s Shyamchi Ai’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 228–256. 12. Veena Poonacha, ‘Rites de Passage of Matrescence and Social Construction of Motherhood among the Coorgs in South India’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 257–291. 13. Divya Pandey, ‘Motherhood: Different Views’, in Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 292–320.

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

(welfare mothers, black mothers, white mothers, women giving birth, single mothers, rural mothers, mothers of disabled children, lesbian mothers, child-care workers, mothers with AIDS, working mothers and so on) need to claim civic spaces, resources and recognition.96

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14. Chitra Sinha, ‘Images of Motherhood: The Hindu Code Bill Discourse in India’, Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: 321–346. 15. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ‘Introduction’, Motherhood in India: 1–8. 16. Leela Gulati and Jasodhara Bagchi, A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women (New Delhi: SAGE, 2005). 17. Rinki Bhattacharya, ed., Janani - Mothers, Daughters, Motherhood, (New Delhi: SAGE, 2006). 18. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Motherhood Revisited’, in Bhattacharya, ed, Janani: 11–21. 19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977). 20. Bharati Ray, Daughters: A Story of Five Generations (Delhi: Penguin, 2011). 21. Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism’, in Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 158–185. 22. Prabhati Mukherjee, Hindu Women: Normative Models (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1978): 94. 23. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). 24. Ibid.: opening epigraph. 25. Ibid. 26. For a pioneering work of feminist theorizing, see Dorothy Smith, Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). 27. James Mill, The History of British India, with notes by H.H. Wilson (London: J. Madden, 1840), 5th edn, pp. 312–313; quoted in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women: 35. 28. Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 334. 29. Uma Chakravarti, Everyday Lives, Everyday Histories: Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas of ‘Ancient’ India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006: 40–42. 30. Ibid.: 56. 31. Kumkum Roy, ed., Women in Early Indian Societies (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999): 29. 32. Mary O’ Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’, Signs 7, 1 (Autumn 1981): 47. 33. Leela Dube, ‘Seeds and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and Sexual Relations of Production’, in

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

Anthropological Explorations in Gender Intersecting Fields (New Delhi: SAGE, 2001): 136. 34. Ibid. 35. Roy, Women in Early Indian Societies, 22. 36. Nancy Chodorov, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (London: University of California Press, 1979). 37. Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘Mother India and Mother Victoria: Motherhood and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, South Asia Research, 12, 1 (May 1992). 38. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1927). 39. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, in the series Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 40. Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal, in the series SOAS Studies on South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 41. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: 8. 42. Chowdhury-Sengupta, Frail Hero and Virile History. 43. Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘Mother India and Mother Victoria’: 20–37. 44. Ibid.: 20. 45. Ibid.: 165; emphasis added. 46. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Literature’, EPW 22, 47 (21 November 1987); reprinted in Alice Thorner and Maithreyi Krishna Raj, eds, Ideas Images and Real Lives (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000). 47. Krishnaraj, ed., ‘Review of Women’s Studies’, EPW 25, 42–43. 20 October 1990. 48. Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘Mother India and Mother Victoria’: 21–32. 49. Ibid.: 28. 50. Ibid. 51. Cited by Ratnabali Chatterjee, Queen’s Daughters: Prostitutes as Outcasts in Colonial Bengal (Fantoft, Norway: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 1992).

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52. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. 53. Chowdhury-Sengupta, The Frail Hero and Virile History. 54. Samita Sen, ‘Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal’, Gender and History 3, 2 (Summer 1993): 231–243. The actual ramifications of this move in the context of the colonial organization of Jute industry has been worked out in her Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 55. Sen, ‘Motherhood and Mothercraft’: 240–243. 56. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London, Pluto Press, 1973). 57. O’ Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’: p. 75. 58. Nancy F. Cott, Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, eds, What Is Feminism? (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 59. Ibid.: 1. 60. Rowbotham, Hidden from History. 61. Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance. (London: Pandora Press, 1989). 62. Ibid.: 9–12. 63. Alison Jaggar and William L. McBride, ‘Reproduction as Male Ideology’, Women’s Studies International Forum (Hypatia Issue) 8, 3 (1985): 185–196. 64. Ferguson, Blood at the Root: 12. 65. Ibid.: 170. 66. Ibid.: 171. 67. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (London: Pluto Press, 1979). 68. Ibid.: 164. 69. Ibid.: 197. 70. Berthold Schwartz, M.D. and Bartholomew Ruggiero, You CAN Raise Decent Children (New York, New Rochelle, 1971): 238. 71. Ibid.: 239. 72. Sheila Kitzinger, Women as Mothers: How They See Themselves in Different in Different Cultures (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1978): 15. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid.: 40. 76. Ibid.: 151; italics mine.

Feminist Debates on Motherhood

77. Ibid.: 183; italics mine. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid.: 231. 80. Ibid.: 233. 81. Ibid.: 234. 82. Ibid.: 241. 83. Ibid.: 241. 84. Ibid.: 173. 85. Ibid.: 178. 86. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett, ‘Introduction’, Signs 20, 2 (Winter, 1995): 395–396. 87. Alice Adams, ‘Maternal Bonds: Recent Literature on Mothering’ Signs 20, 2 (Winter, 1995): 414. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid.: 426–427. 90. Ibid.: 422. 91. Ibid.: 427. 92. Ellen Ross, ‘New Thoughts on “the Oldest Vocation”: Mothers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship’, Signs 20, 2 (Winter, 1995): 397. 93. Ibid.: 390. 94. Ibid.: 399. 95. Ibid.: 403. 96. Ibid.: 413.

31

2 Motherhood and Patriarchy ‘Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?’ asked the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As this canny woman, adept in cloth-making and love-making, realized, it is, ultimately the maker of representation who commands the politics of it. As the Wife of Bath had observed, in the context of Christian clerics in the Middle Ages, so we can corroborate in our own times, it is the value-system of patriarchy that determines the political thrust of the representation, which is invariably a gendered one.1 Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex tellingly claims that we are not ‘born’ woman but ‘become’ one. ‘Becoming’ woman is a process of socialization in which acts of representation play a significant part. As John Berger’s famous BBC lecture series has shown us, representation is not simply a matter of faithful re-creation.2 But the process of mediation through which it comes into being involves an ‘appropriation’ by the dominant patriarchal ideology. Though the process is not always a simplistic uncontested one, the politics of gender comes into play. Representation of a ‘natural’ social relationship such as motherhood is a very telling site of such politics of gender. I would like to begin with a quote from an early article by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay: Few years back a self-styled left wing party had organized an exhibition of posters at one of their street corner meetings. Of these, two dealt with women, the first one had a picture of rather modish appearance with garish make-up; she had on a sleeveless blouse and her hair was cut in a trendy fashion. At

Right across the board, from the so-called ‘high’ to the ‘low’, as in the instance quoted, the representation of mother and mothering is a legitimizing device of the hegemonic, which not only strengthens the politics of gender under the dispensation of patriarchy but also reinforces the status quo in the process. As Simone de Beauvoir had said in The Second Sex:

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the side were these words: ‘the mother of black-marketers’, ‘the mother of goondas’ the mother of anti-socials’, etc. The other poster carried the picture of a large-eyed woman, her head was covered and the red and prominent vermillion mark was prominently emphasized upon; the picture was a crude version of Jamini Ray’s paintings, paintings that celebrate the ‘typical’ Hindu woman. At the side was written ‘the mother of poets’, ‘the mother of honest political leaders’, ‘the mother of intellectuals, and above all, ‘the mother of good brahmins’.3

Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste [sic] than the myth of woman; it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse.4

Motherhood is one such compelling ‘myth’ of a woman with which the system validates itself. In her book Gendering Caste, Uma Chakravarti has given us extremely significant insights as well as analyses about the ways in which this complex validation of the system works. Thus, talking of kanyadan, which is a way of denoting a proper marriage in caste Hindu society, inevitably the question of motherhood comes in: Cultural beliefs, derived on the basis of field information, make it evident that what is being gifted as part of the kanyadan is not just the daughter but her woman’s ‘quality’ and ‘thing’, her femaleness (Matr Shakti), her procreative powers, which is thereafter shared by her sons and daughters. Matr Shakti is given to a man so that a vamsa may be started. Men are born into a particular line and Matr Shakti, in the person of a woman from another line, has to be given to it in order to perpetuate it.5

Ironically, therefore, it is her Matr Shakti which lends power to her endless representations, and which, at the same 33

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time, camouflages her extreme powerlessness in being effectively controlled and appropriated by patrilineal patriarchy.6 ‘Motherhood’ is one of the words/concepts that are the most naturalized of the highly gendered terms in use. Its indelible etymological imprint is to be found in the word ‘engendering’, a synonym for reproduction, both in being impregnated and impregnating. Since motherhood stands at one end of this mutual engendering process, setting up the gender lens on representation of motherhood involves the not enviable task of prizing it open from layers of patriarchal possession. It is an elaborate process that involves the separation of what Adrienne Rich had very perceptively called the ‘experience’ of motherhood from the ‘institution’ of motherhood.7 Motherhood’s gendering process is embroiled in the multi-layered working out of the institution of motherhood. And this is the site that is most prone to the manipulations of representation. The ‘experience’ of motherhood, on the other hand, catches the gender lens in very different prism. Since I am writing this book in Bengal, I will have to confess that there is a peculiar haze of the affective motherhood that surrounds me that is unmistakable. While originating in the hegemonic agenda of patriarchy that we had looked at in Chapter 1, its iconic significance is capable of generating a consensus that was fully utilized by forces like nationalism and nation-building as we shall see in the following chapter. Motherhood has been a major trope in representations, both compliant and resistant. A typical mother-child (son) painting by Jamini Roy was reproduced endlessly as the reassuring image of the idealized mother, as Sibaji Bandyopadhyay suggests above. It can, thus, offer a convenient cover for a brochure for a workshop on maternal mortality organized by a social science institute. The most compliant images of the chaste wife-mother syndrome are to be found in advertisements that have evolved over the years and have now penetrated the domestic space through the explosive visual culture of television. The preponderance of culinary skills (‘Taste my best/Mummy and Everest!’) or washing clothes (Surf Excel) in which mothers’ domestic labour is lightened to the level almost of entertainment makes mother’s nurturance into a piquant theme of enjoyment. Literature, film and other arts,

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both visual and aural, abound in extremely creative representations of motherhood, of which I will examine a few highlights. In Bengal, literature and its close follower film are replete with unforgettable exploration of social existence through motherhood. When feminist literary criticism came into being, motherhood was one of the central motifs that were used to evaluate the thrust of the representation of women. This would be true of both women writing and of writing about women. Retrieval of women writing was one of the main areas of the emergence of feminist literary criticism. One of the most eloquent tributes to the legacy of motherhood was sounded by the feminist critic Himani Bannerji: In this situation of late and slow revelation in the realm of history where can we look for and find our mothers? In this bifurcated world that we still inhabit, with male visibility and female invisibility, the best place so far is to be found in the realms of the arts. Literature, extended to include other forms of texts as well, offers the richest find so far. It is in the literary space so far where women narrate, fictionalize, project their complex and contradictory reality unbounded by factuality, having the room to use the symbolic at its fullest, extending the domain through the polysemiosis of metaphors, dipping into orality, literature has provided us the richest source for exploring the world our mothers gave us.8

The two feminist collections of writings that I had discussed in Chapter 1 were undertaken with precisely the kind of search for the meaning and contribution of lives lived in the private sphere. The energy and creativity of the present generation of feminists were products it was felt not of patriliny but of matriliny. We derived the energy from our own mothers and even grandmothers. As Himani Bannerji has reminded us, the gender lens fails most effectively in the mother-daughter legacy. The motherhood that patriarchy holds captive is the mother of sons, the keeper of the vamsa or the male lineage. For tapping the source of female creativity one has to turn to the mother-daughter lineage, or what I have called in my co-edited book Space of Our Own ‘matriliny within patriliny’.9 A fine literary representation of this occurs in the famous trilogy of the Bengali 35

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author Ashapurna Devi. The first volume, Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise), is centred on Satyabati, the rebel, who stood up for women’s autonomy; the second eponymous novel is built around her daughter, Subarnalata; the third is Bakul Katha (Bakul’s Story), which brings the narrative to postcolonial modernity. This noted woman author’s trilogy remains a living testimony to the changing contours of motherhood that goes into the making of the middle class in Bengal. Among the famous filmmakers of modern India, Ritwik Ghatak’s films are suffused with the affective complexity of motherhood. Of the many refractions of motherhood in films as diverse as Meghe Dhaka Tara, Bari Theke Paliye or Titash Ekti Nadir Nam, in each of which we have very different projections of motherhood under very different class and social formations, it is in Komal Gandhar that we find the heroine Anasuya, see the spark of her creative fighting mother in Bhrigu, the leader of the performing group who belonged to the early days of the Indian People’s Theatrical Association. The most significant instance of the hegemonic power is of Mother India, in which the great actress Nargis, in her searing portrayal of a struggling, nurturing and disciplining mother, becomes the icon of Nehruvian India. Portrayed as a self-sacrificing mother, she also represents the toiling masses of India. As a mother from the agricultural labouring class she is made to symbolize the future of India captured in the inauguration of one of the Bhakra Nangal dams. The belying of the Nehruvian dream is captured in Mahasweta Devi’s novel Hazar Chaurasir Ma (Mother of 1084) later made into a film with the same name. This was the story of a mother whose son was killed in Naxalite rebellion, whose prison number was 1084. Just as European society of different times have been represented by Gorky’s Mother or Brecht’s Mother Courage, motherhood has been able to bring out multi-layered contradictions that uphold the survival of our human condition. World religion has been lit up with the Kalis, the Durgas, and the Pietas. But in more recent times, there has been a most striking addition of a Mother Goddess created in a film Jai Santoshi Ma, which has been analysed by Vina Das to bring out the social impact of such a mother figure on the viewer-devotees who have become her active worshipers in their everyday world.

I would now like to illustrate the universalist possibility implied in Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as institution and motherhood as experience by examining, a little closely, one of Rabindranath Tagore’s novels, Gora (1910). Much of it will be drawn from my own published article ‘Reading Mother/Reading Swadesh: The Case of Rabindranath’s Gora’.10 Anticipating, in a most unexpected context, Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as an institution and motherhood as an experience, Tagore offers a radical critique of the nationalist reification of motherhood that I have examined at length below, in a subversive counter-image of an experiential mother in the figure of Anandamayee. Several years ago, I had called her the opposition figure of motherhood in India’s colonial history. All the dialogic cogitation about what constitutes ‘Swadesh’ and the fitting identity that can claim it, came to fruition in the everyday practice that this mother in an orthodox brahmin household adopts for herself. As the novel opens, we find Gora declining to eat or drink in his mother’s room for the ostensible reason that her maid Lachhmiya, who is a Christian, has full access to it. One of the first things that we notice about Anadamayee is that contrary to the orthodox brahminical Hindu practices, she wears a chemise with her sari. This was interpreted among the older generation as new-fangled and was derided as a Christianizing trait. The rest of her description presents her as a hardworking resourceful housewife who looks after her own family and is mindful of the needs of the neighbours, and hence used to a certain social mobility. When Gora insists that she must conform to all the strictures of an orthodox Hindu household, she says with fervour:

Motherhood and Patriarchy

RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S GORA

Do you know that I let go of all the orthodox practices by taking you in my lap? Once one takes a child in one’s bosom, one realizes that no one is born with caste in the world. The day I realized this, I knew that God will take you away from me the day I hate anyone as a Christian or a low caste. I would rather you remain here illuminating my room, filling my lap, and I will drink water from all the castes in the world!11 37

Full of Sophoclean irony, this bold experience of motherhood is Tagore’s answer to all the narrow appropriation of motherhood as an institutionalized icon of essentialized Hindu nationalism. Having simply accepted as her own, an Irish baby whose mother had found shelter in their house during the Great Rebellion of 1857, and who died giving birth to him, Anadamayee crosses the barrier of casteism and narrow Hinduism, and becomes the true practising mother of a plural multi-race India. In setting out the human perspective in Gora Tagore has given a very special place to Anandamayee. One should note, in particular, her refutation of Gora’s objection to the unrestricted presence of Lachhmiya, a lower-class Christian maid in her kitchen: Gora, my child, please do not say such a thing! From the beginning you have eaten from her hands – she has brought you up from infancy. Only till the other day you did not relish food without the chutney made by her own hands. When you were little, you had ‘pox’ – I will never forget the ways she nursed you back to life.12

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Gora, in his blind identification of the ritual purity prescribed by orthodox brahminical Hinduism with the idea of his own country, thinks that Lachhmiya should be pensioned off rather than be allowed to be part of his mother’s kitchn. Anandamayee, on the other hand, has the truly ‘inclusive’ spirit of humanity that does not flinch from acknowledging the affective entitlement of even a surrogate mother (not in today’s technical sense of a womb sold), even though she belonged to a lower caste and to a different religion altogether.

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Gora, you think you can pay off her debt with money? … She will die if she does not get to see you.13

When Gora accuses her of transgressing the ritual purity of a brahminical household, she narrates the effort she put in breaking the shackles of brahminical orthodoxy in her own life. Her husband had encouraged her to give up orthodoxy to suit his own purposes. The British masters were so happy to find a brahmin employee whose wife was liberal enough

But I will not be able to do it. My seven-generation old orthodoxies have been uprooted one by one – will these simply come back for the asking?14

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to accompany him to his various workplaces that they promoted and rewarded him. Now that he had earned a small fortune, Anadamayee is perspicacious enough to observe, he has resigned from service and reverted to the orthodox brahminical ritual with a vengeance. For Anandamayee the giving up of orthodoxy was a matter of principle. Her husband may revert to orthodoxy, she adds,

This is the mother, who is an individual with ethical integrity, for whom the experience of motherhood was a momentous personal choice of inclusivity that enabled her, as even Gora will understand towards the end of the novel, to embrace humanity, irrespective of religion, race, caste and class. Going back to the reading of the scene at the beginning of the novel, we find Binoy, prevented from eating in Anandamayee’s kitchen, comes home and instead of writing about saving the country, finds his attention drifting towards Anandamayee’s room from where he had just been forcibly taken away by Gora. This is an epiphanic moment in which Anandamayee’s room acquires an iconic significance that makes it coeval with one’s own country. It is worth looking at closely: The bright floor, with ponkho work is shining in its cleanliness; a wooden bed on one side is covered with a spread that is clean and soft like the wings of a white swan. Next to it is a stool on which a lamp with linseed oil is lit. Ma is stooping towards it with threads of many colours, embroidering the kantha [a coverlet stitched with old cloths], Lachhmiya talking endlessly in her stilted Bangla, Ma is paying attention only half-heartedly. Whenever she feels sad, she buries herself in her craft. Binoy cast his inner eye on her silent face, intent on work and said to himself, ‘Let the affectionate glow of this face save me from my mental turbulence’. Let this face be the image of my motherland, inspire me in my duty and help me remain firm in it. He called out to her inwardly as mother and said, ‘I will not let any scriptures prove that your food is not my elixir’.15 39

Throughout the novel, Rabindranath signals at the iconic significance of Anandamayee as consciously transgressing the norms of Hindu brahminical orthodoxy in order to achieve a more inclusive image of the samaj, society. Even Gora, while donning the garb of an orthodox Hindu, had realized early in the novel that his real ties were not with his rigidly conformist father, whose ritual purity found most people, including Gora, beyond the pale of his touchability. Instead, they lay with his mother, who was a rebel against orthodox rituals, however much he would criticize her for her nonconformity. But it takes Gora much longer to arrive at the proper ground for this affinity. It was Binoy who was first to realize Anandamayee’s luminous personality, and it is he who starts talking about the insensitive treatment of their womenfolk even by the so-called educated and privileged Hindus:

Interrogating Motherhood

We are supposed to respect our women – call them Lakshmi or goddess … We call our country ‘motherland’, but if we do not recognize that celebration of the female image in the actual women of our country – if we do not perceive our women as complete, mature, energetic and powerful in their intelligence, power and the breadth of their sense of duty – if we keep on seeing weakness, narrowness and immaturity within our own rooms – then the perception of that country will never acquire brightness within ourselves.16

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As the novel advances we find that it is the dissident, unorthodox mother Anandamayee, who shows her full capability in recognizing the agency of the two strong, principled young women, Lalita and Sucharita. The narrowly conformist mothers and mother substitutes – Baradasundari, the ambitious, narrow-minded Brahmo mother of Lalita, and Harimohini, the ritual-riddled, short-sighted and pettily greedy Hindu aunt of Sucharita –fail both the girls in their moments of greatest need. It is this glow of inclusivity in Anandamayee that is unconsciously picked up by Gora when he realizes the limitation of his sense of swadesh, because he had not remembered to include its women. In the final scene of denouement when Anadamayee reveals to Gora the truth about his birth and origin as an

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alien, Gora asks Anandamayee, ‘Are you not my mother?’ She answers, ‘You are the son of my sonless self. You are much more than the child of my womb.’ She explains that it was the fear of losing him that made her suppress the true account of his birth from him. In reply Gora simply called out to her ‘Ma!’ At this, Anandamayee’s usual restraint gives way to tears. On coming to know the truth of his birth, however, Gora feels strangely liberated. He goes to visit Pareshbabu and Sucharita and declares: Today I am a true Indian. There is no conflict between Hindu, Mussulman or Christian in me. Today all the castes of India are my caste, everyone’s food is my food … all these days I travelled with an invisible barrier within me – I simply couldn’t overcome it. Hence there was an emptiness in me, I tried to cover it up with embroidery, to beautify it … Today I am saved, Pareshbabu, by being relieved of the vain efforts to beautify it.17

He further adds, coming back to the image of the mother in the beatific vision of India, which is not touched by any ritual pollution of any kind: Today I have been so purified, that I am no longer afraid of being polluted even in the house of an untouchable chandal. Pareshbabu, this morning I have been born with my mind wide open, in the lap of India. Today I have had full realization of what is the lap of a mother.18

From the bosom of Anandamayee, the transgressive, exemplary mother, Gora reached the real India, his swadesh, which he had been searching all through the novel. Thus, he says to Pareshbabu: Give me the mantra of that god who is the god of all: Hindus, Mussulmans, Christians and Brahmos – the door of whose temple is not closed to any community or individual – the one who is not a god of Hindus alone but of India.19

In the concluding appendix of the novel, Gora reads his Swadesh by reading his mother experientially, not through an institutionalized reification: 41

Ma, you are my ma. The mother I was looking for was sitting inside my house. You have no caste, no sense of ritual purity, no hatred; you are the symbol of well-being. You are my Bharatbarsha.20

Interrogating Motherhood

Thus, the institutionalized, essentialized mother, celebrated in the brahminical Hindu nationalism, of both the last quarter of the nineteenth century and that of the Swadeshi movement at the beginning of the twentieth, is actively replaced by Rabindranath with the principled pluralism of an experiential mother, more if not less than a biological mother. That is the reading of desh not of rashtra or the ‘nation’, of mother/ land – a human being throbbing with affect, not of a goddess, inert, divine, and reified. The Feminist movement both in the West and in the other parts of the world was built on a renewed perception of women’s agency as well as her victimhood. Women’s creative energy was seen as an essential component of their agency, especially the patriarchal relegation of women into the private sphere, making motherhood the main excuse for doing so, has meant that women have been denied the minimum opportunities for realizing their creativity as a­ rtists. The big articulator of the thwarted creativity of mothers is, of course, the Afro-American writer Alice Walker in her famous essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’. Alice Walker takes her stand on Virginia Woolf ’s Room of One’s Own and builds on it the exquisite structure of AfroAmerican women’s lives, with their colour and creativity. This is how she does the grafting:

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Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the [slaves and the wives and daughters of sharecroppers]. Now and again [a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright] blazes out and proves its presence … when, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a women possessed by devils [or ‘Sainthood’], of a wise women selling herbs [our root workers] or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen … Indeed I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.21

Below the quilt I saw a note that says it was made by ‘an anonymous black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago’.23

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Interestingly enough, Virginia Woolf ’s point about the anonymity of women poets is anticipated by Alice Walker’s description of a quilt preserved in Smithsonian that declared that the creative expression of a black slave woman who could only access rags as her creative resource had made this quilt ‘unlike any other in the world’.22

Alice Walker, the superb literary artist that she is, immediately seizes upon this ancestry. If we could locate this ‘anonymous’ black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our ­grandmothers – an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.24

The search for our mothers’ gardens is likely to yield such a rich maternal heritage of creativity that had so far been blotted out from public gaze due to the gender division of labour, an ideological construct of the patriarchal social order. Alice Walker pronounces, with great credibility And so our mothers and grandmothers have more often than not, anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see; or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.25

What Mary Jacobus called the ‘maternal imaginary’ has occupied creative artists, especially women, in many different forms. In the West it has been prominent in feminist thinking or psychoanalysis, literature and art. Hence Mary Jacobus has called her compilation of essays on ‘maternal imaginary’ First Things.26 Just as feminists have had to engage with Marx when it comes to the scene of women’s position in labour and social reproduction in general, they have similarly had to grapple with Freudian psychoanalysis and its several critiques. Freud’s relinquishing of the mother to the pre-Oedipal has had protests from the feminist rank. As Mary Jacobus puts it pithily: 43

Interrogating Motherhood

Freudian theory is often said to have a ‘blind spot’ in relation to femininity. Freud’s appropriation of the mother also has a ‘blind spot’, an Oedipal blindness.27

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As opposed to the nineteenth-century patriarchal reading of Greek mythology, we have Adrienne Rich talking about the Mystery of Eleusis, the separation of Demeter from her daughter Persephone who was abducted by Pluto, and their final reunion that brought back crops to the earth for nine months. Freud’s laws of the Fetha, that alone are supposed to enable men to transcend into the world of culture and civilization, is clearly an attempt to overturn the worship of women’s fertility in the earliest phase of human civilization. The celebration of motherhood has happened in most cultures in the world, and Indian culture is no exception. The oldest available cultural artifacts in the pre-Aryan civilization in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa bear testimony to the mother cult. The principle of fertility represented by the embodiment of mother is the oldest testimony to the sense of continuity of the species. Not just birthing but the process of nurturance that makes it incumbent upon homo sapiens to recognize the value of the mother. In her magnificent exploration of The Creation of Patriarchy Gerda Lerner has given us a number of valuable insights into the different aspects of the mother in the initial emergence of patriarchy.28 Gerda Lerner’s journey into the origins of patriarchy gives us insights into the unique situations in which motherhood may be placed. She very rightly points out that it is one of the oldest relationships in the world. Lerner has talked about the basic dyad, mother and child.29 What Lerner’s extremely insightful analysis brings out is the centrality of motherhood and birthing to the emergence of the sexual division of labour. Going back into the dim days of pre-history Lerner argues for different communities adjusting, each in their own way, to the needs of a distinctly sexual division of labour arising out of the needs of the women to mother. As a feminist thinking and working in the West which had been under the control of Christianity, Lerner turned to the pre-historic times of the Near East, as, perhaps, part of her own pre-history. Her

The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property.30

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purpose was to understand the historical process of the emergence of patriarchy which she found emerging over a period of 2,500 years, and that, too at different paces in several distinct societies of the ‘Ancient Near East’. She argues with the help of other scholars against a cataclysmic explanation such as the one offered by Engels, who saw ‘the world-historic defeat of the female sex’ in the overthrow of ‘the mother right’. Lerner’s contention is that

Lerner does not believe in an overthrow, but is interested in tracing the different stages of negotiation in fixing women’s functions around their mothering role in order to establish the sexual division of labour. The irony is that ‘labour’ also stands for childbirth. At the same time it is the compulsion of child-bearing and nurturing that brought about the exclusion of women from the world of, what has been designated as, ‘productive’ labour. Hence motherhood became the causal link between women’s place in the sexual division of labour in the domain of reproductive labour that was second in rank to the male domain of productive labour. Focusing on the ‘creation’ of patriarchy Lerner has called attention to the various forms of negotiation that must have gone in different communities to look after the working of the day-to-day life. It is the reified institutionalization of the quotidian practices preserving the balance and sustainability of the renewal of the species, its food and other security of the renewed generation, which produced the tilting of the balance in favour of the male in the hierarchization of the sexual division of labour. The ‘inferiorization’ of the reproductive to the productive led to the solid foundation of the marginalization of women in a society in which the male was the norm. This is why, according to Simone de Beauvoir, women were naturalized as the ‘Second Sex’.31 Held as the prime cause of the lowering of women’s status in the entire socialization process, motherhood was one of the primary targets in the early feminist protests. Almost as compensation 45

for this degradation, it was noticed, fairly early, that a massive glorification of motherhood had come to be adopted in various stages of our society. One such complex phenomenon is the presence of Mother Goddesses in cultures across the world. MOTHER GODDESS

That there was ample recognition of the power of the mother is indicated by the presence of small figurines of fertility goddesses in many of the early civilizations. These figures of goddesses were often associated with the great procreative principle which alone could ensure the continuity of the human species. In her invaluable chapter ‘The Goddess’ Lerner refers to the massive archaeological data in confirming the widespread veneration of the Mother Goddess in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods:

Interrogating Motherhood

Approximately 30,000 miniature sculptures in clay, marble, bone, copper and gold are presently known from a total of some 3,000 sites in Southeastern Europe alone.32

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Lerner further quotes from E.O. James to talk about a ‘fertility cult’ which was ‘firmly established in the region of the Ancient Near East with the rise of agriculture in the Neolithic civilization in and after the fifth millennium BC. The ‘fertility cult’ induced the making of female figures all emphasizing breasts, navel and vulva, usually in a squatting position which is the position commonly adopted in childbirth in this region ... It is not only in Turkey that you find forms of the pregnant, the birthing goddess, but you find similar figurines in the Don valley of Russia, in Iraq, Anatolia, in Nineveh, Jericho and in Southern Mesopotamia.33 The transformation of the Mother Goddess as the creative principle to the dominance of the one male God as the Creator that marks western civilization is not easy to explain. Lerner relates it to the changing social relations in the emerging societies leading to gender discrimination. She suggests the following ‘observable pattern’: First the demotion of the Mother Goddess figure and the ascendance and later dominance of her male consort/son, then his merging with the storm-god into a male creator-God

Shifting our attention from the pre-history of western civilization to our own, we are struck by the presence of the Mother Goddess in our living material culture even to this day. This presence, however, goes back to hoary antiquity. As Sukumari Bhattacharji’s crisp Introduction to her book Legends of Devi begins:

Motherhood and Patriarchy

who heads the pantheon of gods and goddesses. Wherever such changes occur, the power of creation and of fertility is transferred from the goddess to the god.34

The worship of the Devi or Goddess in India dates back to the period of Indus Valley Civilization. It became widespread and was accompanied by complex rituals after the Aryans settled on the land.35

After the nomadic Aryans settled down to cultivation and reaped the harvest of the fertile land of the Gangetic delta they came to worship Prithvi, the mother, who provided them with security and prosperity. As Bhattacharji points out, it is Atharvaveda that contains the first celebration of Prithvi or Bhumi: She holds everything, is the abode of all treasures- firm with golden breasts, the repose of everything that moves. We shall milk her for honey — let her sprinkle with splendour. Let this land, mother of mine, yield milk for me, her son . . . this firmer land, this earth protected by Indra — may I inhabit it unharassed, unsmitten and unwounded . . . She holds the bipeds and the four-footed . . . What redolence rose out of thee, O Prithvi, that which the plants contain in them, as also the water.36

We notice that the dominance of the storm-god mentioned by Lerner has already taken place, but she remains the repository of the life-giving sap which will sustain the son. The Mother Goddess has become accommodative of patriarchy. This is already indicative of the later contrast that Bhattacharji points to, between the mythical status of mother as goddess, who is an active agent, and the passive victimhood of mothers in lived life as captured in the scriptural injunctions under brahminical dispensations. As Bhattacharji points poignantly, 47

The two mothers belong to diametrically opposite planes. The human mother is within her heavily circumscribed domestic region with little scope of asserting her will even for the good of her child . . . on the other hand the divine mother’s will is creative at the cosmic level. The Mother Goddess discharges her functions without any pain, with divine delight, the human mother begins and ends her motherhood in pain . . . Her motherhood brings her some months of bliss when the infant is very young and totally dependent on her. But soon, rather too soon, this brief reprieve is over and the glory of motherhood fades slowly but surely.37

Interrogating Motherhood

What is very interesting about India is that there is a continuous history of worship of Mother Goddesses in different levels of Indian society.38 The process that needs to be studied is that though worship of the Mother Goddess permeates different levels of our society, the myth lent itself to being held captive by the dominant layers of our society. The stray presence of Mother Goddesses in the ‘little tradition’ in India that probably go back to pre-Aryan tribal societies who usually preside over epidemics, diseases, drought, and so on, is gradually appropriated by the more hegemonic brahminical models of motherhood that are compliant towards full patriarchal control over all resources, most of all women’s sexuality. By creating the ideological smokescreen around motherhood, Mother Goddesses are elevated to represent full control of the male principle. The famous goddess Durga, for instance, is given weapons by male gods in order to fight their battle against the buffalo demon (Mahishashura).

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NOTES 1. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, Canterbury Tales, l. 692, in The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, general ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 114. 2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: B.B.C. and Penguin Books, 1972). 3. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Contemporary Popular Bengali Fiction’, in Indian Women: Myth and Reality, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1997): 135.

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4. Simone de Beauvoir (1949/1989). The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley; Introduction to the Vintage edition by Deirdre Bair (New York: Vintage Books): 255. 5. Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens (Kolkata: Stree, 2001): 31–32. 6. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ‘Motherhood Power and Powerlessness’, in J. Bagchi, ed, Indian Women: Myth and Reality: 34–43. 7. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977). 8. Himani Bannerji, ‘Re-generation: Mothers and Daughters in Bengali Literary Space’, in Literature and Gender: Essays for Jasodhara Bagchi, edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Sajni Mukherjee (Hyderabad: Orient Longman: 2002): 187–88. 9. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Matriliny within Patriliny’ in A Space of Her Own, edited by Leela Gulati and Jasodhara Bagchi (New Delhi: SAGE, 2005): 223–36. 10. All page references to the text of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora are to Rabindra-Rachanabali, vol. 6 (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, Aswin 1363 (1957), first published Sravan 1347 (1940); all translations of Rabindranath’s texts are by Jasodhara Bagchi; some of the translated passages also appear in the following article: Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Reading Mother/Reading Swadesh: The Case of Rabindranath’s Gora’. Rabindranath and the Nation, edited by Swati Ganguly and Abhijit Sen (Kolkata: Punascha, in association with Visva-Bharati, 2011): 205–19. 11. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 126; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 214. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 26 Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 126–27; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 215. 15. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 249; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 215. 16. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 275; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 216. 17. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 474; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 217. 18. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 566; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 217.

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19. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 570; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 217. 20. Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, vol 6: 571; translated in Bagchi, Reading Mother: 217. 21. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: The Women’s Press, 1983): 239–40. Italics mine. 22. Ibid.: 239. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.: 240. 26. Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. (New York: Routledge, 1995). 27. Mary Jacobus, First Things: 1. 28. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 29. Ibid.: 38. 30. Ibid.: 8. 31. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. 32. Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy: 145. 33. Ibid.: 146–47. 34. Ibid.: 145. 35. Sukumari Bhattacharji, The Legends of Devi (Calcutta, Orient Longman, 1998): ix. 36. Ibid.; italics mine. 37. Sukumari Bhattacharji, ‘Motherhood in Ancient India’, in Motherhood in India, edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 65. 38. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 158–84.

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3 Nationalism and ­ Nation-Building The Mother Goddess sufficed as a symbol of the motherland in colonial Bengal, a synecdoche for colonial India. For the nationalist anti-colonial resistance, the resurgence of the Mother Goddess tradition in Bengal proved an effective ground for mobilizing the wounded psyche of sons/devotees of the Mother Goddess/Motherland. NATIONALISM

In an early Sanskrit text of fifth-sixth century AD, we get a reference to the presiding deity of Bharat, well famed as Bharatmata (Mother India): ‘To her north is the Himalaya, Kanyakumari to the south is forever present. Prayer to this great Shakti frees men from re-birth (Samavidhana Brahman)’.1 Whatever may have been the pluralism and inclusivity of the original image, for the nineteenth-century Hindu male elite of Bengal the image helped to consolidate the exclusive orthodoxy of a Hindu brahminical patriarchal world order. This became naturalized into the new political domain that posed itself as a challenge to the colonial domination and the extraction of wealth. The feminized Shakti that is iconized in this emblem of the motherland is an image drawn entirely on the pattern of a brahminical family, where the entire resource and its control are in the hands of the male. Like the goddess Durga the motherland is empowered by the male gods so that she can slay the common demon enemy. This mother, as the

songs and popular presentations bring out, is the mother of sons. As we shall see, her Shakti is the compensation for the charge of effeminacy of her sons. Bankimchandra’s clarion call of Bande Mataram did not challenge any established authority structure of an upper-caste Hindu family, rather it could harness affect qualities and political anguish to legitimize it. It could, therefore, reach far and wide. The Swadeshi movement that surfaced in Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century used the trope of motherhood to bolster the spirit of the sons, charged with a lack of heroism, who were nevertheless, trying to free the splendid mother from her chains. Rabindranath Tagore in his early involvement wrote beautiful songs about Mother Bengal. Yet another songwriter who won the hearts of Hindu middleclass nationalist consciousness and was capable of realizing its hegemonic potential was D. L. Roy. Some of his famous songs make very communicative use of the mother image in energizing the drooping male ego of the colonized: O my Bengal, O my mother, O my nurse, O my land, Why is your face so wan? Why is your hair unkempt? Why are you seated on a dusty floor? Why are your clothes unclean? When seven crores of voices combine To sing in unison, My Country! 2

Interrogating Motherhood

Or, take the following analogy with Minerva

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The day the Mother India Rose from the deep blue sea There was such clamour throughout the world, Such devotion, Mother, such joy! 3

It was this song writer who drew tears in our eyes when the Indian coastline came into our view in 1961 when I was returning from Oxford. This ancient redeeming image of the Bharat Mata as the presiding deity, Shakti, is taken up in a big way in the

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nationalist phase of Bengal. There were of course loyalist songs sung to Queen Victoria in the pleading style of Ramaprasad,4 but there were not marked by the interlocking crises of power and resistance that signified the nationalist use of the icon for which Bankimchandra sets the tone. His message of ‘Bande Mataram’ became a political battle cry. The extremist nationalist movement took it up with great gusto. Amales Tripathi sees in this ‘an escapist mood which sought respite from the inexorable gruelling debate with the western culture, technology and material power in the protective womb of the past’.5 The image is particularly apt in this context; it is applied to the nationalist obsession with motherhood in Tanika Sarkar’s feminist analysis referred to earlier: A new acute consciousness of the inexorable march of history, with which India had never kept in step, of technological time with a westernized notion of progress as its goal, produced intolerable anxieties and a violent desire to break out of its frame by a return to the post, to one’s mother, a reversion to the womb in a state of innocence, of pleasure where the infant is as yet un-differentiated from the mother, as yet unaware of his own distinct self.6

Women’s reproductive domain is thus abstracted, even fetishized, as Tanika Sarkar suggests.7 Since the spiritual domain was a weapon in the hands of the nationalist, the glorification of motherhood was the double-refined spirituality that was used as a major mode of representation by the Bengali nationalists.8 If worship of the Mother Goddess was the exclusive domain of Bengal/India, then the land itself became the mother. The symbolic representation of India as the mother as well as the Mother Goddess became a major source of ‘mass contact’.9 It helped spread the message of Swadeshi, both economic and cultural, which erupted in Bengal at the turn of the century. It was Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay who had first made the mother into an emblem of the country though the song ‘Bande Mataram’. The song which was originally written to fill a gap in his journal Bangadarshan, found its political context in his proto-nationalist novel Anandamath. 53

The novel, with its apparently collaborationist tag, became the parable of militant nationalism. The emphasis on the crisis-ridden social order provides a fitting context for the rhetoric invoked by Bankimchandra in a mixture of Sanskrit and Bengali. The ‘invention of tradition’ is so successful that it became the slogan of all militant nationalism. However, the song ‘Bande Mataram’ is merely an item in a far more consistent effort of Bankimchandra to politicize the Mother Goddess image. We begin to notice a new domain emerging. In their intense search for what may be considered their own, Bengali writers often turned to that intensely Bengali festival of the autumnal worship of Durga. Bankimchandra attempts to build up the religious sphere of Shakti worship into a political domain. Throughout his career, Bankimchandra meditated upon the political significance of the goddess Durga in her different manifestations as Shakti. In his creation of the early but brilliant confessions of his opium-sodden ‘double’, Kamalakanta, Bankimchandra writes a very telling piece on the worship of the Mother Goddess Durga. In one of his psychedelic visions, Kamalakanta sees floating on turbulent waves

Interrogating Motherhood

The gold-adorned autumnal mother image of The first day’s festivity [Saptami] smiling. Floating on water, radiating lights. Is this Mother? Yes, this is Mother. I recognize my mother, my land of birth in her image Of clay, embodying mother earth, adorned In many jewels but now buried in the Wombs of time.10

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Kamalakanta’s prayer is full of the agony of the subject race. Arise, O my mother, golden Bengali arise. Now we will be good sons, will not let you Down. Arise, Blessed Mother – We will henceforth renounce narrow self-interest. Will do good to others, will give up indolent Sacrilegious sensuality. Arise, Mother, tears are Blinding me, arise, O Mother Bengal.11

Nationalism and ­Nation-Building

Bankimchandra has tried to historicize this metaphor of the Mother Goddess as the motherland. In a very early piece published in 1873 in his own journal Bangadarshan, Bankim interprets ten forms of the Mother Goddess as Dasamahavidya, and sees the evolution of Indian society in the ten successive forms, right from the past when non-Aryans were subdued by the Aryans (Kali), through the wretched conditions of India under Muslim rule (Dhumavati), and right up to the futurist vision of Mahalakshmi when Indian society will be prosperous and bountiful. This, one may say, is a very early prefiguration of the famous series of mother images mentioned in Anandamath, the fiction that gave shape and form to militant nationalism. This is the novel in which the full span of the ‘condition of India’ question is to be found in the three successive images of the Mother Goddess, corresponding to the past, present and future of Indian history. In his presentation of the then current misery, Bankimchandra collapses Muslim as well as British rule, and thus creates one of the most powerful icons of nationalist struggle. The description of the three images, ‘Mother that was, Mother that is, Mother that will be’, deserves to be quoted in full. What follows, occurs in the eleventh chapter of the first part of the novel: Then the hermit (H) took Mahendra (M) to another room. Mahendra saw there was the image of the great Mother, upholder of the world, adorned with all ornaments. She was an astounding embodiment of perfection. Mahendra asked the hermit: ‘Who is she?’ Hermit: ‘Mother as she was’. M: ‘What do you mean?’ H: ‘Wild animals – lions and elephants – have cowered at her feet. She has made a lotus garden with their verdurous gloom. Resplendent with smiles and bedecked with all ornaments, the mother shone forth with the brilliance of the rising sun. And there was no wealth that was not hers. Kneel before her.’ When Mahendra had knelt reverently before the image of the divine nurturer that was his motherland, the hermit showed him a dark tunnel. ‘Come this way’, he ordered.

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The hermit himself went in and Mahendra followed with a throbbing heart. Deep down there was a dark chamber, illuminated faintly with some unknown source of light. In the translucent darkness, Mahendra could see the image of another goddess, Kali. The hermit said ‘Do you see? Mother, as she is’. ‘Kali?’ Mahendra’s voice trembled in fear. ‘Kali. The deity of darkness and vile insights. Dispossessed of all she had; therefore naked. Our land is nothing but a graveyard now. And so she has that garland of skulls around her neck. She tramples on her consort, her own Shiva … who is bliss and benediction. O Mother!’ The hermit’s eyes were full of tears. Mahendra asked, ‘Why does she hold the skull and scimitar?’ ‘There are all the weapons we have given her, and we call ourselves her children. Come say with me Bande Mataram!’

Interrogating Motherhood

Mahendra repeated ‘I worship thee, Mother’, and knelt before the goddess. Then the hermit said, ‘Come this way’, and this time he began to climb up another tunnel. Suddenly the rays of morning sun dazzled their eyes. Honey-voiced birds began to sing all around. Mahendra saw a huge marmoreal temple, and a golden deity with ten arms smiled forth in the gold of the rising sun. The hermit knelt in front of her.

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‘This is the Mother as she will be’, he said. ‘Ten arms stretch out in the ten directions. Each holding up a weapon that declares her power, the enemy of man lies vanquished at her feet and the ferocious lion is subjugated and turned against all those who dare to oppose her. Mother, let your arm direct us’. The hermit (Satyananda) began to weep in adoration. ‘Mother let your arms show us the way. O Mother with many weapons, rider of lion – most valiant of all animals – show us the way …’ Mahendra spoke with effusion, ‘When shall we see this image of the Mother?’ The hermit replied, ‘That day, when all her children shall call her Mother. That day the Mother shall be pleased.’ 12

Partha Chatterjee has talked about Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s formulation of nationalist discourse as the

Nationalism and ­Nation-Building

‘point of departure’.13 Bankimchandra, who was, as he characterized himself, a petty official in the employ of the British colonial state, was one of the first batches of graduates from the newly founded Calcutta University, Bankimchandra, well versed in Sanskrit, had equipped himself adequately with western knowledge particularly with Enlightenment philosophy and the nineteenth-century developments in social philosophy. Caught in the bind of the power of knowledge and the powerlessness of a colonial subject, it is Bankimchandra who had articulated nationalism as a paean to motherhood in his song ‘Bande Mataram’. The sense of inadequacy that the heroism of the mother was supposed to compensate for, of course, belonged to the colonial male. By coalescing the Mother Goddess, terrible and destructive, with the affection for one’s own mother, nationalists helped to domesticate Shakti within another nationalist image – the ideal Hindu joint family. This may be perceived in the juxtaposition of the political and familial marked with the autumn worship of Durga that is carried on to this day with great fanfare. When Sister Nivedita writes about the civic pageantry of Durga Puja, she does not miss out its political significance: ‘For the mother of universe shines forth in the life of humanity, as a woman, as family life, as country’.14 Bankimchandra’s presentation of Durga that we had seen earlier, with its accompanying agony of a colonial subject who has not yet found his proper national idiom, is invoked by Sister Nivedita as an unhesitating call for freedom: It is more than thirty years since Bankimchandra Chattopadhyayji, the great Bengali romancier, sang the vision of the ended Durga Puja as the hour of the motherland’s need, as he saw the image plunge beneath the waves. That the poet spoke the innermost thought of his countrymen . . . is proved by the history that has gathered around his song . . . Mother and motherland – where ends the one and where begins the other? Before which does a man stand with folded hands, when he bows his head still lower, and says with a new awe: My salutation to thee, Mother!15

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Extremists like Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal read deep political messages in Bankimchandra’s crisis-ridden images of Durga and Kali. Interestingly, it is in these two forms that the Puranic goddess Chandi was believed to have emerged in the colonial period.16 What the nationalists did was to try and infuse a new hegemonic significance in the worship of these two Mother Goddesses. Ramakrishna’s Kali worship contributed to this mainstream. Vivekananda’s poem, Kali the Mother,17 sets the tone of desperate heroism that was later politicized by the ‘extremist’ nationalists, setting the ideological tone of so-called terrorism in nationalist politics:

Interrogating Motherhood

Dancing mad with joy, Come, Mother come, For Terror is thy name, Death is in thy breasts, Thou ‘Time’ the All-Destroyer! Come, O Mother, come! Who dare misery love? And hug the form of Death,18 Dance in Destructions dance, To him the Mother comes.

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Thus, the image of the destructive Mother Goddess builds up a particular involvement with the motherland which has been exploited and ravished by foreign rulers. The strength of the icon worked on two of the unlikely converts to the movement – Bipin Chandra Pal, a Brahmo, and originally loyal to the providential presence of the British in India, and Aurobindo Ghose whose original notion of freedom came from Europe: France and Italy. Bankim’s image of Durga and Vivekananda’s of Kali served to give shape and form to the extreme need to defend one’s country heroically. For both it was a shift away from a masculine ideal to a feminine one. Aurobindo’s invitation into an Aryan revival as a nationalist agenda first took place in western India where the ideal was one of a male warrior like Shivaji. Shakti as a political ideal of Swadeshi certainly was specific to Bengali culture, fed by the literary experiments of Bankimchandra and the Kali cult of Ramakrishna, and popularized by Swami Vivekananda

I know my country as my mother, I bow to her, I respect her. If a rakshasa sits on the body of the mother and tries to suck blood from her, what does the son do? Sit and eat with ease . . . or run to the mother’s rescue?19

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and Sister Nivedita. ‘I know my country as my mother, I adore her, worship her’, wrote Aurobindo Ghose, the revolutionary. He accepted Bankimchandra’s periodization of Indian history through the Mother Goddess icon. He wanted to rescue the mother from being denounced by the rakshasa (demon) in the form of British rule:

Commenting on Bankimchandra’s contribution to political thought, Bipin Chandra Pal invokes a vivid, though un-self conscious presentation of the womb we had discussed earlier: Just as the foetus lives in the mother’s womb, each of us is living in the womb of the societal mother. Just as the mother’s blood builds up the foetus, the mother’s vitality protects the life of the child in the womb and gives it strength; the strength of the society derived from the wealth, knowledge and religion, becomes the vehicle and resting place for each of us and lends justification to our individual existence.20

The sense of a personalized well-being generated by the warm affection of the mother is beyond the reach of an impersonal concept of a ‘nation’. This is how the nationalist revolutionaries appropriated the mother image into their politics of heroism. The visual symbol of Swadeshi nationalism, Bharat Mata by Abanindranath Tagore, was a blend of a Bengali woman with her conch-shell bangle and the image of Shri, the harvest goddess of prosperity. The picture was immediately appropriated by the nationalist discourse in Sister Nivedita’s commentary revealing her usual mytho-poeic imagination: This is the first masterpiece in which an Indian artist has actually succeeded in disengaging, as it were, the spirit of the motherland – giver of faith and learning, of clothing and food – and portraying her as she appears to the eyes of her children.21 59

Interrogating Motherhood 60

She is the familiar Bengali woman, defamiliarized by the spiritual halo, four arms and the lotuses at her feet. The aggressiveness of the Hindu Shakti is certainly muted in this emblem – she is yet to be identified more with the ideal of Bangalakshmi, propounded by yet another Swadeshi movement – initiated by Ramendra Sundar Trivedi. It was he who had involved the women of Bengal in the anti-partition Swadeshi movement of 1905 by giving the call of Arandhan (no cooking).22 In the centre of the colonial history of Bengal, a synecdoche for India, in general, we have a major ideological presence of motherhood that has coloured the entire perception of nation-building in the Indian context. Motherhood becomes the site of struggle in colonial Bengal, as the marker of superiority of the culture in the dominated East. This is evident in the writings of two main disciples of Ramakrishna: Swami Vivekananda and his disciple, Sister Nivedita. One of the most articulate among foreigners, Margaret Noble, an Irish woman, became Sister Nivedita in order to make Calcutta her home. Sister Nivedita was no ordinary convert to the Hinduism of Ramakrishna’s organization, but she made the leap into the anti-colonial struggle in Bengal and later on became a pan-Indian nationalist. In her book, Kali the Mother, Sister Nivedita makes a distinction between the Semitic (Judaism, Christianity) worship of the father, and the Aryan [sic] devotion of the mother. Sister Nivedita says, ‘In the Aryan home, woman stands supreme. As wife in the West (lady and queen of her husband) and as mother in the East (a goddess enthroned in her son’s worship), she is the bringer of sanctity and peace’.23 The cult of mother worship in the West, centring on the Virgin Mary, has emphasized the association ‘of all that is tender and precious with this thought of woman worship’. Sister Nivedita feels this to be an incomplete package. She feels that in India, ‘the thought of the mother has been realized in its completeness. The completeness arises from the assimilation of the destructive Shakti into the motherly tenderness that generates confidence’. The following is the description given by Sister Nivedita: In the East, the accepted symbol is of a naked woman with flowing hair; so dark a blue that she appears to be black; fourhanded – two hands in the act of blessing and two holding a

Sister Nivedita, an iconographer of no mean stature, goes on to assert the special relationship with the goddess: To her we belong. Whether we know it or not, we are Her children, playing round Her knees. Life is but a game of ­hide-and-seek with Her, and if in its course, we chance to touch Her feet, who can measure the shock of divine energy that enters into us? Who can utter the rapture of our cry ‘Mother’?25

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knife and a bleeding head; garlanded with skulls and dancing with a protruding tongue on the prostrate figure of a man, all white with ashes.24

In the changed context of an Orient that has been colonized by the Occident, Sister Nivedita tries to restore the balance by reviving the tradition of Ramprasad Sen. In her splendid translation; the hide-and-seek image comes alive in a song by Ramprasad: Whom else should I cry to, Mother? The baby cries for its mother alone – And I am not the son of such That I should call any woman my mother.26

The edge that comes out in the revived context is the pride of swadeshi – the colonial subject is acutely conscious of his own mother. This mother is superior to all religious acts of penance: Why should I go to Benares? My mother’s lotus-feet Are millions and millions Of holy places.27

Sister Nivedita was paying her respects to the original guru of her order, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who had found a live context for Ramprasad’s songs for Kali. Ramakrishna had once admonished someone, ‘Don’t say amar, amar, amar [mine, mine, mine] but say ma, ma, ma [mother’s, mother’s, mother’s].’28 Sister Nivedita therefore worships Ramakrishna: The great incarnation of the spirit Of the mother towards her children.29 61

Sister Nivedita’s nationalism was not negated but sustained by this ascetic devotee of the mother, for in the foundation of his order she sees a rejuvenated India with its new universal message of humanity: It is not true that he expresses the mind of India alone, or even chiefly. For in him meet the feeling and thought of all mankind, and he, Ramakrishna, the devotee of Kali, represents Humanity.30

Sister Nivedita draws a contrast between the Semitic worship of God the father with the Indian worship of the Mother Goddess, thereby implying the greater spiritual purity of India. In her emphasis of the ritual of mother worship as a Bengali/ Hindu tradition, there was an attempt to turn Orientalism upside down. Mother worship helped to define for Sister Nivedita a more humane land of the East, away from the masculine iron chains of the West. Her essentialist vision, one must remember, is not feminism, but utopia of the humane nationalism she envisaged for Bengal/India. The technique perfected by Sister Nivedita was really her master’s. Before a western audience, Swami Vivekananda used motherhood to assert the distinctiveness of Indian culture:

Interrogating Motherhood

Now the ideal woman in India is the mother, the mother first and mother last. The word ‘woman’ calls up to the mind of the Hindu motherland, and god is called mother.... In the West, the woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there as the wife. To the ordinary man in India, the whole force of womanhood is concentrated on motherhood.31

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Tagore’s patriotic songs about the motherland have resonated through the cultural fabric of Bengal. Writing about the theme of the motherland as a mode of representing nationalism, I realized that it was the songs that came flooding to my mind. In the words of historians of the Swadeshi movement quoting Yeats’ memorable line, a ‘terrible beauty’ had indeed been born in Swadeshi Bengal.32 Ullaskar Dutta, a young revolutionary on trial for his life in Alipore, held the court spellbound by singing one of the songs of Tagore:

So powerful was the rhetoric of motherland in the Swadeshi nationalism that more than half a century later, the liberation movement of Bangladesh could bring it alive. They took as their battle cry a tender Swadeshi song of Tagore: My golden Bengal, I love you Your sky and winds have played music To my ears forever.34

Nationalism and ­Nation-Building

Blessed is my birth in this land Blessed is my birth, O my mother, In having loved you.33

Language was one of the main issues of the movement, as a result, mother tongue became, literally, the mother’s tongue. The words in your mouth are like nectar to my ear. O my mother.35

Motherhood was the most significant emblem specific to Bengali culture which offered the kind of root that the early nationalists needed. Yet at the same time it will be wrong to think of the representation as a non-contentious domain. Tagore’s representation of motherhood eschewed, as far as possible, the Hindu revivalist tones of the Mother Goddess; he was more inclined to present her as the natural land; her soil and fruit inspired him more effectively. At least in one presentation of a mother, that is, Anandamayi in Gora, Tagore has given his note of dissent to Hindu orthodoxy (see also Chapter 2).36 In a memorable letter to Pulinbehari Sen, Tagore reports of the occasion when he had been approached by Bipin Chandra Pal to write a song combining the Durga form with that of the goddess who was the motherland to celebrate their special autumnal worship of Durga. Tagore felt he could not compromise his own religious conviction and write such a song for puja. Instead, he wrote his memorable song: O the enchanter of the Universal mind, O mother The land washed by the radiant rays of the sun.37 63

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Tagore did not wish to transcend the legitimate limits of the natural mother, even though it displeased Bipin Pal. The price that the Swadeshi movement had paid in Hinduizing the nationalist movement is made clear by Tagore in Ghare Baire (1916). In 1937, writing to Nehru about the appropriateness of ‘Bande Mataram’ as a national anthem, he does mention the threat to Muslim susceptibilities – the original context in which the song was located in the novel. Nevertheless, he felt that the first two stanzas had enough broad humanitarian appeal. It was Tagore who had set it to tune and sung it to an early session of the Indian National Congress.38 The kind of divisiveness that this ideology implied had far reaching implications. By abstracting Hindu goddesses as the motherland, what did this universalist sounding deploy have to say to the Muslim sensibility? By extolling an ideology that apparently rested in a show of empowering women, it was ultimately a way of reinforcing a social philosophy of deprivation for women. It was a signal to women to sacrifice everything for their menfolk. The internationalization of this so-called ideal that nationalism put up for women simply reinforced their traditional notion that the fruition of women’s lives lay in producing heroic sons. The nationalist ideology therefore simply appropriated this orthodox bind on women’s lives by glorifying it. This renewed ideological legitimacy made it even more difficult for women to exercise their autonomy in the matter. Bengali mothers had to contend with the unspoken call to renounce any other form of self-fulfilment. Child-bearing and nurturing became the only social justification for women’s lives. Without any control over her own reproductive powers, this amounted to a form of slavery, however magisterial it may have been made to look. Numerous women died trying to produce yet another son, and were deserted for their failure to produce a male child. Childbirth was not the end. The ideal of motherhood permeated the entire lifestyle of mothers in colonial Bengal; if they were unfed or uncared for, this became their great claim to social recognition and fame – their distinct superiority over their well-fed western counterparts. I suspect this may lead to some eyebrows shooting up from within the rank of feminists themselves. Is this not a

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denigration of your own womenfolk, a reductive exercise in curbing the supreme status given to Bengali women as mothers? This kind of feminism would welcome a strict division of spheres, for within the household of a joint family, the antahpur (the inner domain) was an exclusive domain of women. Did Bengal not realize the utopia of sisterhood in its andarmahal (the inner apartments, another word for the women’s quarters)? Was the affective domain, so elaborately worked out in the specificity of Bengali culture, not an adequate compensation for the deprivation to which the women were submitted? This is the kind of essentialist approach to womanhood that the present analysis would like to contest by focusing on the genesis of such a weltanschauung in a given historical moment. It was the political need of the hour that made the nationalists take up the myth. The compulsions of that brand of politics again helped to unify the religious, the social and the aesthetic domain. Innumerable novels, poems and songs glorified the Bengali mother for her overweening affection. So robust was this sentiment that occasionally she had to be rebuked for spoiling her sons: O you infatuated mother! You have brought up seven crores of sons As Bengalis, not as human beings.39

Over-nurturance can be socially counterproductive – hence the ideal of Shakti with which mothers were supposed to fill up their sons. The relationship however remained instrumental. As Tagore had once said in a different context, ‘You will earn the merit but the penance of starvation will be performed by them’. One reads a distinct male anxiety in the glorification of motherhood – the need for authentication and valour in the face of better organized cultural order of the rulers. The legitimacy that it accorded was not to the daughters but to the sons of the mother. Socially and ideologically, the glorified Indian mother belonged to the world of myth. Where it touched reality, apart from the indirect sense of power, it may have given way to a few exceptional Bengali women; the 65

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ideology of motherhood otherwise strengthened the social practice of the hidden exploitation of women. It made negative contributions to the lives of women. Empowered by their male progeny, Bengali mothers thought little of neglected daughters and torturing daughters-in-law. Bengali mothers upheld the hierarchy of patriarchal control within the family. No wonder she was mythicized as a symbol of order.40 One of the areas that a feminist understanding of motherhood will have to address is the ease with which the image of motherhood is deployed to construct a nation all over the colonized world. The notion of nurturance that is supposed to surround the ideology of motherhood is appropriated with great ease by the patriarchal foundations of nationhood that is particularly invoked in a situation of resistance against an alien ruler. This chapter will take up the anti-colonial resistance in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a special case study, drawing heavily on my earlier research in the area41 but going by the very ideological nature of such an appropriation, there are significant parallels in the history of other nationalisms as well. We also have to remember that the ideological aspect of motherhood had enormous appeal for the nation-building process both from the point of view of the imperialist power and from that of the resistant nationalist and sub-nationalist forces. Ireland forms a major site for engendered use of motherhood in its representational aspect. We have got to remember that the representation of a mother has the advantage of being able to draw upon our ‘affect’ in ways more than one: it brings into action both the power of the image that is actively serviced by the powerlessness of her sons, in particular. In the West, Ireland brings out this representational ambiguity extremely well. To quote from a scholar of Irish society, Ireland has been represented by the British imperialists as well as Irish nationalists and artists as female: she is Hibernia, Eire, Erin, Mother Ireland, the poor old woman … Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Dark Rosaleen. British as well as Irish cartoons of the nineteenth and early twentieth century depict Ireland as a young woman besieged but the nations and nationality of the enemies differ.42

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The stereotyping had very respectable roots. Way back in the 1890s Matthew Arnold in his hegemonic analysis of the study of Celtic literature had stated that ‘the Celt is …peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy’.43 In this he had the support of the French scholar Ernest Renan. In the book referred to above, we see the full configurations of the feminine image worked out through folklore, myth, cult of Mary and literary representations like Deirdre or Cathleen ni Houlihan. We also see how the image of the motherland absorbs and transmutes these varied images. A short but pointed history of the proto-imperialist oppression of Ireland by the capitalist English has been given by Amiya Kumar Bagchi.44 The feminization of the oppressed country, therefore, was a resource in the hands of the masculinity ideology of colonial/imperialist masters, as in Matthew Arnold or Renan’s reading of the Celtic nation, as well as in the hands of the resistant ideology of the nationalist aspirations of the subject country. The masculine-feminine dichotomy that accompanied the process of colonial oppression through domination found extremely evocative images in the case of Ireland from its rich storehouse of legend and folklore. The two images it threw up of the ‘maiden’ and the mother, could muster authentication from the folk traditions still living in Ireland. While the maidenly image was communicated through the popular genre of aisling, the motherly image was expressed through the traditional and equally popular figure of ‘the poor old woman’, the Shan Von Vocht of Irish legend.45 There is also the figure of Erin with her ‘garland of shamrock’ who ‘suggested all that was feminine, courageous and chaste about Irish womanhood and she made the ideal Andromeda waiting to be rescued by a suitable Perseus’.46 The agony of building a nation out of the dispossession of colonial subjugation thus found expression in notions of femininity in which the image of the mother dominated. Though complicit with patriarchal gender construction, this use of motherhood was capable of generating resistance against masculinist coercion and violence of the dominant state power. The most striking of these was the poster published after the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising showed the martyred Pearse

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reclining ‘Pieta-like on the bosom of a seraphic celestial woman brandishing a tri-colour … a combination of Mother Ireland, the Mother of Christ and the Angel of Resurrection.’47 Motherhood was used as a representation of caring, both matronly, as well as the suffering mother. Hence, we find the representation of motherhood being deployed both in imperialist and Nazi domination as well as in images of oppression, resulting either in passive suffering or in heroic resistance. In neither instance is there any deep challenge offered to the patriarchal social order that these images of motherhood represent. The ambivalence that surrounds motherhood appears to have a transcultural spread. Motherhood, thus, is a standard way of implementing authoritarian regimes, such as imperializing countries. The Fascist agenda of Motherhood in the Fatherland is another such myth with which women and her womb are targeted in order to reproduce domination.48 As Himani Bannerji reminds us,

Interrogating Motherhood

Any reader familiar with the critical cultural and historical writings of Anne McClintock, Laura Ann Stoler, Mariana Valverde or Anna Davin can remember the status of the colonial governments or white-settler colonies in the motherhood of white women … The weight of holding up the white ‘race’ and culture — that is, the physical and social reproduction of racism — fell with great pressure on white women. In this context, the ethnic nationalism of the German Third Reich may also be mentioned, as German mothers had to uphold the honour of an Aryan nation and their Nazi politics.49

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Nearer home, the imperializing burden that motherhood is capable of bearing is brought out by the instance of Katherine Mayo’s eugenicist Malthusian defence of the continuation of British rule in India is called Mother India.50 In their Introduction to From Gender to Nation Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov say, evoking the contexts of multiple nation-building witnessed in the last hundred years or so, Gender and Nation are social constructions, which intimately participate in the formation of one another: nations are gendered, and the topography of the nation is mapped in gendered terms (feminized soil, landscape and boundaries and

Another very telling instance of the way this ambivalence in the deployment of motherhood in the construction of nationalism may be found is in the case of South Africa. In a study published in the late 1980s, Deborah Gaitskell and Elaine Unterhalter demonstrate the way motherhood forms the staple of both Afrikaner nationalism and its contestants, African nationalism, as represented by the ANC. They comment in conclusion, ‘motherhood is explicitly part of the terminology and strategy of struggle of both Afrikaner nationalists and the ANC. But the implications of motherhood remain very different on both sides just as both sides envisage a very different future for the women and the nation as a whole’.52 In this juxtaposition of the representation and ideology of motherhood in two opposing trends of nationalism, we find the remarkable ways in which the deployment of the ideology differs from each other in accordance with the different power equations within which the nation-building and nationalism are conceived. Thus in the case of Afrikaner nationalism the conception varies between the three phases of Afrikaner nationalism. In the first phase the nation’s defeat in the Boer war is ‘most feelingly focused on and remembered in the fact of the suffering of Afrikaner mothers’.53 In the second phase, the woman as mother becomes the focus of the consolidation of Afrikaner wealth and identity in the new hegemonic state. When this domination is challenged in the third phase, Afrikaner motherhood is called upon to uphold white supremacy. Much more predictably, a reader like me who has gone through the experience of colonization and is involved in a precarious postcoloniality, aggravated by a globalized hegemony, the deployment of motherhood in African nationalism, roughly represented by the ANC touches more sympathetic

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masculine movement over these spaces). National mythologies draw on traditional gender roles and the nationalist narrative is filled with images of the nation as mother, wife, and maiden. Practices of nation-building employ social constructions of masculinity and femininity that support division of labour in which women reproduce the nation physically and symbolically and men protect, defend, and avenge the nation.51

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chords. Going back to my formative years, in the 1950s, we all felt deep solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement. The major women’s organization in the movement was the Federation of South African Women whose largest affiliate was the ANC Women’s League. Thus the campaign against the Pass Laws led by a woman trade union leader of the ANC was formulated in the following way:  We knew that you would be carrying a child or have your

Interrogating Motherhood

child in your back; and the police would be coming towards you wanting your pass and you won’t be able to run away and jump over that fence there and that would be the time the police will get you…And then who is going to look after the children when they take you to jail because you do not have a pass, or the pass is not right?54

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While there are early attempts to form solidarity in motherhood across races in order to strengthen women’s campaign against apartheid issues like passes, after the Soweto massacre in 1976, the revolutionary potential of black motherhood is emphasized. Motherhood is envisioned as more dynamic and activist, rather than passive and suffering. As African nationalism entered its later phases, disappointment with reforms which were seen as too late and too little, the image of motherhood has changed ‘from a protective status to a dynamic force for change’.55 While the Afrikaner movement has emphasized the nobility of motherhood, it seems to have accommodated the denigration and degradation of the lives of black mothers. The movement of black nationalism, therefore, has emphasized the more revolutionary dynamic face of motherhood that is no longer content to suffer passively. As feminists, how do we view this phase in one’s history? Was it, as the nationalists claimed, a process of authentication for a fulfilment of the search for one’s own identity? Or, was it just a manipulative attempt to set up a counter hegemony which hardly changed the rules of the game?56 NATION-BUILDING

We have already heard in Samita Sen’s analysis of the insistence of quality sons produced by Indian, mostly working

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class, mothers. The fuller implications of this come out in the contradictions that mark the campaign lodged by Margaret Sanger. As Linda Gordon has demonstrated, the contradictory impulses within Margaret Sanger, between radical cutting edge feminist politics and the urge to belong to the mainstream of responsible policy-making on reproductive health, meant that despite being jailed several times, she played into the hands of the ‘professionals’. The first group was the medical profession, increasingly wresting the power from the hands of women who had taken charge of maternity and birthing for centuries. It was the profession of gynaecology and obstetrics, dominated by male doctors, which took over the act of childbirth. Similarly, ‘birth-control’ (a formulation of Sanger’s) that was part of the women’s movement for autonomy and agency, and of the socialist, who tried to espouse the interests of the working class, came to be dominated by the elitist professionals who were firm eugenicists, who believed that contraception should be used to keep the population free of the undesirables and ‘unworthies’. The Janus-like quality of Margaret Sanger’s leadership of the birth-control movement in the USA may be read in her famous book Women and the New Race, published in 1920 with a preface by Havelock Ellis. She begins by commenting on the fact that control over their maternity was not an integral part of women’s organized protest, founded as it was on suffrage, legislation, property rights, and so on. ‘She had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature and only chains this strong could have bound her to her lot, as a brood animal for masculine civilization of the world’.57 She goes on to add, Caught in this ‘vicious circle’ woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings — human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot. Upon the rock of the enlightened, submissive maternity have these been founded, upon the product of such a maternity have they flourished.58

This was exactly the period when immigration into the USA even from Eastern Europe was made more strict. 71

When she broaches the theme of the ‘new race’ we get the full thrust of her control of maternity—it has precious little to do with the plight of the poor labouring women with whose lot she had started out. If one were to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy.59

Sanger was won over by the need for scientific accreditation for contraception for the cause of controlling population. In her preface to the Proceedings of the World Population Conference held in Salle Centrale, Geneva, August 20 to September 3, 1927, Margaret Sanger declared, with barely concealed triumphalism:

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It was the first time that biologists had been invited to participate with sociologists in the solution of economic problems, and, as has been seen, the biological principles played a very large part in the discussion.60

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The professional entry into the field of technology of reproduction meant that what began as a pro-poor and women’s movement gradually lost its critical edge and became yet another tool of exploitation of class and gender in the hands of capitalist patriarchy. The class bias of Malthusian population theory embraced the latent race prejudice in the eugenicist flavour of the imperialist hegemonic notion of ‘development’ and was used as a baton against both the ‘under-developed’ Third World countries and the women’s movement both in the First and the Third World countries.61 To quote Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta, There is a spectrum of opinions and arguments on the issue of population growth in the Third World countries and different interests lie behind the advocacy of family planning to bring down the fertility rates. The response of the new women’s

However, in her ‘historical overview’ of the debates on the ‘reproductive control and population policies’ in India from the late nineteenth century to 1950, relying on the pioneering work of Barbara Ramusack,63 Agnihotri-Gupta brings out how the mediative role of Margaret Sanger and her associates such as Agnes Smedley played an important role. Interestingly enough, some of the early male pioneers among the champions of contraception in India, such as Professor N.S. Phadke, himself a Marathi novelist, corresponded with Margaret Sanger and also published in her journal The Birth Control Review. As Ramusack cites in her book, Phadke wrote in 1924, ‘We must keep population proportional to our resources and so guide and control our [procreation] that our progeny will not contain even a single “unwanted child”.64 This fitted with the shrill imperialist propaganda that India was poor because it was overpopulated. A similar kind of demonizing of motherhood as practised in India are to be heard in two very disparate sources that we shall cite. The first one is captured by Meera Kosambi in her analysis of motherhood, Indian and western/Christian faced by Pandita Ramabai and her daughter,65 and the other is the more publicized account mentioned earlier, Katherine Mayo’s violent presentation of Indian nation-building that formed the argument of her notorious book Mother India. Meera Kosambi’s article captures an East-West encounter in Motherhood and Daughterhood centring around the life of Manorama, the daughter of Pandita Ramabai, and Sister Geraldine who helped the mother and daughter to convert to Christianity. The intricate relationship between Sister Geraldine, Pandita Ramabai and Manorama brings out the global dynamics of a so-called natural relationship like motherhood involving race, religious affiliation and social attitudes revealed in practices of motherhood, which, inevitably signalled acts of nation-building. It is in the tussle between two

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movement and women’s health advocates which may vary in strategies to be adopted, in general support women’s right to control their own fertility while being critical of the population control framework within which access to contraception and abortion is provided.62

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sets of mothers, one a Hindu convert to Christianity and the other a superior Christian missionary, that we find the dialectical relationship between motherhood in two kinds of nation-building. As Meera Kosambi brings out the complexity of colonial motherhood:

Interrogating Motherhood

But more than race or culture, the effective determinant of emotional affinity seems to be the western maternal authority (implicitly anchored to colonial power), which was repeatedly contested by Ramabai but unquestionably accepted by Manorama since childhood. In such unconditional exercise of spiritual, cultural, racial and colonial motherhood, Geraldine and her countless western counterparts saw the success of their evangelizing agenda and realized the possibility of emotional bonding.66

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Katherine Mayo’s Mother India has brought centre-stage the stake that motherhood held in the imperial hegemony of nation-building. There is a large body of literature that has grown up around Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. Mrinalini Sinha’s book has done adequate justice to this theme.67 I would merely like to draw the readers’ attention to Chapter 8 entitled ‘Mother India’ in her book. It is a completely demonized account of childbirth in a Hindu household, whether aristocratic rajas or out-caste paupers. The nationalist icon of Mother India is appropriated by Katherine Mayo from the indigenous Hindu population and its ability to build the Indian nation. Constant reference to the superiority of western birthing practice is pitted against the horrifying lack of hygiene and cleanliness in the traditional birthing practices of Hindus to justify the efficacy of British Imperial rule in India in order to produce a nation worth the name. Almost as an icon of this barbaric Hindu civilization which was meant to be civilized by the British Imperial mission, Mayo picks on the traditional midwife or the dai. According to the Hindu code, a woman in childbirth and in coalescence therefore is ceremonially unclean, contaminating all that she touches. Therefore only those become dais who are themselves of the unclean ‘untouchable’ class, the class whose filthy habits will be addressed by the orthodox

And so, at her dirtiest, the bearer of multiple contagions, she shuts herself in with her victim. . . One saw her Witch-of-Endor face through its vermin-infested elf locks, her hanging rags, her dirty claws, as she peered with festered and almost sightless eyes out over the stink-cloud she has raised.68

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Hindu as his good and sufficient reason for barring them from contact with himself. Katherine Mayo’s imagination is at its peak, hovering on the description of an evil within western fairy tales:

Dedicated to The People of India, Katherine Mayo held Indian motherhood hostage to the just cause of imperial nation-building, camouflaging the colonial exploitation and extraction of Indian resources to add to the wealth of the Anglo-American hegemonic order. NOTES 1. Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ed., Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009): 175. 2. ‘Banga amar! Janani amar!’ Dwijendra Lal Roy. Dwijendrageeti Samagro. Compiled by: Sudhir Chakraborty (Kolkata: Paschim Bangla Academy, 2008): 153; translated by Jasodhara Bagchi. 3. ‘Jedin sunil jaladhi hoite’. Dwijendrageeti Samagro: 164; translated by Jasodhara Bagchi. 4. Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1987], 2011). Quoted in Motherhood in India: 176. 5. Amales Tripathi, The Extremist Challenge (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1967); quoted in Motherhood in India: 178. 6. T. Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934, quoted in Motherhood in India: 175. 7. Ibid. 8. Partha Chatterjee. ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989): 236–37. Quoted in Motherhood in India, p.160. 9. Sumit Sarkar The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House, 1973): 296. Quoted in Motherhood in India: 179. 75

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10. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. Rachanavali (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1962), vol. 2: 80; translated by Chandreyee Niyogi for Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Krishna Raj ed. Motherhood in India: 173. 11. Ibid. 12. Chattopadhyay, 1962, vol. 1: 728–79; translated by Chandreyee Niyogi. Quoted in Motherhood in India: 172–75. 13. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Moment of Departure: Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankimchandra’, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986): 15. 14. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother (Almora: Advaita Ashram, 1900): 324; quoted in Motherhood in India: 176. 15. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 326; quoted in Motherhood in India: 177. 16. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980: 8–9). 17. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 324. Quoted in Motherhood in India: 177. 18. Ramendra Sundar was a polymath who wrote on a host of themes, including popular science and the philosophy of science. 19. Amales Tripathi, The Extremist Challenge (Kolkata: Orient Blackswan, 1967): 42; quoted in Motherhood in India: 178. 20. Bipin Chandra Pal, Nabajuger Bangla (Calcutta: Jugajatri, 1955); quoted in Motherhood in India: 178. 21. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 58; quoted in Motherhood in India: 179. 22. Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 176–179. 23. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 16; quoted in Motherhood in India: 170. 24. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 20; quoted in Motherhood in India: 170. 25. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother 21; quoted in Motherhood in India: 170. 26. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 53; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171. 27. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 1900: 54; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171.

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28. Sashibhushan Das Gupta, ‘Evolution of Mother Worship in India’, in Swami Madhavananda and R.C. Majumda, eds, Eminent Indian Women: From the Vedic Age to the Present (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1953: 83; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171. 29. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 56–57; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171. 30. Sister Nivedita, Kali the Mother: 80; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171. 31. Vivekananda, 1951, vol. 8: 57, in Vivekananda, Complete Works 10th ed (Advaita Ashram, Mayavati, 1951), 1978, 8 vols; quoted in Motherhood in India: 171–72. 32. Sumit Sarkar. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908. (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House: 1973): 296. 33. Ibid.: 293. 34. ‘Amar sonar bangla, ami tomaye bhalobashi’; translated by Jasodhara Bagchi; the song is also the national anthem of Bangladesh, words in Bengali at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Amar_Sonar_Bangla#Lyrics; accessed 13 June 2015. 35. Ibid. 36. Malini Bhattacharya, ‘Rabindrasahityey o Srishtite Narimuktir Bhabna’, in Nirmaner Samajikata o Adhunik Bangla Upanyas (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 1996): 56. 37. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ayi Bhubanamohonomohini’; translated by Jasodhara Bagchi; Bengali lyrics at http://www.geetabitan.com/ lyrics/A/ayi-bhubanmon-mohini.html; accessed 13 June 2015. 38. Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 179–81. 39. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sat koti santanere’; translated by Jasodhara Bagchi. 40. Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 181–82. 41. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India. 42. C.L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–1935 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993). 43. Mathew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, Smith and Elder, 1891): 182. 44. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2005); Appendix B. ‘European Colonialism and Racism at Home: The Case of Ireland’: 396–411.

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45. C.L.Innes, Women and Nation: 15. 46. Ibid.: 17. 47. Ibid.: 24–25. 48. Frigga Haug, ‘Mothers in Fatherland,’ New Left Review November-December 1988. 49. Himani Bannerji, Demography and Democracy Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012): 101–02. 50. See Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India. The Global Restructuring of an Empire (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006). 51. Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, eds, From Gender to Nation (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2002): 9–10. 52. Deborah Gaitskell and Elaine Unterhalter, ‘Mothers of the Nation: A Comparative Analysis of Nation, Race and Motherhood in the Afrikaner Nationalism and the African National Congress’. Quoted in Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias, eds, Woman Nation State (London; Macmillan, 1989): 76. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid.: 69. 55. Ibid.: 76. 56. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism’, in Maithreyi Krishnaraj, ed, Motherhood in India: 181. 57. Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1920): 2. 58. Proceedings of the World Population Conference (London: Edwin Arnold & Co., 1927): 3. 59. Ibid.: 44. 60. Ibid.: 13. 61. The debates that went on between 1800 to 1900 have been very usefully summarized by Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta in New Reproductive Technologies. Women’s Health and Autonomy: Freedom or Dependency? Indo-Dutch Studies in Development Alternatives (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2000). 62. Ibid.: 142. 63. Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, Women’s Studies International Forum 13 (1990): 309–21. 64. Cited in Agnihotri-Gupta, New Reproductive Technologies: 200.

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65. Meera Kosambi, ‘Motherhood in the East-West Encounter: Pandita Ramabai’s negotiation of “Daughterhood” and “Motherhood” ’, Feminist Review 65 (Summer 2000): 49–69. 66. Ibid.: 64. 67. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 68. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927): 91–92.

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4 Reproductive Technology: Motherhood under Capitalist Patriarchy The nation-building exercises, as discussed in Chapter 3, proved to be of ambiguous interest to motherhood in the context of poor toiling women in India and other Third World countries. It is these mothers who became ‘targets’ of what was considered population control, not just to save the Third World societies themselves but in the name of environmental degradation. This chapter will explore the multivalence of motherhood’s encounter with reproductive technology under capitalist patriarchy and the challenges it poses for feminist theorizing of motherhood. In the Autumn 1981 issue of Signs, Mary O’ Brien makes a very significant point about reproduction. She says: The nature of woman appears to differ from the nature of man precisely because she is somehow more ‘natural’… Women are inseparably entwined with nature, and, incapable, as de Beauvoir puts it, of transcendence … Man, on the other hand, appears to have two natures, as against woman’s single one. Man’s second nature is the one he makes himself … through the artificially created realms of civility, of politics, of philosophy, and above all, of freedom, has transcended the contingencies of biological being.1

O’Brien considers the available analysis of reproduction as opposed to production, as part of the private vs public debate as

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‘polemical’ rather than ‘critical’ and certainly not ‘dialectical’. She argues for a ‘socio-historical model that does not simply consign reproduction to the animal world … [but rather sees it as] … a necessary component of a “man-made world’,2 in order to analyse the ‘contradictions within reproduction as opposed to production processes or between the social relations of production on the one hand and the social relation of reproduction on the other’.3 Women have been made part of the ‘artificial world’, but have refused to remain in the private realm created by man. As part of this dialectical understanding, O’ Brien makes out a strong case for the reproductive technology of contraception. Contraception technology is not just one more technology comme les autres. The impact is upon family institutions that have persisted for a very long time. Reproductive technology is revolutionary in a similar but different sense to that in which productive technology was revolutionary in the seventeenth century. It produced a new science of political economy. The current transformation in reproductive process also demands a new science … It is exactly this science that is being sought under the indeterminate rubric of ‘women’s studies’ … confronting those engaged in them with the realization that, as Marx famously remarked, the point is not to describe the world but to change it’.4

She builds on this technological revolution as a major possibility of social transformation: Human emancipation … must emerge from an understanding of the dialectical movement within and between the relations of reproduction and production that makes it entirely possible for historical change to be initiated within the social relations of reproduction. History only now presents us with the possibility of understanding this idea and developing from it an autonomous feminist praxis and entirely original theoretical premises. It is an enormous challenge.5

While O’ Brien is extremely perspicacious to bring out the possibility of ‘the dialectical movement within and between the relations of reproduction and production’, the expectation she pinned on the revolutionary possibility of inducting 81

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technology in changing the social relationship of reproduction and that of production from a mere binary to a dialectical one has been belied. The technology that was supposed to have transformed the social relations of reproduction from taking a backseat, while production remains defined as the main highway, has had a rough battle to fight from the very beginning. It has had to capitulate to the compelling demands of capitalist patriarchy that has overtaken the world since the 1980s, at the beginning of which Mary O’Brien published her challenging article. In fact, among the Bauls, contraception is widely prevalent, but women still remained subordinate to the men. In France, contraception became prevalent long before the twentieth century, with only a little improvement in women’s space. Who controls the technology matters in all cases. Contraception that emerged as ‘the’ reproductive technology in the nineteenth century was seized upon by diverse groups to serve their own interests. One of the most ‘informed’ histories available on the subject is by the Socialist Feminist historian Linda Gordon in her book Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right,6 She has written a history of birth control as a social movement in the USA. She has outlined the social dynamics of the reception and dispensation of contraception as part of a social movement for women’s autonomy, achieved through the control of motherhood in their own lives, thus challenging the prevailing stereotype of motherhood as women’s ‘biological destiny’. The significance of contraception is challenging this long-prevailing myth that affected the sexual division of labour. Linda Gordon has brought out meticulously the social forces within which contraception made its way felt before it got established. What is remarkable is the way in which women’s issues gradually took the backseat. Although the coming and reception of contraception had a different history in different parts of the ‘industrial-military’ West, Linda Gordon has given us an extremely valuable insight into the social issues surrounding women’s control over their own motherhood in giving us their detailed history of ‘birth-control’ as a social movement in the USA. Much of the story unfolds around the iconic figure of Margaret Sanger (see also Chapter 3) in whose extraordinary campaigns we see

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the transformation of contraception as a technological tool for women’s autonomy, confronting the patriarchal domination in the existing social relations of reproduction, as Mary O’Brien had formulated in the ground-breaking essay with which we had begun, into a mere tool of social control of women, the poor and the marginal outcasts in the hands of medical professionals and the crass eugenicists among the professional community, increasingly in alliance with corporate capital. There were militant women in the movement to begin with, who were fighting for a social revolution involving women’s power. Sanger’s pamphlets on contraception were distributed by women who were arrested and legally prosecuted, as was the author of the pamphlets even when she was a celebrity. These women aroused the deep fundamentalist male hatred among the rulers. As Linda Gordon says, Police and prison guards were often hostile and violent to the birth-control prisoners, especially the women, for their advocacy of birth-control seemed to violate every male fantasy about what women should be like.7

We must remember that these women were seen as refusing ‘motherhood’, the goal of their ‘biological destiny’. In an interesting specific instance given by Linda Gordon, The detective arresting Agnes Smedley in 1918 told her that ‘he wished he had me in the South, that there I would be strung up to the first lamp-post: I would be lynched’. I tried to tell him that he was on the wrong side of the trenches… Smedley recalled that he only threatened her again.8

The origin of the birth control movement was socialist in nature; therefore, it was strong in its bias for empowering the working-class women in particular. To quote Linda Gordon again, Commitment to action was strong among the birth-­controllers. As socialists, most of them believed that working-class strength was the key to political progress, and thus they wanted above all to reach the working-class people with their message and 83

service … As feminists they wanted to improve the position of women.9

However, socialism in the USA in the first two decades in the twentieth century did not speak in one voice.

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Although most supported the principle of voluntary motherhood, many believed that under socialism prosperity would make women willing to have as many children as came naturally. At the same time they supported the division of labour that made women solely responsible for child-rearing and men wholly responsible for production.10

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Though there was a widespread association of birth control with free love and the weakening of the normal family stability, ‘Margaret Sanger was frequently accused of free loveism and always denied it. The origins of birth control as a women’s movement were in free love.’11 From the very beginning, however, the technology of contraception was fraught with the possibilities of being inscribed within patriarchal class politics, besides its twin inspiration in women-centred demands of voluntary motherhood and the claims on women’s own sexual drive as expressed in free love. For instance, there are two uncomfortable accompaniments of technology: one was the population question as formulated by Neo-Malthusianism and the other was the eugenics which espoused contraception as a device of the Social Darwinism of the survival of the fittest and the rooting out of the ‘unfit’. Such imperialist hegemonic lineages marred the potential of bringing power to women and made it complicit with patriarchal domination over motherhood. As Linda Gordon has demonstrated, the contradictory impulses within Margaret Sanger, between radical cutting edge feminist politics and the urge to belong to the mainstream of responsible policy-making on reproductive health meant that despite being jailed several times, she played into the hands of the ‘professionals’. The first group was the medical profession increasingly wresting the power from the hands of women who had taken charge of maternity and birthing for centuries. It was the profession of gynaecology and obstetrics, dominated by male doctors which took over the act of childbirth (see

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also Chapter 3). Similarly, ‘birth control’ (a formulation of Sanger’s) that was part of the women’s movement for autonomy and agency, and of the socialists, who tried to espouse the interests of the working class, came to be dominated by the elitist professionals who were firm eugenicists, who believed that contraception should be used to keep the population free of the undesirables and unworthies. The potential eugenicist (and Malthusian) bias, visible even in N. S. Phadke’s view (see Chapter 3), was institutionalized in the Sholapur Eugenics Education Society or in the Madras New Malthusian League founded by some Tamil brahmins, which even sold contraceptives and published Madras Birth Control Bulletin.12 Though the male advocates of contraceptives kept in touch with Margaret Sanger, Agnes Smedley, her associate, cautioned her about the need to underplay the idea of reproductive control by women and women’s freedom in relation to contraception, because the idea of increased personal freedom of Indian women might be unpalatable to Indians.13 The canniness of this advice becomes evident in Gandhi’s reluctance to provide any information on contraception to Indian women, only advocating strict sexual abstinence (brahmacharya) in order to regulate the family size. ‘Birth control by contraception is race suicide’, he said. He believed that women would reject artificial methods of contraception as being inconsistent with the dignity and such methods would increase the appetite for sex and would result in the dissolution of the marriage bed.14 This did not entirely prevent the first organized group of Indian women fighting for women’s rights from taking up the issue of birth control. From their 1931 annual conference after the All India Women’s Conference was founded in 1927,15 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the first Organizing Secretary of the AIWC, demanded that ‘birth control was a sacred and inalienable right of every woman to possess the means to control her body and no God or man can attempt to deprive her of that right without perpetrating an outrage on her womanhood.’16 This was written, despite all the underpinnings of imperialist designs that were suspected and subsequently further uncovered in the notorious publications of Katherine Mayo (see

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Chapter 3) in her deliberate appropriation of the nationalist motto ‘Mother India’ in advocating the continuation of British Rule in India under the guise of addressing women’s health problems, particularly those relating to maternity, in India.17 Thus we see the co-optation of women’s demands for using the technology of contraception and abortion for ensuring her own control over her own motherhood into a more ­hegemonically articulated demand for population control. This process included both the objectives of eliminating the ‘unfit’ and ensuring the best race of mankind. We also find the technology being subsumed by the class bias of the neo-Malthusians and the racial bias of the eugenicists. When the third wave of the feminist struggle in the West took up the issue from the 1960s and 1970s, we found important and interesting re-grouping of the movement around the question of the ideological foundations of the International Feminist movement. In her comprehensive book Women, Population and Global Crisis,18 Asoka Bandarage has brought out the severe limits suffered by the feminist expectations of contraception as a weapon for women’s liberation while the socially well-endowed upper class women could benefit due to their ability to access the necessary prior information about the use of technology, necessary social and medical aftercare demanded by some of the more invasive contraceptive technologies like IUD or Norplant and such other sophisticated contraceptive devices. As Bandarage says very aptly

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The ‘contraceptive revolution’ has had differential effects upon different classes and races of women. While more privileged classes of women are able to exercise greater caution and choice in the use of contraceptives, poorer women and women of colour are frequently the victims of experimental contraceptives and unethical and coercive promotional strategies. This seems to be the case with regard to all modern contraceptives, ranging from the pill to the non-surgical sterilized quinacrine.19

Bandarage establishes the position that marks the feminist questioning of the Neo-Malthusian fear of the breeding ‘Other’ and the eugenicist emphasis on physically and mentally ‘unfit’ children.20 The book makes very telling references

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to ‘Something Like a War’, made by feminist documentary film maker Deepa Dhanraj, who brought out the extremely hazardous condition in which the mass sterilizations were ­c onducted. 21 Elizabeth Bumiller, who had advocated ­population control and expressed it by opposing the message of blessing for a young Hindu Bride, ‘May you be the mother of a hundred sons’,22 was revolted by visiting a mass sterilization camp and commented: ‘But once I saw the operation for myself, my reaction was that treating women as if they were cattle could not possibly be the most humane or even the most effective method of population control’.23 The classist and racist bias was even more socially articulated as women-friendly campaigns such as Safe Motherhood programmes grew in number. Bandarage refers to a review of the World Bank Report, India’s Family Welfare: Towards a Reproductive and Child Health Approach (1955) by Dr. Mohan Rao, an Indian expert on Public Health who is known for his friendliness to the Indian feminist movement: ‘Rao points out that a very large proportion of maternal deaths in India are attributable to under-nutrition, anaemia, infections and communicable diseases and other poverty-related causes which are obscured by new reproductive ‘rights’ focus of the Bank report.’24 He also usefully refers to Vina Mazumdar contesting the claim that the state of women’s health in India has improved due to fertility reduction. The architect of the famous Status Committee Report Towards Equality brought out by the Government of India in 1974, Vina Mazumdar ‘has argued, improvement of the status of women in India is not the consequence of family planning programmes, as has been believed by the population planners; rather it is a more complex outcome resulting from rise in the age of marriage, education, employment, better living conditions, general awareness among women and so on’.25 One of the important offshoots of the new forms of organizing was the emergence of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), which addressed the problem of reproductive rights of women from the South. With a strong presence in India, the Caribbean and in Latin America, woman’s right to articulate her own conditions of motherhood was formulated on the eve of the World Population

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Conference in Cairo that preceded the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Writing on Population and Reproductive Rights from feminist perspectives from the South, Sonia Correa from Brazil sums up the debates and strategies of action in preparation for the Cairo Conference in 1994. Clearly differentiating themselves from the earlier imperialistic formulation, Correa tries to articulate the standpoint of the feminists of the South. Since motherhood is a practice embedded in culture, which as we have seen above, varies across the world, the feminist movements in the South, fighting for reproductive rights must put up a three-pronged fight: cultural practices, state accountability and marketplace challenges. In the cultural sphere, Correa states: Our challenge, therefore, is to strengthen and support all aspects of cultural transformation and continuity that respect women’s integrity without falling into cultural relativism.26 Under ‘state accountability’, Correa says, ‘We must work out two levels — pressing the executive and legislative branches to introduce and ratify policies and holding the judiciary for upholding national law.27

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The trickiest, as it has turned out, are the marketplace challenges. Women should opt for women-centred methods to control their reproduction and protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. Correa warns against the greedy invasions of the market.

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Women should also monitor the role of the multinationals in developing contraceptives and new reproductive technologies. Much of the recent contraception and biogenetic research violates the limits of ethical standards and we must use international scientific ethical principles to monitor such research.28

Two micro studies based on slums in Calcutta indicate the women’s exclusive reliance on abortion and ligation, in the absence of any proper infrastructure to help the women with spacing their pregnancies, While most of the women interviewed who were negotiating motherhood were in favour of small families, they did not have access to the means that

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would ensure they had the same. These women disliked the toll abortion took on their bodies, but they were forced to adopt this disliked method as it was what was conveniently available to them. As Paromita Banerjee reports, ‘Most of the women who had had abortion favoured planning a family through both spacing and terminating childbirth.’29 This is combined with ‘their lack of knowledge about available options for contraception, lack of access to birth control pills or IUDS and quite often their fear of these methods.’30 About the same women, Himani Bannerji says, ‘Among the women we spoke with there is a widespread knowledge about one-shot surgical measures, but very little of any “planning” method that requires clinical supervision, check-ups, some monetary resources, and has a long-term planning horizon.’31 The women living in slums are self-empowered enough to know the needs of rationally spaced families, but with all the rhetoric of reproductive ‘rights’, the Indian state in cahoots with the international bodies in charge of population control, cannot provide the right kind of resources to them. Birth control practices involve women’s negotiation with the complexity of conjugal lives that put severe limits to w ­ omen’s access to contraception. In her meticulous and sensitive study of poor women in Calcutta slums, Arna Seal uncovers the class context of choices in contraception. There is a clear prevalence of terminal methods, especially on women, in the way women exercise the choice regarding motherhood. Female sterilization appeared to be the most favoured of the methods in the sample of one hundred women that the book covers. It appears to be the method that required least negotiations with the husbands’ communities Not only was it the least bothersome, but sometimes even brought monetary incentives.32 However, the coming of reproductive technology, instead of maturing the dialectical relationship between production and reproduction as Mary O’ Brien had predicted, further intensified the domination of production relations in a market-driven society. It intensified the exploitation and marginalization of poor women and other women, increasingly vulnerable in a globalized neo-liberal capitalist world. If we follow the work of Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta, during the last thirty years when

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the capitalist world entered the phase of neo-liberal reform, reproductive technology entered a phase of invasive intensification. New Reproductive Technology, or its more euphemistic nomenclature of Assisted Reproductive Technology, entered into a whole new ballgame of proliferation. What is more immediately noticeable is that the original socialist impulse that accompanied the introduction of contraception and was supposed to empower toiling women to make motherhood voluntary was entirely reversed. The eugenicist and professionalized response that we have seen Margaret Sanger succumb to grew more and more prominent. The anti-natalist, pro-abortion Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic technology that was researched and promoted in the West to promote prevention of the birth of ‘unfit’ babies that the eugenicists talked about, was promptly adapted to the noxious cultural practice of son-preference prevalent among the relatively prosperous families in the Third World. In India, son-preference is built into the structure of hegemony in the patriarchal social order. In her Presidential Address to the section on ancient Indian history in the Indian History Congress in 2008, the feminist scholar Kumkum Roy brought out meticulously the heterogeneity of practices in Ancient India in ‘Towards a History of Reproduction’, ultimately coming down on the masculinist thrust of women’s reproduction. She quoted the following passage from M.S. Valiathan’s The Legacy of Caraka, the medical treatise in ancient India:

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The gods, sages, physicians, pupils, patients, attendants, and all other dramatis personae in Caraka were invariably men; male progeny was preferred and a special ritual during early pregnancy to obtain a son was prescribed approvingly; the attendant whispered the glad tidings of the birth of a son – not daughter – to the mother.33

Such practices have parallels in our times. Kumkum Sangari cites a poem of Gharelu Laj (Homely advice) by a certain Dr. Samar Sen who describes how to conceive a male child. Sangari says, ‘A historical, sociological or medical analysis may be premature; instead of a more “expressive” or descriptive form, I have chosen verse.’34

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The poem literally describes the things man and woman do before, during and after conception in the hope of having a son. The desire to have sons is an aspect of patriarchy and is part and parcel of the oppression, devaluation and exploitation of Indian women. The verse is a part of Dr. Samar Sen’s Gharelu Laj which is a popular collection of Home Remedies. India suffers from a declining sex ratio and the wedding of this deep-seated traditional son-preference with the advanced technology of sex-selective abortion has wreaked havoc in many parts of India. Campaigns against this inhuman practice has succeeded in getting the state to enacting a law ­Pre-Conception-Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act, 1994, against its misuse, but feminists have found it very difficult to get it implemented. Much effort had gone into getting it enacted. Unlike most of the internationally planned Population Control methods used in the Third World, sexselective abortion is not targeted towards the poor and the ill-informed. This anti-women sex-selective abortion, therefore, is all the more noxious in its gendered inhumanity. In India, for instance, it is in the so-called Green Revolution belt of Punjab-Haryana that this technology has been adopted so widely, that the sex-ratio, already skewed against females has gone down drastically. (836 girls to 1000 boys). These new Reproductive Technologies (RT), clearly targeting the reproducers themselves by inducing sex-selective abortion have reduced the female population, aggravating what Amartya Sen had characterized as ‘missing women’, and thus intensifying the general neglect of the health of women, and girl children in particular.35 China, under the leadership of Den Xiaoping, adopted a one child policy, and that led to massive female foeticides, which had all but disappeared in Communist China under Mao’s leadership. According to a UNFPA report of 2012, China, along with South Korea, India, Bangladesh and countries of the South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) has become the major killing sites of female foetuses.36 The use of latest technology to further son-preference, which has roots in so-called traditional cultural thinking, is certainly an ironical comment on the so-called glorification of motherhood that we have seen in the Indian culture, for instance.

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Increasing medicalization and technologization of motherhood has facilitated servicing infertile couple in a new language of genetic mothering. Going by the name of New Reproductive Technology, it has been called the dismembering of women whose birthing process is held hostage by a section of the ­scientific and technological community; it has angered feminists from the early 1980s. Thus Adrienne Rich’s celebration of the experience of motherhood in the title of her book Of Women Born is negated in another book Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women.37 Presented at the Second International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Holland in April 1984, kindly note the title of the panel in which the papers were presented: ‘The Death of the Female’. It represented ‘the feminist perspective on the new reproductive technologies, emphasizing sex pre-determination, but including in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and embryo transfer.’38 So fraught was this panel that it resulted in the ‘founding of a new “Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive Technologies” (FINNRET)’.39 The last thirty years have seen a lot of ‘resistance’ to this invasion of what has been called Assisted Reproductive Technology. The natalism of this phase of RT, combined with the emphasis on genetic parenting, makes it complicit with patriarchy. However, despite active ‘resistance’ from feminist groups, both international and local, Reproductive Technology has continued to proliferate. In this field it is worth following the arguments of Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta who has been researching, at least for the past two decades, the field of Assisted Reproductive Technology. In an essay published in 2012, Agnihotri-Gupta says:

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In keeping with the consumer culture of our times and the free market of a globalized world, women’s reproductive bodies and their body parts (such as eggs, embryos and uteruses) are entities which have been turned into commodities that are donated or traded, either for use by infertility specialists or research scientists. The ‘reproductive industry’ is mimicking capitalist industrial production by searching new markets and cohorts of consumers, seeking cheaper labour power through practices including ‘offshoring’ and outsourcing.40

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While this proliferation has made it possible for some categories, marginalized so far, such as single women or lesbians, to achieve what is the conventional meaning of ‘family’ and enjoy the experience of motherhood by conception, for countless poor women strewn across the Third World, surrogate pregnancy and motherhood is fraught with the lack of decision making, agency or even a recognition of an arduous ‘labour’ with all the ambiguity of the term: Most surrogates and their families do not recognize surrogacy as paid labour performed by women. The in-laws and husbands of surrogates perceive surrogacy as a familial obligation and a duty. The striking absence of surrogacy as work in the narratives of surrogates indicates that the surrogates do not resist this image of women as selfless dutiful women whose primary role is to serve the family.41

The New Reproductive Technology has, as we have seen, acquired the euphemistic title Assisted Reproductive Technology, to spread an ideology of natalism at the cost of women who have fewer resources to get on in life, and who are paying the price of living in an ever-sharpening inequality brought on by the neo-liberal globalization that has overtaken our world since the 1980s. In order to fulfil the desire for genetic children among infertile couples who are much more prosperous, the wombs of women struggling with poverty are being hired. Through egg-donation and surrogate motherhood, human beings wanting to parent genetic children are being serviced. As Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta’s latest research brings out, what Arlie Hochschild had characterized as the ‘commoditization of the intimate life’, meaning the limited sphere of care gap, has spawned into the commoditization of the very process of birthing itself. Agnihotri-Gupta has confessed that when she first presented a paper on the future of Indian women under the New Reproductive Technologies, she had not envisaged the scale on which the use of these technologies would grow worldwide in such a short period of time. It had, in fact, evolved into a full-fledged industry. Above all, I could not have imagined the participation of Indian women as (re)producers in the outsourcing taking place in the field.42 93

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Instead of adding to the dialectics of production and reproduction, market-driven research on reproduction in a globalized capitalist world has merely fed into the mainstream mode of production.

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NOTES 1. Mary O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’, Signs 7, 1 (Autumn 1981): 147. 2. Ibid.: 150. 3. Ibid.: 148. 4. Ibid.: 150. 5. Ibid.: 157. 6. Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right. Birth Control in America (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 7. Ibid.: 229. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.: 230. 10. Ibid.: 237. 11. Ibid.: 243. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid.: 207. 15. Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women’s Struggle: A History of All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990 (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1990). 16. Ibid.: 204–05. 17. Mrinalini Sinha, Spectres of Mother India: The Global Resructuring of an Empire (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2006). 18. Asoka Bandarage, Women, Population and Global Crisis: A Political and Economic Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1997). 19. Ibid.: 81. 20. Ibid.: 65–114; see especially the extensive discussion in Chapter 2: ‘Politics of Global Population Control’. 21. Ibid.: 77. 22. Elizabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India (New York: Fawcett Books, 1990): 259. 23. Bandarage, Women, Population and Global Crisis: 77. 24. Ibid.: 95. 25. Ibid.: 95–96.

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26. Sonia Correa, Population and Reproductive Rights. Feminist Perspectives from the South (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994): 104. 27. Ibid.: 106. 28. Ibid.: 109. 29. Paromita Banerjee, ‘Women as Bonded Reproducer for the Family’, Canadian Woman’s Studies, 17, 2 (Spring 1997): 120. 30. Ibid. 31. Himani Bannerji, ‘Conceptualizing the Grounds of Research’, Canadian Woman’s Studies, 17, 2 (Spring 1997): 126; see also: Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘From Heroism to Empowerment: Identity and Globality among the Slum Women of Chidipur’, in Identity, Locality and Globalization: Experiences of India and Indonesia. (New Delhi: ICSSR, 2001): 211–38. 32. Arna Seal, Negotiating Intimacies. Sexuality Birth Control and Poor Household (Kolkata, Stree 2000); see especially Chapter 5 ‘Negotiating Birth Control: 73–95. 33. M.S. Valiathan, The Legacy of Caraka (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006): xiv. 34. Kumkum Sangari, ‘If You Would Be the Mother of a Son’, in Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? edited by Rita Arditti, Renate Duelle Klein, and Shelley Minden, (London: Pandora Press, 1984): 286. 35. Amartya Sen, ‘Missing Women’, British Medical Journal 304 (1992): 586–97. 36. See A.K. Bagchi, ‘Global Social Reproduction and the Neoliberal Order’. Paper presented at workshop on ‘Economic Crisis and the Reorganization of the Global Economy: Trans/regional Responses’, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 10 September, 2011. 37. Gena Corea et al. eds., Man-made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women (London: Hutchinson, 1985); The Preface by Janice Raymond says, ‘The essays collected in the volume originated as a presentation at the ‘Second International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Holland’, in April 1984’. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta, ‘Parenthood in the Era of Reproductive Outsourcing and Global Assemblages’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 18, 1 (2012): 10.

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41. Amrita Pande, ‘Not an “Angel” not a “Whore”: Surrrogates as “Duty” Workers in India’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 16, 2 (2009): 158; quoted in Agnihotri-Gupta, ‘Parenthood in the era of Reproductive Outsourcing and Global Assemblages’: 21. 42. Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta, ‘Reproductive Bio-Crossing: Indian Egg-Donors and Surrogates in the Globalized Fertility Market’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5, 1 (Spring 2012): 20.

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Conclusion Feminist theorizing of motherhood takes up a long journey from the unfolding of the special bonding of mothers, daughters and their offspring, to women who have thought it important to deny the biological destiny of motherhood, to working mothers of different classes, some of whom have had to act as caregivers to children of more privileged class and race, and many such categories. Experientially articulated this entire terrain of motherhood consists of the agony and ecstasy of motherhood as a celebratory marker of gender that adds to the glory of women’s lives. For feminist theorizing, however, there is the other great block of what Adrienne Rich had perceptively called motherhood as institution. Here women as mothers are made to stand for the most authoritarian of social orders. Therefore it is motherhood that is manipulated most relentlessly by the nation-building process, both by the colonizer and the colonized. Central to the class and race agenda of the nationstate, the axe of motherhood falls the heaviest on the poor working women of the world: the slaves, the ethnic minority and migrant working women in the West and the poor women of many marginalized categories in the Third World whose motherhood is held hostage in the neo-Malthusian and Social Darwinian eugenicism of Capitalist Patriarchy. The turn towards neo-liberal globalization during the last three postcolonial decades has sharpened this exploitation with the unregulated flourishing of reproductive technology in its many avatars. Thus the Private has taken over the Public and has brought out unforeseen possibilities of the feminist slogan ‘The Personal Is Political’. The manipulation and control of the ‘local’ in women’s private lives by the global market-centred

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world order has made the challenge of feminist theorizing of motherhood extremely controversial. This book celebrates motherhood and highlights the new challenges before those who believe that motherhood is central for theorizing feminism in our times. My primary commitment, in writing this book, is to human beings who are, after all, ‘of women born’.

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References Agnihotri-Gupta, Jyotsna, 2012a. ‘Parenthood in the Era of Reproductive Outsourcing and Global Assemblages’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 18, 1: 7–29. ———, 2012b. ‘Reproductive Bio-crossings: Indian Egg-donors and Surrogates in the Globalized Fertility Market’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5, 1 (Spring): 25–61. Arnold, Matthew, 1891. On the Study of Celtic Literature, London: Smith and Elder. Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, 2011. ‘Global Social Reproduction and the Neoliberal Order’. Paper presented at workshop on Economic Crisis and the Reorganization of the Global Economy: Trans/ Regional Responses, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, 10 September. ———, 2005. Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bagchi, Jasodhara, 2011. ‘Reading Mother/Reading Swadesh: The Case of Rabindranath’s Gora’ in Rabindranath and the Nation, edited by Swati Ganguly and Abhijit Sen, Kolkata: Punascha, in association with Visva-Bharati. 2011: 205–11. ———, 2005. ‘Matriliny within Patriliny’, in A Space of Her Own, edited by Leela Gulati and Jasodhara Bagchi, New Delhi: SAGE: 223–36. ———, 2001. ‘From Heroism to Empowerment: Identity and Globality among the Slum Women of Khidirpur’, in Identity, Locality and Globalization: Experiences of India and Indonesia. New Delhi: ICSSR: 225–38. ———, 1999. ed., Indian Women: Myth and Reality, Hyderabad: Sangam Books 1997. Bandarage, Asoka, 1997. Women, Population and Global Crisis: A Political and Economic Analysis, London: Zed Books. Banerjee, Paromita, 1997. ‘Women as Bonded Reproducer for the Family’, Canadian Woman’s Studies 17, 2 (Spring 1997): 118–21.

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Bannerji, Himani, 2012. Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. ———, 2002. ‘Re-generation: Mothers and Daughters in Bengali Literary Space’, in Literature and Gender: Essays for Jasodhara Bagchi, edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Sajni Mukherjee, Hyderabad: Orient Longman: 185–215. ——— and Jasodhara Bagchi, 1997. ‘Modernization, Poverty, Gender and Women’s Health in Calcutta’s Khidirpur Slum’, Canadian Woman’s Studies 17, 2 (Spring): 122–128. Berger, John, 1972. Ways of Seeing, London: B.B.C. and Penguin Books. Bhattacharya, Malini, 1995. ‘Rabindrasahityey o Srishtite Narumuktir Bhabna’, in Nirmaner Samajikata o Adhunik Bangla Upanyas, Kolkata: Orko Prakashani: 80–94. Bhattacharya, Rinki, ed., 2006, Janani: Mothers, Daughters, Motherhood. New Delhi: SAGE. Bhattacharya, Sukumari, 1995. The Legends of Devi, Calcutta, Orient Longman. Briffault, R, 1927. The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions, 3 vols. New York: Macmillan. Chakravarti, Uma, 2003. Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens, Kolkata, Stree. Chatterjee, Partha, 1986. ‘The Moment of Departure: Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankimchandra’, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Delhi, Oxford University Press: 54–84. Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 1962. Rachanavali. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2 vols. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2008. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, general ed., 3rd ed, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 105–121. Chodorov, Nancy, 1979. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. London: University of California Press. Chowdhury, Indira, 1998. The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— (-Sengupta), 1995. Colonial Masculinity. The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, 2012. ‘Social Reproduction’, Journal of Social and Economic Development 14, 1: 103–12. ———, Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, ed., 2010a. Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. ———, Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, and Lakshmi Lingam. 2010b. ‘Maternity Benefit in India’, Draft, ILO, Mumbai. ———, Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, ed., 1990. ‘Review of Women’s Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly 25, 17 (28 April). ———, Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, and Ratna Sundaram and Abusaleh Sharif, eds., 1988. Gender, Population and Development, New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Kosambi, Meera, 2000. ‘Motherhood in the East-West Encounter: Pandita Ramabai’s Negotiation of “Daughterhood” and “Motherhood” ’, Feminist Review 65 (Summer): 49–67. Lerner, Gerda, 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy, New York, Oxford University Press. Mukhim, Patricia, 2013. Women’s Entitlement to Land and Livestock in Matrilineal Meghalaya’, in Women, Land and Power in Asia, edited by Govind Kelkar and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, New Delhi: Routledge. Mayo, Katherine, Mother India, London: Jonathan Cape, 1927. Mitchell, Juliet, Nancy F. Cott and Ann Oakley, eds., 1986. What Is Feminism? New York: Pantheon. Nandy, Ashis, 1980. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, Mary, The Politics of Reproduction. 1986. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———, 1981. ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’, Signs 7, 1 (Autumn): 144–57. Olcott, Jocelyn, 2011.’ Introduction: Researching and Rethinking the Labors of Love’, American Historical Review 91, 1: 1–27. Omvedt, Gail, 1984. ‘Patriarchy and Matriarchy’, in ‘Contribution to Women’s Studies Series’. Part I Mimeo. (Working Paper) edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj. Pal, Bipin Chandra, 1955. Nabajuger Bangla, Calcutta: Jugajatri. Pande, Amrita, 2009. ‘Not an “Angel” not a “Whore”: Surrrogates as “Duty” Workers in India’. Journal of Gender Studies 16, 2: 141–73. Rich, Adrienne, 1977. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, London: Virago.

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Index abortion, xi, xvi, xviii, 8, 86, 89, 91. See also contraception; patriarchy adoption, xvi, xvii, 93 AIWC, 10, 85 American practice Black women and, 23–24 child-rearing, 20–21 of minority, 22–23 White Mothers; movement, 20 Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), xvi, xxvii, 88, 97 FINNRETY, 92 fragmented process, xvii Jyotsna Agnihotri-Gupta on, 89–93 Mary O’ Brien on, 80–82 as new, 89–91 Sonia Correa on, 87–88 surrogacy, 92–93 Bandrage, Asoka, 86–88 Brahmins and knowledge, xi birthing/childbirth, xii, xvii, xx, 10, 22, 44, 64 cf. with West. See Mayo, Katherine capitalism, x, xxv, xxvi, 14, 29, 80–82, 93–94, 97

caste, x, 5, 13, 80. See also Hindu social relations; patriarchy childbirth. See birthing Chakravarti, Uma on, 7, 33 colonial rule as civilizing, 1. See also Katherine Mayo James Mill, 6 Ireland, 68. See nation-building motherhood, 97. See also motherhood Pandita Ramabai, 73 as rakshasha, 59 South Africa. See nation-building contraception, 82, 83 Agnes Smedley on, 73–83 AIWC on, 85 DAWN on, 87–88 free love, 84 Katherine Mayo on, 68, 73, 85 Linda Gordon on, 82–83 Margaret Sanger on, 71–73, 82–83, 90 M. K. Gandhi on, 85 Mary O’ Brien on, 16, 80 N.S. Phadke, on 73, 85 PC–PNDT Act 1994, 8, 91

de Beauvoir, Simone, 15–17, 32, 33, 45 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 20–21 English, Deirdre, 20–21 family, x, xi, xiv, xvi, xxiii, 1, 18. See also female foeticide; motherhood female foeticide, x, 8, 91 PC–PNDT Act, 1994, 8, 91 feminism, ix, xxi, 1–2, 16, 97. See also motherhood; patriarchy and andarmahal, 64–65 Adrienne Rich. See Rich, Adrienne Ann Oakley on, 17 Indian scholars on, 7 Juliet Mitchell on, 17, 18 mothers as low status, 45 Mary O’ Brien on, 7, 16 male supremacy, 8, 15–17 Sheila Rowbotham on, 17 western political divisions, 18–10 Woolf, Virginia, 41–42 Ferguson, Ann, 17–19 Freud, Sigmund, xxiv, 14, 43–44 gender, x, 99. See also patriarchy caste-class axis, 8 division of labour, xii and motherhood, 2. See also motherhood

and nation-building, 68–69 See also nation-building

Index

Social Darwinism, 84, 85–86, 97 socialism, 83–84 women’s no choice, 88–89

Hindu social relations, xi, xii as barbarous, 6 in Gora, 37–40 Hindu Code Bill, 3. See also law Shakti, 2, 51 joint family, 57 kanyadan, 33 mothers, 42. See also mothers; motherhood women as powerless, xii, 5–8 ideology, 9, 12 Aryan woman, 6–7, 9 of middle class, 2, 3, 11, 13, 28 Indian scholars on, 7 male supramacist, 8, 16 son preference. See motherhood women and sacrifice, 64. labour, 12 black women, 18 childbirth as, 15, xxii, xxiii sexual division of, xviii, 44–45 white middle class, 17–18 working class, 13–14, 97 laws, 3, 5, 6, 91 Lerner, Gerda, vs Engels, 45 Kakar, Sudhir, xiii Kitzinger, Sheila, 21, 22. See also birthing MacKinnon, Catherine, xxii Manusmriti, xii, xiii–xiv 105

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Marxism, xiii–xiv, xxi, xxiv, 16, 18 masculinity, x–xii, 11, 14, 15, 18, 44, 67. See also Freud, Sigmund matriliny, xv–xvi, 125 Mayo, Katherine, 10, 68, 73–75 Moss, Ellen, 24–26 Mother Goddess, 46–48, 53. See also patriarchy Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay on, 55 cf. with human mother, 47 Durga, Kali, 56 primacy of sons, 52 Sister Nivedita on, 57 motherhood, ix, xi, xvi–xviii, xx, xxii, xxiv–xxv, 2, 3, 21–23. See also reproduction Adrienne Rich, 37. See also Rich Adrienne agency, x, xxi Adams, Alice on, 24–26 Bharatmata, 11, 52, 59 birthing. See birthing/ childbirth biological destiny, 81–82 blacks, 70 breast–feeding, xviii Collins, Patricia Hill, 23–24 and daughters, xiii, 66, 92 denial of, xvi, 99 egg, fertilization, x, 7–8 gendering process, 34. See also gender Gora, 63 and eugenics, 8, 68. See also contraception Moss, Ellen, 26–27

Mother Goddesses. See Mother Goddesses mother-son dyad, xiii, xvi, xxii, 1, 4, 8, 11, 13, 52, 64–65, 91 sexuality, xi Mother India, 36 mothers, iv–xii, 11 as all–sacrificing, 3 black, 24 child relations, xxi empress as mother, 9, 12–14 lower class, 15 White mothers’ movement, 20–21 nationalism, 12, 51, 56, 64 African, 69–70. See also nation-building Aurobindo Ghosh, 58 ‘Bande Mataram’, 52, 53, 57, 64 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay on, 55, 56–57, 58 Bipin Chandra Pal, 6, 43, 58–59 Bharat Mata, painting, 59–60 Mother Goddesses. See Mother Goddesses Sister Nivedita. See Sister Nivedita Tagore, 62–65 Vivekananda, 58, 60, 62 nation-building, xxvii, 1, 10 colonies, 66 Ireland, 66–68 Katherine Mayo, 74–75, 85 motherhood, use of, 97

patriarchy, ix–xiv, xviii, xxi, xxiv, 9, 97. See also Hindu social relations; ideology and Assisted Reproductive Technology. See Assisted Reproductory Technology image, 11 Gerda Lerner on, 44 Mother Goddess, 47, 51. See also Mother Goddesses production, xiii, xviii, xxv, 89, 93. See also capitalism; reproduction Mary O’ Brien, 16 women as only reproducers, 16 Ramakrishna Paramahansa. See Sister Nivedita representation, 32–36, 63, 66, 68 Ashapurna Devi, trilogy, 36 Gora, 37–38, 41 Swadeshi movement, 42, 64 reproduction, xxi, 94. See also birthing as ‘engendering’, 34 of humans, xiii women, confined to, 2, 4 Kumkum Roy on, 7–8

Linda Gordonon, 82–84 Mary O’ Brien on, xxiii– xxiv, 16 relation with production, 16, 80–81 as secondary, 45 of social relations, xxi surrogacy, xvi–xvii. See also Assisted Reproductive Technology of things, xi, xvi Rich, Adrienne, 4, 34, 37, 44, 92, 99

Index

Pandita Ramabai, 73–74 South Africa, 69–70

sexuality, ix, x, xi, 18. See also masculinity Sanger, Margaret, x, 71–73, 85. See also contraception Sister Nivedita (Margaret Nobel), 57–61 socialism, xii–xiii, xviii, 83–84 Sojourner Truth, xxi, xxii surrogacy. See Assisted Reproductive Technology Swadeshi movement, xii, 52–53, 55, 69–61, 63 Walker, Alice, 42–43 women’s movement, ix, xii, 42, 82 Women’s Studies, ix, 2, 3, 81

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About the Author and Series Editor Author Jasodhara Bagchi was an independent scholar, formerly Chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women and Director, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University; also Professor of English, Jadavpur University; considered to be a pioneering scholar of women’s studies. Among her books with Stree: Loved and Unloved: The Girl Child in the Family (1997); with Subhoranjan Dasgupta, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in the Easter Region, 2 vols (2006, 2009); Karmakshetre Jouno Henasthar Mokabilye Ain Byabohaer Nirdeshika (How to handle sexual harassment in the workplace); with SAGE: Changing Status of Women in West Bengal, 1970–2000: The Challenges Ahead, 2005. Series Editor Maithreyi Krishnaraj, a pioneering scholar in women’s studies, is senior honorary fellow, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, and steering committee member of the Dr Avabai Wadia Archives.