Description

MEDICINE AND 'INDIAN MOTHERS'1: CONFINEMENT, NURSING OF INFANTS AND MORTALITY European and indigenous medical practitioners blamed the problematic customary breastfeeding practices alongside the ‗ignorance' of Indian mothers, older women of the household, 2 and dais for the contemporary high infant and maternal mortality rates in colonial India. Mothering had to be learnt as not just anyone could be a ‗good' mother. ‗Maternal ignorance'3 and ‗overnursing'4 of infants became catchphrases for ‗bad' mothering. This chapter explores the pathologisation and medicalisation of ‗Indian mothers' and their ‗mother love'5 in the context of colonial Bengal. The main thesis is that colonial and nationalist medical print media concomitantly championed, pathologised and medicalised ‗Indian mothers', based on their ways of nursing infants, for the betterment of community, ‗racial' and/or national health. ‗Indian mothers' and Indian motherhood are phrases that recurred in contemporary medical literature as malleable stereotypes both celebrated and pathologised in colonial and nationalist medical prescriptive literature on maternal and infant care.6 This chapter locates maternal breastfeeding amidst the processes of the medicalisation of midwifery as well as ante-and-postnatal maternal and infant care. It is divided into,

three sections namely: Confinement, Customary Breastfeeding Practices: Exposure of Infants, Prolonged Lactation and Breastfeeding Constantly; and Gender in Diet, Adulterated Milk and Ailments. The first section provides an analysis of medical opinion about the intimate relations between insufficient lactation and improper confinement. Thereafter, it discusses the pathologisation and medicalisation of Indian mother love in relation to three main customary breastfeeding practices namely: the exposure of infants, prolonged lactation, and always breastfeeding whenever the child cried. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, medical advice on infant feeding insisted that breastfeeding had to be a disciplined and regulated activity by the clock. Lastly, it explores the problematic maternal diet and how it affected lactation, the problem of milk-borne diseases in relation to the adulterated milk supply, and the contemporary high infant and maternal mortality figures. I. Confinement Borthwick argues that the dark and insanitary lying-in room of the bhadramahila, which represented the ‗physical embodiment of the impurity associated with childbirth'7, together with the unfavourable traditional midwifery practices were responsible for the prevalent high maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates in colonial Bengal.8 Pande highlights that ‗ i]n Bengal, the woman's body and the domestic space were often represented as containing the most deeply buried secrets of Indian pathology'.9 In 1840, indigenous medical practitioner Madhusudan Gupta argued that traditional beliefs and practices about confinement and childbirth needed to be altered because confinement took place in a ‗damp dark room very ill ventilated, with one small door only, and no window, or opening in the nature of a chimney'. The doors were usually closed due to ‗ritual impurity'10 associated with childbirth which, in turn implied that ‗children too suffer, by being kept in the same smoky room, the treatment,