Domestic Goddesses

Maternity, Globalization and Middle-class Identity in Contemporary India

Henrike Donner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317148470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.

Chapter 1

Middle-class Domesticities and Maternities

Most days my mother-in-law does the cooking and looks after the house, I am so busy bringing Shreya to school and organizing things for her – even in the afternoon, I take her to the computer class so that she gets a good idea how to do that, she also does classical dance and classical music classes and drawing, and I teach her some English. When we were young all that wasn’t necessary, I just went to a Bengali-medium school and I did some singing with my uncle who lived with us. My mother was busy from night-time onwards, she would get up at half past four to start cooking breakfast for my father and us. He would go to the market in the morning and she would finish the cooking for lunch after he came back and before he left the home around 11 a.m. he would have a warm meal so that he could have a full stomach. She would prepare our breakfast and our tiffin for school. She was always busy cooking and preparing snacks for visitors as well, and then there were the special occasions like pujas, when there was plenty of extra food to cook and rituals to perform. With my grandparents, my uncles, aunts, with everybody coming and going, there was no time. My parents were very concerned and interested in our education, they made sure I did a degree. Because we lived outside Calcutta we could go to college and do a degree. So I am a qualified teacher, that means I could work if I wanted, but I stopped when I had Shreya, I want to look after my child by myself – but the degree is still helpful I can help her with her homework and I do know how teachers think. My in-laws were clever like that, they made sure all the bous [daughters-in-laws] were teachers and well-educated so that they can help the grandchildren. In that way you save money on the tuition, when I help her with her homework until her father comes back… If I had the choice, I would not allow her to marry someone working in a private firm, they are never at home and there is no security. When he comes home we play with Shreya or she watches some TV. We eat very late, then she goes to bed and I clear up the kitchen and put out the utensils and washing for the maid who comes early in the morning. I do hope we can buy an apartment soon, I am so fed up with living with my in-laws and only two rooms to share, it is embarrassing – even if we wanted to we could not afford to have a second child with the school fees, tuition and rising house prices.

In 1997 Moon-Moon, a married Bengali housewife in her thirties, gave birth to a baby girl after she and her husband had been trying for a baby for some years. Before she married, Moon-Moon had been a teacher and worked for a private school, but as it became clear that it was taking her much longer than expected to get pregnant, her doctor suggested that she should leave paid employment. By then she had been married for a couple of years to Sanjay, the youngest of three sons from an affluent south Calcutta family, who worked in a private company’s sales department. Since he earned well and they lived in a two-bedroom flat in her in-laws’ house, they could afford to do without her meagre teacher’s salary, while still managing to go out once in a while, take holidays and eat well on a daily basis, as well as to save for a flat. We became neighbours in 2003 when I arrived with my 3-year-old son and my partner in Calcutta for a year of fieldwork during which the former attended the same nursery school as 4-year-old Shreya.

Moon-Moon, like most other married middle-class women I met in the course of my fieldwork, had had her marriage arranged and her in-laws had indeed picked her as much for her features – she was, she said, exceptionally light-skinned ‘for a Bengali girl’ – as for her education, which would benefit their grandchildren. Her family were civil servants in the generation above, but her two brothers were both doctors and so in the local idiom of matching status and lifestyles, she did in fact fit well into her in-laws’ household. Her father, a bureaucrat, died when she was still at school and her mother, who was a housewife, moved in with her uncle and his family in one of the districts near Calcutta. Moon-Moon’s father-in-law, on the other hand, had been manager of a tea plantation in the hills of Northern Bengal and, by the time of her marriage, had taken early retirement to live off his investments. He had built an impressive house in a well-to-do neighbourhood for himself and his sons, parts of which were rented out. Moon-Moon’s mother-in-law was over seventy when we first met, and had trained as a school teacher. Out of her four children, her three sons lived with their families in the same residence, and all of them were married and had one (grand)child each.

The subject of this book is motherhood and how it is constructed, experienced and debated by women in Calcutta middle-class families. The brief excerpt from interviews I did with Moon-Moon in her flat, while our children were playing, and the history of her own and her in-laws’ family indicate how motherhood dominates the lives of middle-class women in India. Their education, their marriages and their professional careers are arranged and represented in relation to the female role of a mother, and listening to marital and educational histories I was almost without exception presented with narratives of the commitment, sacrifice and determination it takes to bring up children, as well as descriptions of the relative success of families to make ‘good’ Indian mothers. Reading between the lines of the common and in no way exceptional comparison of two generations of women (Moon-Moon and her mother and mother-in-law) another theme comes to the fore, namely the perception of social change. Thus Moon-Moon’s account of her own marriage, education and professional life on this and other occasions highlighted the differences between women belonging to the older generation, for instance, her mother whose schooling was not as extensive as hers, and her mother-in-law who despite (or because) of the fact that she was well educated never worked outside the home, and her own. She emphasized the way her education, marriage and professional life were laid out in terms of her future role as a mother in a rapidly changing environment. In recognizing her impact on future generations in a modern world she is not alone. Throughout the decade I have been doing research with middle-class women in Calcutta, the common denominator in their lives has been the question of whether or not they were successful as mothers in an era of globalization. These women represented a wide range of subjects including politics, changing consumption patterns, media representations and globalization – in short the impact of change on their lives in an era of economic liberalization – through the lens of motherhood.

Since having children, child rearing and family relationships are of such concern to women like Moon-Moon, it is remarkable that apart from a few notable exceptions (see Trawick 1990; Seymour 1999) this important arena, which implies anthropological topics like notions of the body, of relatedness and kinship, of gender, of politics and economic change, has not received any attention in the writings of South Asian anthropologists. While those interested in the effects of neoliberal politics and globalization have recently begun to produce ethnographic accounts of new families, motherhood and the state from the perspective of women, rather than media representations, these are the work of anthropologists studying Japan, China and Malaysia (Allison 2000; Anagnost 1997; Stivens 1998), not India. More generally speaking, the everyday lives of middle-class families have received very little attention in anthropology per se, and it is only very recently that mothers and their experiences, which more often than not centre around the family, childcare and parenting, have been the subject of studies on changing notions of kinship and new families as well as neoliberal politics and new regimes of care in situations of rapid economic change (i.e. Stacey 1991; Weston 1991; Edwards 2000; Haukanes and Pine 2005).

Why, then, has there been so little interest in middle-class family life and parenting in South Asia?

I suggest that, first, it is the dearth of literature and in particular detailed anthropological studies of the middle class and its lifestyles in the post-independence period more generally, which is responsible for the way motherhood is excluded from South Asian studies on gender. Since middle-class women, unlike their working class counterparts, rarely figured directly as mothers in post-independence politics, because the interventions in the reproductive lives of the poor did not appear on the surface to affect them, they have not been the subject of enquiry.

Second, I suggest that motherhood and kinship are conspicuously absent from the accounts of change in contemporary India due to scholars’ preoccupation with issues directly related to the state and nationalism. Historical studies provide us with a very rich literature on upper-caste and middle-class women in their domestic environments (Chatterjee 2004) and the way their roles as daughters, mothers and wives changed during the colonial period (see, for instance, Borthwick 1984; Sangari and Vaid 1989; Ram 1998; Sangari 1999; Sarkar 2001; Walsh 2004). With reference to the nationalist movement we hear of newly emerging domesticities, gender relations and maternities, but we can get only a few glimpses into the private worlds of middle-class families in contemporary, post-independence India. In the serious long-term studies available religion, education, law and occupational choice, as well as media representations of women’s sexuality are foregrounded, while the nitty-gritty of family life, of intra-household and intergenerational relations and the practices surrounding marriage, motherhood and parenting are rarely addressed (see, for instance, Standing 1991; Basu 1999; Das 1988; Hancock 1999; Mankekar 1999).

This bias against the family, parenting and the domestic sphere also prevails in the literature on globalization and economic liberalization in India, despite a strong interest in middle-class lifestyles. While a number of recent monographs focus on the transformation of urban areas, they highlight mostly one aspect of the ‘public’ and in particular the way the spread of visual media and advertising challenges notions of being Indian and middle-class (Rajagopal 1999; Mazzarella 2003). The growing interest in new intimate relations and sexualities, masculinities and gender relations has resulted in exciting new perspectives on post-liberalization lifestyles and changing subjectivities (see, for example, Osella and Osella 2004; Srivastava 2004). However, the middle-class family as a site for physical and ideological reproduction through the practices I refer to as parenting, and the way these are restructured and reformulated in an era characterized by economic liberalization and cultural globalization, is conspicuously absent from these accounts.

In search of an explanation for this lacuna I can only add to, reiterate and expand on what Nita Kumar has written about the absence of real mothers from writings on South Asian educational histories that could encompass any contemporary social science research on gender, sexualities and social change in South Asia. ‘The unattractiveness of certain spaces inhabited by women’, she asserts, lies partly in ‘the categories themselves: “mother”, “home”, “childcare”, versus “intelligentsia”, “the nation”, “education”. The former cluster has to do uniquely with women and is private, passive, apolitical and ahistorical. The latter has to do only with men and is public, important, the stuff of politics and history’ (Kumar 2005: 157). Following from this bias, the majority of studies dealing with middle-class women privilege these other more attractive and public spaces, where motherhood seems to be primarily discussed where it feeds into, or is overtly constituted by, the realm of nationalist discourse. This is of course not to say that motherhood can be studied in isolation from other domains of the social. On the contrary I suggest that motherhood as a middle-class institution is a prime site from where to study change and social transformation.

For anthropologists and sociologists working in South Asia motherhood has mainly figured in two related fields of scholarship – the domain of kinship, with a focus on femininities and ideas about conception, gestation and birth or psychological approaches to motherhood as a cultural motif and stage in the life cycle, studied in the context of the socialization of young girls (see Östör, Fruzzetti and Barnett 1982; Das 1988; Ray 1995). Here motherhood appears as a timeless folk construction of biological processes and kinship roles, whereas maternities are politicized only where they are targeted by family planning and health care interventions (see Unnithan-Kumar 1994), thus generating a body of literature that deals almost exclusively with poor women’s experiences. In the process, middle-class ideologies and practices of motherhood, maternities and child rearing, being less directly governed by official policies, are constituted as natural, unproblematic and apolitical sites of privilege.

Families and motherhood

Maternities as ideological constructions of motherhood have, however, formed part of social research on South Asia, primarily in studies of the colonial and post-colonial political constitution of the family. Debates on changing family forms, on parenting, and on marriage have recently received new attention in ethnographic writings on industrialized countries through the obvious transformations that marriage, child rearing and intimate relations are undergoing in the face of economic and social change. Many of these studies deal with the transformation of the nuclear family and the way new economies and new technologies challenge our understanding of kin relationships (i.e. Stacey 1991; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Taylor et al. 2004). Significantly, motherhood and new regimes of care are at the heart of these approaches because, as Linda Nicholson observes, the modern ideal of the nuclear family implicitly assumes a class-based lifestyle that features motherhood as an institution for child rearing. They assert that the family represents an institution:

[t]hat begins to emerge for the upper classes during the eighteenth century. It is typified by a strong sense of the separation of the unit of parents and children from both a more extended kinship network and such non-kin related persons as servants. It is marked by a norm of partnership between husband and wife and by the special role of the mother in shaping the character of her children. In brief, it represents an institution less organized around relationships of authority and more geared to relations of affection as the household becomes less a unit focussed on production and more on sexuality, intimacy and consumption. (Nicholson 1997: 31–32)

Within this framework, motherhood is therefore rooted in much more than a biological or genealogical relationship or even a specific role and stage in the life cycle; rather it emerges as part of historically specific family structures and the power relations produced.

Unlike the nuclear family, mothering – the practices defined as nurturing and caring for children by a female person (not necessarily the birth mother) – has long been the subject of particularly interesting anthropological discussions because through a focus on these processes key questions about the relationship between nature and culture, individual and society, and socialization and cultural difference can be addressed. Mothering in the anthropological sense consists of culturally specific practices to nurture and socialize children into full members of a given society, and this encompasses reproductive practices as well as the particular power relations within which these practices are situated. For the West, the most influential theoretical approaches to mothering have been psychological theories on infant development, which provide comparative perspectives on nurture and caring in India as well (see Kakar 1978; Kurtz 1992; Seymour 2004). The mother–child dyad conceived as the most important relationship in the lives of infants is of course also the subject of Freudian approaches anthropologists employ to analyse processes of individuation and the formation of gendered subjects (see Moore 2007).

Considerable debates regarding the extent to which mothering has been naturalized in such discourses have developed over time. While, as Barlow (2004) concedes, mothering is in Western societies conceptualized as primary care giving, it has also been argued that mothering practices are far more culturally specific than Freud and those following in his footsteps accepted. Thus, while mothering is universal to women who bring up children, the specific understandings of conception, birth and female personhood which emerge from it vary greatly and, equally significantly, so does the agency of women as mothers.

With reference to South Asia, though historically and culturally birth mothers play an important role, ‘multiple mothers’ and shared parenting, for example in the joint family, are common. This fits with findings in comparative anthropological work which state that in most societies children are not brought up by birth parents on their own and that institutionalized multiple caretaking of infants and young children is, in fact, a much more common scenario cross-culturally (Seymour 2004.). Thus, the work of mothering/nurturing is spread across generations and sometimes classes, and anthropologists like Kurtz (1992) argue, that in mother-centred religious and cultural contexts like Northern India, sole caretaking by a birth mother is a recent exception, at least among the middle classes.

For such a mother-centred model of caretaking to emerge, motherhood as a particularly recognized institutional arrangement explicitly relates birthing with rights in children. These are supported, more often than not, by ideas about genealogical relatedness and birthing as the main source of special, individuating relationships. Examples from across the world, including pre-colonial South Asian elite households highlight that motherhood so marked is not necessarily a recent European middle-class institution (pace Nicholson 1997) but is rather something determined by the way relationships between a birth mother, or those standing in her stead, and offspring are regulated in public. But in spite of its institutionalized character, historically, motherhood has to be envisaged, and is experienced and exercised, as a malleable part of very specific social formations. Writing about the notion of the affective family, the idea of childhood, of the nuclear family and companionate marriage, Indrani Chatterjee reminds us that for South Asianists in particular, a ‘historical sensitivity to how intimacy was created in the past appears to stand in stark opposition to the questions of power’ haunting them. She provides a telling example of the way in which motherhood was conceptualized in an elite Muslim household that settled in Banares in the 1780s. Here, a complaint to the East India Company triggered the following discussion of a mother–son relationship:

Quatlaq Sultan Begun, a widow of Emperor Jahandar Shah, claimed to be the mother of a son, Muzzafar Bakht, who enraged her by ‘deserting’ the household on his father’s death. The mother’s letter to the Company said: ‘Mirza Muzzafar Bakht is the son of a slave-girl, who was an attendant to her grandmother and whom the late Prince had taken into his harem. She still lives at Delhi for the late Prince did not bring her with him. Only Bibi Zeban, who was a slave girl of Mehdi Behgam [sic], daughter of His Majesty, came with the Prince. In this manner the late Prince had several slave girls in his harem.’ The son in question, Muzzafar Bakht, in his address to the Company accepted the ‘motherhood’ thus: ‘The humiliation and ill-treatment that he [Muzzafar Bakht] has been receiving at the hands of his mother Qutlaq Sultan Begam cannot be adequately described. He on his part was never remiss in the observance of filial duty and expected naturally to receive a kindly treatment from her. But his expectations were belied. (Chatterjee 2004: 15)

As the above excerpt indicates motherhood constitutes a political issue when it is bound up with the idea of the family and, more specifically, when the parent and child triad instils specific rights. Even if nascent and not institutionalized beyond the household as in the case cited, as an institution motherhood implies a special kind of relationship between an adult caring for a child and the infant, which more often than not is based on notions of descent through shared substances. But it is in the conjunction of this idea, namely that descent allows for certain rights in children with new discourses on the ‘family’, that the prioritization of biologically-related parents emerges. Furthermore, with this discourse on families, care work is relocated to the family home, the much contested heart of the ‘modern’ middle-class ideal and, as my ethnography will show, therefore institutionalizes modern motherhood as we know it.

However, for the ‘family’ to become the ideological locus of middle-class child rearing practices and lifestyles in India, its role had to be created from diverse earlier patriarchies and a wide range of existing rules about residence, household forms, inheritance practices, legitimate marital arrangements and sexual relations.1 As historians of the nineteenth century have shown, the changes that allowed for a discourse on the family, loosely ...