Conceptions

Infertility and Procreative Technologies in India

Aditya Bharadwaj

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785332319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Ginecología, obstetricia y partería

Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These 'conceptions' are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

PART I

In Hindu India – as in ‘other cultures’ – cultural norms and ideas are inextricably bound up with how people experience and make sense of disruptions to life processes. The disruption caused by infertility connects the worldly and otherworldly dimensions that together give meaning to everyday existence. Part I provides an insight into cultural conceptions about fertility and infertility. Although these ideas originate in classical texts and oral storytelling traditions, they nevertheless permeate contemporary thinking about human fertility. The social experience of infertility and the experience of stigma associated with such a condition can be located within this wider cultural context. Human fertility is quasi-sacred and inherently gendered with differing male and female inputs underpinning the reproductive process. This worldview ascribes a superior status to men while holding women responsible for bringing pregnancies to fruition. A disruption to this division of reproductive labour heralds a socio-cosmic crisis that stigmatises and ostracizes the inflicted bodies. In attempting to understand the cultural strength of fertility beliefs and the debilitating experience of stigma, one can also better understand why infertile couples readily turn to assisted conception both to fulfill their desire for a family and to salvage their socially fractured personas.

Chapter 1

FERTILE CONCEPTIONS

CULTURE AND INFERTILITY

In India, as in many parts of the world, the centrality assigned to fertility and the ability to translate this fertility into pregnancy and eventually childbirth is one of the most important factors in assigning a woman her personhood. For a man, fatherhood represents the only chance to establish visibly masculine credentials. Taken together, for the married couple, fertility and its outcome are often viewed as a main source of happiness, as worldly and otherworldly merit. However, in India, anxiety surrounding the inability to produce a ‘visuality’ of womanhood and manhood in the public domain arises also from its perceived cosmic consequences and is thus better understood in the context of Hindu conceptualisations about human fertility. These norms and ideas are firmly rooted in quasi-sacred myths, epics and ancient codes of law, which provide some sense of the urgency with which the Hindu community engages with the subject of infertility and the social complications it engenders.

The importance assigned to human fertility and the quasi-sacredness bestowed upon it by the ancient Vedic and Puranic texts has profoundly animated the contemporary Hindu worldview. These textual sources are part of rich oral storytelling and visual iconic traditions in India. As such, they help to structure and reconcile culturally appropriate responses to social and biological issues. This chapter seeks to explore (some of) these fertility themes as they emerge from such ancient sources, aiming to understand how these ideological and normative frames become weaved with a rich tapestry of contemporary cultural thinking and practices in India, a society in which everyday religiosity has particular significance and where the ‘sacred’ touches almost all aspects of human existence. Reading the past to comment on cultural conceptions in the present is a difficult task. According to Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (2001), this amounts to reading ‘only along the grain of our pressing cultural and personal needs’, a process Gillian Beer describes as ‘hermeneutic retrenchment’. But if such a reading ‘brings sharply into focus a pattern of debate within the work hitherto little understood, or masks discursive elements unfulfilled at the historical moments of the text’s production’, it may have ‘a sound political function … Such at least would have been my intention’ (Sunder Rajan 2001: 332–33). This chapter follows Sunder Rajan’s lead in accomplishing productive retrenchment from textual sources that remain relatively ignored while framing contemporary understandings of infertility. It discusses a range of ideas echoing the importance of human fertility and the socio-cosmic crisis left in its absence. In doing this, the chapter attempts to interlace ancient textual sources and contemporary anthropological/sociological studies to introduce social attitudes towards infertility and the cultural approach to managing a failure to conceive.

Fertility: Expectation and Dictation

The cultural importance of women as visible symbols of fertility and continuity, i.e. the actual locus of reproduction and regeneration, was firmly established in the Vedic practices. With themes such as perpetuation of the self, abundance, and life-engendering symbolism associated with the concept of fertility, we find that much of the Vedic period (ca.1750–500 BCE) was firmly organised around an ideological premise where the procreative power of the fields and that of women became central components of social life. In the ancient Vedic literature, and later in the Puranas and the Dharmashastras (law books) alike, woman is often referred to as the kshétra (field/soil) and man as the beja (seed). The ancient laws of Manu (IX: 36, 33, 333) echo this view most explicitly: ‘By the sacred tradition the woman is declared to be the soil, the man is declared to be the seed; the production of all corporeal beings (takes place) through the union of the soil with the seed’.

This metaphoric dualism is literalised in many mythic renditions of divine conception. For instance Sita (literally meaning ‘furrow’), the chaste divine goddesses in the epic Ramayana (more on this later), was conceived when her father, King Janaka, spills semen (seed) on the ground (field), which, when ploughed, birthed his divine daughter, imbued with celestial beauty (Doniger 2009). This metaphoric postulation of the field/seed dualism and symbolism occurs also in many contemporary understandings of reproduction. R.S. Khare’s (1982) study, for instance, brings together an interesting mix of informant and textual statements to highlight the culture-specific formulations of this analogy. The beja comes to represent the necessary karma, and kshétra thus becomes the field where the fate or destiny of the beja becomes known (Khare 1982: 157). Veena Das’s (1976a) case study of fifty Punjabi urban households explains the ‘Punjabi theory of procreation’ in which the woman provides the field and the man provides the seed. Das (1976a: 3) goes on to emphasize that in the Punjabi understanding, ‘the quality of the offspring is determined by the quality of the seed. Nevertheless, the field should be able to bear the seed. If the seed is very powerful, it will “burn the field”. Hence it is important that the qualities of the genitor and the geneterix are evenly matched’.

Leela Dube (1986) argues that across much of northern, central and parts of eastern India, human reproduction is ‘expressed’ in terms of seed and earth. Ethnographic evidence ranging from Gond (Dube 1956) and Khasi tribal communities to the Kashmiri Pandits (Madan 1981) and Bengali kinship studies (Fruzzetti and Ostor 1976; Inden and Nicholas 1977), similarly suggests that a specific cultural conception is rooted in a fairly wide geographical region (Böck and Rao 2000).¹

The field/seed dyad finds further expression in various festivals and rituals where female fertility and sexuality become homologous with agricultural practice. N.N. Bhattacharya (1977) provides an exhaustive compilation of various beliefs centred around female biology and the cult of the mother goddesses. The fertility ritual called ambuvaci, which is observed by Bengali women in India from the seventh day of the third month of the Hindu calendar, connects to a belief that for four days Mother Earth menstruates in order to prepare herself for the work of fertilisation. As a result there is complete cessation of ploughing, sowing and other farm work (Bhattacharya 1977).² The homology between women and earth/soil is taken further to express what Dube (1986: 41) calls an ‘idealised role’: ‘Like the earth a woman too has to bear pain. The earth is ploughed and furrowed; a woman too is ploughed and pierced. A common metaphorical expression for sexual intercourse is ploughing’. Dube further argues that ploughing is strictly forbidden to women, despite the fact it is not particularly strenuous for them.

The point of similarity between (mother) earth, mother goddesses and women (as mothers) transcends the biosocial fact of reproduction. It inscribes a deep symbolism of nurturance, maternal love and duty, which equates women to goddesses and goddesses to women.³ The ideology of motherhood therefore becomes one of the many central themes around which the ‘two great national Epics of India’ – Mahabharata and Ramayana (Meyer 1971: 2) are constructed. Taken together these two epics exert considerable influence on people’s lives to this day; the norms and ideas enshrined in these works form an important subtext in the collective conscience. Examples range from the ritualised enactment of the Ramayana every year in most parts of northern India to television adaptations of the Mahabharat and Ramayana in serialised form broadcast on state television from the mid-1980s. It is these, in particular, which illustrate the rootedness of these epics in contemporary Indian life (Sutherland 1991). The state-sponsored television, in the words of Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, has a

dual obligation in its representation of women and religion – on the one hand to acknowledging the state’s constitutional commitment to equal rights (in [the] case of women) and to secularism (in [the] case of religion), and on the other hand to developing a new idiom of ‘nationalism’, equated with a valorisation of the traditional (which is preserved, precisely, in and by women and religion) – redefines the two terms [women and religion] flexibly. (Sunder Rajan 1993: 134)

The central female figures appearing in these televised epics and in the popular understanding and interpretation of these works have become not only an ideal of femaleness but also potent symbols of Indianness. Prabha Krishnan (1990), in her critical account of the construction and projection of motherhood in the televised rendition of Mahabharata and Ramayna, raises crucial issues concerning the impact of idealised constructs of Indian womanhood and motherhood. She is especially critical of the stereotypical constructs of ideal and chaste woman in the depiction of Sita – the heroine of Ramayana, who also happens to be a female role model and a prime example of a woman’s devotion to her husband in contemporary Hindu thinking. But Krishnan is also critical of the very effective depiction and separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in these epics, where the latter are invariably women who are not under direct male supervision. She argues that television in India can in theory reach nearly 75 per cent of the population (the satellite television revolution in the twentieth century, especially networks led by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has increased this number exponentially). This makes television a powerful propagation medium. Drawing on her personal observation, Krishnan (1990) further asserts that these viewers are not just Hindus; they cut across religious lines and include many Muslims, as well.⁴ Thus, the potential of this epic to shape the worldview of a captive audience is ‘enormous’.

The subject of motherhood in India has been hotly debated for some time. Academic works range from psychoanalytic analyses of the concept in the Hindu worldview (Kakar 1978; Obeyesekere 1981; O’Flaherty 1980) to the evaluation of the status of women in India (Basu 1992; Dube 1988, 1997; Dutta 1990; Ganesh 1990; Kumar 1994; Lakshmi 1990; Sangari 1993; Sinha 2007) through to the nationalist project of garnering the ‘icon of motherhood’ to forge the nation as a geopolitical, linguistic and religiously unified entity (Gupta 2001). It is clear that popular culture, at least, reproduces constructs derived from Hindu cosmology, within which a woman is viewed as Samsarahetu, the ‘source of the world’, the cause of the Sansara, the world (Meyer 1971). Motherhood is extolled as the highest duty, and women in this sense are viewed as born to be mothers. This passage from laws of Manu (IX: 92, 96, 344) substantiates this view: ‘To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers men; religious rites, therefore, are ordained in the Veda to be performed (by the husband) together with the wife’. Manu (IX: 25, 27, 332) goes on to separate woman as a living cause of the very act of everyday life: ‘The production of children, the nurture of those born, and the daily life of men, (of these matters) woman is visibly the cause’. A woman thus becomes not only a symbol, but also the source of the visuality of motherhood and fatherhood that has become such an integral part of married existence in India.⁵ The reproductive responsibility of women is also closely linked to the proper discharge of worldly and otherworldly duties, which are to be shouldered by a woman alone: ‘Offspring, (the due performance of) religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depends on one’s own wife alone’ (Manu IX: 25, 28, 332). The idealised Hindu normative order conflates the twin concepts of womanhood and motherhood. One is inconceivable without the other; the two must occur in conjunction. Thus, for a woman to realise her full potential and worth, she must become a mother, a transition mediated by marriage.

Marriage for Hindus is the first socially prescribed and proscribed step towards motherhood. It is a sacred duty on two levels. First, the bride giver (father) has a duty to give the daughter away in marriage on time; second, the bride taker (husband) has a duty to beget children from his lawfully acquired wife:⁶ ‘Reprehensible is the father who gives not (his daughter in marriage) at the proper time; reprehensible is the husband who approaches not (his wife in due season), and reprehensible is the son who does not protect his mother after her husband has died’ (Manu IX: 3, 4, 328). The rules for the father – the bride giver – are, however, more strictly encoded in various ancient legal texts. For instance, the laws of Gautama (XVIII: 21, 22, 269) state: ‘A girl should be given in marriage before (she reaches the age of) puberty. He who neglects it, commits sin’.

The code of Vasishtha (XVII: 71, 92) goes a step further and states, ‘As often as the courses of a maiden, who is filled with desire, and demanded in marriage by men of equal caste, recur, so often her father and her mother are guilty of (the crime of) slaying an embryo; that is a rule of the sacred law’. Kautilya’s Arthashastra (150 AD) similarly declares it to be the father’s duty to marry off his daughter within three years of her reaching puberty. Kautilya (1992: 365) declared that ‘A bridegroom shall have the right to have marital relations with the betrothed girl, if seven menstrual periods have passed since the date of the betrothal. The bridegroom shall not then be obliged to pay the dues owed to the father, since the latter loses his rights by wasting his daughter’s fertile period’. The discharge of the sacred duty – to procreate after marriage – has clear implications for the couple, but there is more pressure on the husband, the owner of the seed, than on the woman, the receptacle for the seed (Filippi 1996 in Böck and Rao 2000). This is not to say that women are not pressured, but as we shall see in the next section, the timing and the intensity of pressure is bound up with the male and female inputs and their potency. According to the cosmic division of labour, the task of sowing the seed belongs to the husband and the task of fertilising and nourishing it belongs to the wife. The following two sections briefly consider these respective obligations.

The duty of a husband to visit his wife in ritu is stressed in most ancient codes of law and in the two epics. Ritu implies menstruation in women, particularly the fourth day onwards, which even to this day in the Hindu view is considered the proper time for conception. However, sexual union with a menstruating woman is forbidden. To be in contact with a menstruating woman (rajasvala) and not a woman in ritu (ritugamana) is a dreadful sin. Interestingly the monthly flow is also construed as a great ‘liberator’ for women. The cleansing power of menstruation is considerable according to these textual sources. The legal codes of Vasishtha, for example, declare:

A woman is not defiled by a lover, nor a Brahman by Vedic rites, nor water by urine and ordure, nor fire by consuming (impure substances). A wife, (though) tainted by sin, whether she be quarrelsome, or have left the house, or have suffered criminal force, or have fallen into the hands of thieves, must not be abandoned; to forsake her is not prescribed (by the sacred law). Let him wait for the time of her courses; by her temporary uncleanness she becomes pure. Women (possess) an unequalled means of purification; they never become (entirely) foul. For month by month their temporary uncleanness removes their sins. (Vasishtha XXVII: 17; XXVIII: 9, 1, 2–3, 4, 132–33)

Similar references are found in Manu and Vishnu.

The consequences of approaching and not approaching one’s wife in ritu are most explicitly laid down in the two epics. Ramayana, for instance, mentions the evil-minded man (dushtatman) who does not give his wife her rights af...