Beyond the Apparent

Abstract

The existing historiography on medicalisation of childbirth in India has overemphasised the role of female doctors in introducing Western medical ideas and practices pertaining to childbirth into the Indian zenana (secluded sections of respectable Indian households inhabited by females) and, hence, has uncritically assumed the absence of male involvement in midwifery as an unquestionable historical fact. Using Bengal as an example, this article will demonstrate that the medicalisation of childbirth was not single-handedly brought about by women doctors but was preceded by the constitution of a medical discourse on midwifery: a process enabled by the inclusion of midwifery in the medical curriculum of Calcutta University in the mid-nineteenth century under the guidance of the medical faculty of the Calcutta Medical College consisting entirely of male doctors, both indigenous and British. This article seeks to analyse the role of male doctors not in terms of the extent of their accessibility to the upper caste purdah women but by highlighting their instrumentality in buttressing the scientific and theoretical foundations of midwifery. It will account for the sustained presence of male physicians in multiple roles of professors, researchers, composers of reproductive tracts and nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.