Colonial Legacies and Maternal Health in South Asia

Abstract

This chapter provides important insights into why culturalist, technocratic, and neoliberal approaches to maternal and neonatal health have persisted in South Asia despite critiques by bringing together a historical analysis of the ‘problem of childbirth’ under colonialism with the interdisciplinary literature on the medicalization of childbirth. This chapter establishes the central role of British women doctors who fashioned themselves as colonial experts on maternal health in shaping developmental discourses regionally and internationally. British women doctors’ professional project drove their participation in a wider international epistemic community and the creation of infrastructure to improve maternal health in South Asia which emulated British maternalist discourses. Their interventions influenced anti-colonial nationalist attempts to reform reproduction and initiatives by middle-class South Asian women. These reformist discourses, which braided eugenicist concerns with communal polarization and marginalized subaltern medical auxiliaries, continue to pervade post-colonial interventions. The chapter also explores the emergence of international health organizations in the interwar period which produced a discourse linking health and governance to which critiques of conditions of maternity in South Asia responded.