Midwifery, Childbirth, and Breastfeeding Advice in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

Abstract Despite enormous scholarship on motherhood and childcare in colonial India, the subject of breastfeeding remains underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring medical advice about breastfeeding by the ‘respectable’ Bengali-Hindu women or bhadramahila, often located amidst the shadows of the ‘dark’ and ‘dirty’ lying-in room, makeshift spaces that signified the impurity and ritual pollution associated with childbirth. It argues that colonial and indigenous medical practitioners of western medicine often drew intimate biocultural connections between midwifery, confinement, childbirth, lactation, and nursing of infants in colonial Calcutta. In particular, the chapter examines why and how European and indigenous medical writings on so-called ‘clean’ or ‘scientific’ midwifery often voiced the urgent need to either replace or medically train the ‘ignorant’ and ‘dirty’ dais. From being feared as ‘a sorceress’ to having a ‘hereditary claim on the family of her patient’, this chapter argues that there were contradictions inherent in the dichotomous representations of ‘clean’ versus ‘dirty’ midwifery in European and Bengali medical print media on midwifery, encompassing maternal and infant care.