Motherhood in India

Glorification without Empowerment?

Maithreyi Krishnaraj

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136517792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents an overview of the varied experiences and representations of motherhood in India from ancient to modern times. The thrust of the arguments made by the various contributors is that the centrality of motherhood as an ideology in a woman's life is manufactured. This is demonstrated by analysing various institutional structures of society – language, religion, media, law and technology.

The articles in this book are chronologically arranged, tracing the different stages that motherhood as a concept has traversed in India – from goddess worship to nationalism, to being a vehicle of reproduction of the sexual division of labour and the inheritance of property via the male-line. Underlying these stages are the dialectics between them that have been facilitated by agents such as the state – the ultimate controller of a woman's reproductive powers. The feminist critique of 'essentialising' the role of a woman has been employed to deconstruct and humanise the experiences and lives of mothers.

This anthology therefore attempts to initiate a meaningful and 'sensitive' engagement with issues pertaining to a woman's autonomy over her body and her role also as a mother.

__________________________

chapter 1

Introduction

maithreyi krishnaraj

A mother in essence transcends the binaries of gender as every child, boy or girl, is born of a woman. Since a major aspect of the female role is considered to be reproduction, mothering has continued to be basic to women’s lives as well as the organisation of the family, and is fundamental to the genesis of the ideology about women. Symbolised in mythology, legends and popular culture, she stands as an eternal icon to represent the generative, nurturing power of life, itself celebrated in temples and sculptures, poetry and literature. Newspapers bring out special Mother’s Day editions. I see my city’s taxis and auto-rickshaws carrying the inscription ‘Ma’s Gift’ or ‘Ma’s blessing’. In Indian cinema, the mother is the central figure. Sons in the stories especially swear by their mothers; will undertake hazardous adventures and avenge insults perpetuated by her enemies. She is an all suffering being dedicated to the welfare of her sons. Hindi cinema used to show the toiling mother sweating away at her sewing machine to educate her son/s.

In many Hindi films, the mother is given a prominent place, and acts as the guiding spirit in every day life for her sons. In the aphorisms found in the Indian language, while teaching children about ethics, the first line would be ‘respect your mother’, like in the Tamil verses of the woman poet Avvai. The bhakti poet Tyagaraja, for example, appeals to Sita, as his mother, who will induce Rama to bestow his compassion and grace on him.

In my day to day life, I encounter men saying ‘She keeps the baby for nine months in her womb, nurtures it with her blood and flesh. How can we not respect her?’ Whatever may be the reality of actual protection and support, the ideology of a mother’s pre-eminence is very strong. She is valiantly fighting for her country like Rani Jhansi who, in a popular poem, is a mardani — a masculinised woman. A mother can repudiate her son for his misdeeds to her mother country, as in the famous hindi film Mother India, or despite her love and affection can chastise her son in order to teach him proper behaviour, as in the story of Shyamchi Ayi included in this book. I once had a strange personal experience. I was pregnant and was returning from work; it had rained heavily. The street on my house was flooded and I had no umbrella. A fruit vendor selling fruits ran across the street to offer me his umbrella saying ‘Ma, you should not get wet in this condition’. An elderly woman is usually addressed as mataji. The point of this narration was to highlight the pervasive respect that motherhood has in Indian culture as opposed to a woman as an individual. The centrality of the mother in popular speech and practice reverberates throughout this country. A mother feels fulfilled nurturing her child. Feminists would consider this approach as essentialising the woman as a mother. This denies her the potential as a human being with multiple abilities, and her need to be a citizen as much as anyone else.

Women give birth to children and the care of new born babies requires breast feeding by the mother (or a substitute for the mother). This responsibility puts onus on women as care-takers of the family. The responsibilities and rewards that men and women have within the family and household are thereby determined by this role of women which is perceived as ‘the’ fundamental and primary identity. Women may not live in the father-mother-child nuclear family. Our notion of the family disregards variations in family composition — many family members, including men, may care for children.

A woman, because of her physiological equipment, is capable of bearing children. Through the act of carrying a child in her womb and giving birth, a woman attains ‘motherhood’. Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and nurturing an infant are the concomitant acts that go with being a ‘mother’. All these actions involve considerable expenditure of energy, time and resources, during which she needs support. It is believed that the sexual division of labour came into existence because women found it difficult to be mobile during child-bearing periods (Leibowitz 1986). Women were therefore assigned domestic tasks while men went hunting. Women rather hunted small animals closer to home and foraged for food. Anthropologists like Briffault (1927) and Bachofen (1967), on the basis of their study of different cultures and their symbolic systems, claimed that the original human society was matriarchal because the maternal instinct is stronger than the mating instinct.

The abundance of mother goddesses in the Indian subcontinent, in the great as well as the little traditions, speaks of the worship of the mother principally as a procreative power and nurturer. The mother goddess is not a mother with child, like the Madonna, but an independent entity standing by herself. She has both benign as well as fearsome aspects. From the exalted Durga to the ubiquitous gram devata, she is present to this day all over the country. She is a matrika. Kamala Ganesh, in her article, traces the tradition of the mother goddess to the Indus Valley civilisation. These predate the ‘spousified’ goddesses of later ages. According to her, in pre-patriarchy, gender relations followed ‘linking’ rather than ‘ranking’. She leaves us with the question as to whether contemporary sensibilities like autonomy, power, and equality can be projected on to a different time–scale? However, it seems to me that whatever meaning earlier periods might have had, when we re-surrect the past, its significance rests in the present.

In literature and in mythology, the mother is deified. There is sentimental devotion and mythification of her power to protect. Feminist reappraisal of the matriarchate is a political strategy to reclaim female power. Can one recreate the matriclan that provides power and support? With emergence of the nuclear family and the availability of easy divorce in the west, women now struggle as single mothers.

Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata expound, in a multifaceted way, the significance and experience of motherhood within patriarchy. Marriage for women is primarily to bear a male child. A woman was not even the owner of her womb. The woman’s body was seen as merely the soil, and it was the man who provides the seed. The earlier mystery of birth, which had sustained a veneration of women, gave way to the father–right. The television serials which Prabha Krishnan has monitored indicate how at the heart of the epics lie problems of identity, hierarchy and patriliny. Both the epics portray a woman’s honour as located in her sexuality. The epics also denigrate non-patriarchal communities which practice mother–right. Motherhood is seen as an emotion-based state. How Yashodha — the foster-mother of Krishna, the cowherd god — is rapturously absorbed in her child, is told and retold through dance, songs and stories. This is the idealised mother–child relationship.

There are some women mentioned in the epics who did resist motherhood. There were others like Madhavi who was lent by Galav to beget sons for kings in order to get Ashwameda horses for his guru Vishwamitra. Once his mission was accomplished, she was discarded without being allowed any claim over her children. Indian mothers are revered only as mothers of sons. Through her reading of the many texts, Sukumari Bhattacharji points out that in ancient India, the main concern of women was to avoid the slur of ‘sonlessness’. The many rituals during pregnancy among hindus are for the health of the husband and child; nowhere is there any concern expressed for the health of the mother. By contrast, Poonacha’s narration of practices in Coorg during maternity has a more positive note. The care of the mother is the responsibility of the clan — a social commitment. Women in the rest of our country live under the thumb of their husbands, in-laws and other elderly relations, and even their sons during their old age.

Jasodhara Bagchi, in her discussion on Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s portrayal of the nation as mother, argues that he was building on the existing mother cult in Bengal. The natural bounty of the soil is an affectionate mother. Thus, the mother image that was projected by the anti-colonialist was a combination of the affective warmth of a quintessential Bengali mother and the mother goddess as Shakti — the divine female power. Bagchi says, ‘Apart from a nationalist euphoria, the colonial experience was also refracted in Bengal, at the turn of the century, as the concern a male child has for his neglected mother.’

C.S. Lakshmi describes the metaphor of the mother for the community and language in Tamil Nadu. ‘In the elaboration of Tamil culture, the Tamil mother became the central element as guarantor of purity of progeny and authentication of historical continuity. Hence, the Tamil man’s manliness rested on him providing protection to the Tamil mother’ (Lakshmi 1990). The sentimental devotion to the mother is further exemplified by Shanta Gokhale’s discussion of author Sane Guruji’s work called Shyamchi Ayi. The mother in the story is the embodiment of kindness as well as probity, and her every gesture is nourishment to the soul of the child. This extreme idealisation appears to be the desire of the son to give the mother all that she needs but did not get from the father, and yet at the same time the son wanted to remain as an infant, loved and looked after by her. The mother’s fixation for sons appears to affirm Freud’s thesis of the psychological problem that sons face during separation from their mothers.

Coming to contemporary times, in Indian English literature, mothers are not the self-sacrificing angels but are made of flesh and blood; beings who face contradictory pulls. Caught between rejecting the life-giving power that motherhood gives her, and seeking an identity beyond the halo of motherhood, the modern woman finds no viable alternative.

Feminists tend to see the reproductive burden as limiting women’s ability to participate in wider society and pursuing their own self-actualisation. Their basic approach is that motherhood should be by choice. Today among urban westernised couples intent on pursuing their chosen careers, many are indeed opting out of motherhood. Socialist feminists argued that mothering is not solely the woman’s responsibility; when women bear children, they create new citizens and new workers, and hence this is a ‘social’ action and not an individual one. Nancy Folbre (2004) demonstrated the enormous cost women saved the economy by providing free labour. To her goes the credit of introducing ‘care economy’ as an essential aspect which must be recognised while estimating national income.

For socialists, social reproduction had three aspects: (i) bringing forth new human beings, (ii) nurturing them to adulthood, and (iii) reproducing the social formation through rearing practices. Community support should be provided through day care. With more and more mothers employed outside the home, the demand for day care in non-socialist countries is being supplied commercially. The problem of commercially offered child care suffers from the hazard that it may not be real ‘care’. Nannies who serve as foster-mothers do get attached to the babies but do not enjoy rights over them. This situation implies that the whole society should be permeated with the mothering quality. It needs reform of the workplace that permits mothers the necessary leave to care for young children; it also needs change in the rigid sexual division of labour whereby fathers also learn to take care of their children. Some societies have successfully experimented with paternity leave where both parents are held responsible and can take turns. In the majority of cases, especially in poor countries, working-class women do not have the luxury of full-time motherhood, driven by the necessity to earn their living. In many parts of the world, with men migrating or deserting their wives, the onus of family maintenance falls heavily on women.

Reading through various views on motherhood, one is driven to the conclusion that motherhood invites glorification but no empowerment. The real life conditions of mothering in terms of pre-natal and post-natal care, give the lie to the exalted position a mother is supposed to have. Still reeling under high maternal mortality, we are far from nurturing the nurturer. Chitra Sinha studies the Hindu Code Bill to confirm that mythification of motherhood is unaccompanied by a willingness to giving a mother her actual rights. It was after contentious battles in the Constituent Assembly that the hindu woman won her right to her father’s property, as a daughter. The father however continues to be the legal guardian of the children. Women’s groups’ demand for equal guardianship has not yet been accepted.

Motherhood and mothering raise many questions: (i) Do we see this function as an onerous duty done at the bidding of others, or as a freely chosen avenue of fulfilment? (ii) Are there rewards for motherhood? (iii) Do women feel incomplete without bearing a child? (iv) Can women reclaim the power of mother–right?

While motherhood has often been invested with status and prestige, feminism objects to the reduction of a woman’s identity exclusively to this role — women are mothers and also women. Given the availability of contraception, the number of births can now be limited as compared to earlier times. While the possibility is there, women may not really be the decision makers in settings where the family and society put pressure on them to bear children for the continuation of the lineage as their duty. A recent field study in Bangladesh and India found that newly married girls have little freedom in avoiding births during the first year of their marriage (Sethuraman and Duvurry 2007). In more recent times, population policies in countries with high population growth like India enforce, covertly or overtly, contraceptive regimes on women without regard to attendant health risks.

As I have pointed out in my opening article, ‘It is not the fact of mothering that makes women vulnerable, but their social construction, the implications for women flowing from the meaning attached to the idea of motherhood, and the terms and conditions under which it is allowed to express itself. Becoming the mother is an emotionally fulfiling experience. However in reality, it becomes a burden to be borne by women because they do not get adequate support from society. A baby demands so much attention. It is tiring to breast feed every two or three hours. Mothers are unable to seek work or life outside. Many unwed mothers have to surrender their babies because of stigma as well as lack of support to raise the baby. Divya Pandey, while reporting the interviews she conducted in a maternity home in urban Mumbai, concludes, ‘The subjective experiences of motherhood and mothering is one where not only the social relations between the sexes dominate, but also the family as an institution constantly intrudes, manipulates, reorganises and redirects the experience to suit the specific purposes of a given family.’

The set of articles brought together explore different facets of motherhood and the ideological underpinnings that go with it. Feminism has an ambivalent attitude towards this issue. What could be an ennobling experience is also riddled with an awareness of the personal cost one must bear while investing so much in it. The self-sacrifice inherent in the aspiration to be a good mother is also binding on the child, as it encourages dependence. Women are women and also mothers.

References

Bachofen , J.J. 1967. Myth, Religion and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Briffault , R. 1927. The Mothers. Vols I–III , New York: Macmillan Co.

Folbre , Nancy. 2004. Family Time: The Social Organisation of Care. New York: Routledge.

Krishnaraj , Maithreyi. 1995. ‘Motherhood: Power and Powerlessness’, in Jasodhara Bagchi (ed.), Indian Women: Myth and Reality. Hyderabad: Sangam Books.

Lakshmi , C.S. 1990. ‘Mother, Mother Community and Mother Politics in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35 (42&43), October 20 – 27.

Leibowitz , Lila. 1986. ‘In the Beginning… The Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour and the Development of the First Human Societies’, in Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson (eds), Women’s Work, Men’s Property. London: Verso.

Sethuraman , Kavita and Nata Duvurry. 2007. ‘The Nexus of Gender Discrimination with Malnutrition’, Economic and Political Weekly. 42 (44), November 3 – 10.

__________________________

chapter 2

Motherhood,
Mothers, Mothering:

A Multi-Dimensional Perspective

maithreyi krishnaraj

1

We perceive motherhood as a central fact of female existence because it is mostly connected to biology, differentiating a female from a male. A woman’s role in reproduction far outweighs that of a man. It is invariably a woman who ‘mothers’. Motherhood and mothering are usually perceived as naturally related. Paradoxically, this bringing forth of new life and its sustenance, so essential to human survival, has become an instrument of subordinatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Motherhood, Mothers, Mothering:A Multi-dimensional Perspective
• Chapter 3 Motherhood in Ancient India
• Chapter 4 In Search of the Great Indian Goddess:
• Chapter 5 In the Idiom of Loss: Ideology of Motherhood in Television
• Chapter 6 Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal
• Chapter 7 Mother, Mother-Community and Mother-Politics in Tamil Nadu
• Chapter 8 The Mother in Sane Guruji’s Shyamchi Ai
• Chapter 9 Rites de Passage of Matrescence and Social Construction of Motherhood among the Coorgs in South India
• Chapter 10 Motherhood: Different Voices
• Chapter 11 Images of Motherhood: The Hindu Code Bill Discourse in India
• Note on the Editor
• Notes on Contributors