Beyond Conventional Narratives
Ranjana Saha
COLONIAL MODERNITIES: MIDWIFERY IN BENGAL, C.1860-1947 by Ambalika Guha Routledge, New York, 2018, 219 pp., 795
April 2019, volume 43, No 4

Ambalika Guha has produced an excellent study on the powerful interplay between colonialism, nationalism, modernity, medicine and midwifery in colonial Bengal (c. 1860-1947). Unlike the dominant scholarship in the field, Guha emphasizes the roles that both male and female doctors, and not female doctors alone, played at the pedagogic and interventionist levels respectively in the development of midwifery and obstetrics in Bengal (pp. viii-ix). She highlights the centrality of the vernacular medical and popular print media in the gradual development of the Bengali middle-class ‘respectable’/bhadra identity, primarily the bhadramahila as the ‘new woman’. She provides invaluable insights on Bengali medical and popular manuals, especially the role of the popular women’s magazine Bamabodhini Patrika in ‘home tutoring’ of the bhadramahila in domestic management, midwifery, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and childrearing. She mainly focuses on why and how nationalist politics and institutions like the Calcutta Medical College and the Calcutta Municipal Corporation brought pregnancy and childbirth to the centre of nation-building endeavours. Her main argument is that reforming midwifery meant ‘modernising the middle-class women as mothers’ which was ‘essentially a modernist response of the western-educated, colonised middle-class to the colonial critique of Indian sociocultural codes’ based on the ‘nationalist recognition of family and health as important elements of the nation-building process’ underscored by transnational discourses on eugenics and ‘racial regeneration’ (pp. ix).

Bengali men’s insecurities regarding their stereotyping as ‘effeminate’ and ‘frail’ coupled with the pull of new medical-scientific, often pseudo-scientific, discourses on health amidst a flourishing vernacular print market brought to the fore heated debates about the body, including male and female/maternal bodies in connection with child marriage. She emphasizes on contemporary anxieties concerning the Hindus as a ‘dying race’ amidst communal tensions and fears of a growing Muslim population. Sources used like UN Mukherji’s Hindus: A Dying Race (1909), also discussed earlier by David Arnold in relation to malaria, ‘race’, science and colonialism; stress on the communalized logic in anxieties regarding the ‘diminishing vitality of the nation’ (p. 116). This discussion on ‘immature’ maternity would have also benefitted from an in-depth investigation of the reports on native newspapers of Bengal, which give interesting snippets of information, especially about the age of consent debates (1890s-1920s) and the sometimes-contradictory worldviews of indigenous medical practitioners in this regard.

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