The concept of motherhood in India: myths, theories and realities 9781527546806, 1527546802

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The Concept of Motherhood in India

The Concept of Motherhood in India: Myths, Theories and Realities Edited by

Zinia Mitra

The Concept of Motherhood in India: Myths, Theories and Realities Edited by Zinia Mitra This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Zinia Mitra and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4387-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4387-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I: Myths Mother: Archetype and Beyond ................................................................ 13 Tutun Muherjee Myth, Motherhood and Mainstream Hindi Cinema................................... 27 Shoma A. Chatterji Mother is the Buddha at Home Gedara Budun Amma .............................. 43 Daya Dissanayake Part II: Theories and Realities Bodies and Embodiments: Theories of Motherhood ................................. 59 Zinia Mitra Motherhood and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971) .......................... 85 Mosarrap Hossain Khan Single Motherhood: A Decentralized Status in Search of a Centre ........... 97 Anuradha Kunda Contributors ............................................................................................. 113 Index ........................................................................................................ 115

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful to my family, friends and colleagues for their inspiration that has helped me on this difficult route – it is difficult because it is in a flux, shifting and changing its course like a stream. The concept of motherhood has undergone a revolution in India, with women moving away from the home to join the workforce and provide extensive monetary support to their families. Now, with same-sex marriage, adoption, artificial insemination, IVF, and other techniques introduced, motherhood is no longer limited to biological mothering. The concept thus needs to be revisited. ‘India’ in the title of the book is used in the sense of Indian subcontinent. I would like to thank Mitali Wong, Professor of English, Claflin University, for her encouragement and her foreword to this book. I also thank Professor Tutun Mukherjee, Soma Chatterjei, Anuradha Kunda, Mossarap Hossain, and Daya Dissanayake for their visits to the blind alleys of tradition and returning with new perspectives. I thank the team of Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their cooperation and support. Zinia Mitra

FOREWORD

The current anthology edited by Zinia Mitra brings together unique perspectives on the complex subject of motherhood. The essays by contemporary scholars address the myths, realities, and theories associated with the concept. Professor Mitra’s own expertise is in the myths and realities of motherhood in Bengal, and she undertook a minor research project on the subject at the University of North Bengal. She discusses the theories of motherhood, and includes the following essays in the collection: Tutun Mukherjee’s “Mother: Archetype and Beyond,” Anuradha Kunda’s “Single Motherhood: a Decentralized Status in Search of a Centre,” Shoma Chatterji’s “Myth, Motherhood, and Mainstream Hindi Cinema,” Daya Dissanayake’s “Motherhood in Buddhism,” and Mosarrap Hossain Khan’s “Muslim Motherhood and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971).” The importance of motherhood in traditional patriarchal cultures is rooted in the teachings of all the world religions. Hence, the connections between world religions and motherhood made in this collection are valuable. The contributors to Professor Mitra’s anthology cover the role/myth of motherhood in Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim cultures. With the focus of this volume being on motherhood in the Indian subcontinent, it is advisable for readers to reflect upon motherhood as a transformative process that affects the lives of very large numbers of young women all over the world every day. There is over half a century of commentary, questioning, and theorizing by scholars in gender studies across the world regarding the biological determinism that impacts the lives of women when they become mothers. And even in this twenty-first century, not all instances of motherhood are women’s choices. There is a global awareness that the stagnant or declining birth rates in post-industrial societies have contributed to demands by conservative politicians to revisit liberal abortion laws. Some countries such as Germany and Russia continue to offer financial incentives to women to bear children. Russia gives significant financial stipends to couples who have male babies because patriarchal society perceives that males are needed as future members of Russia’s armed forces. The value of bearing male babies in Renaissance Europe was

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evident even in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Macbeth tells his wife, who has none of the softer virtues stereotypically assigned to the female gender: “Bring forth men-children only,/ For thy undaunted mettle should compose/ Nothing but males” (2.1.73–75). Traditionally, in Asian countries, the mothers of infant sons are looked upon more favourably than the mothers of daughters. It is indeed ironic that while motherhood is held in high esteem, in many traditional patriarchal cultures less value is placed on the birth of female infants who will become the mothers of the future. The dichotomy between the value placed on motherhood and the devaluation of a mother who has given birth to a female infant, in comparison to a mother who has given birth to a male infant, is traceable to economics. The benefits of raising male children who will support their parents in old age versus raising female children in dowry-ridden societies where daughters represent financial loss are still prevalent views in some parts of the world. In areas of South Asia, newly married women are expected to bear at least one child in the first year of marriage to prove their fertility. Similar views are also prevalent in other countries. In this context, Zinia Mitra’s anthology is a much needed one in understanding the theories, myths, and realities associated with motherhood. For many years, as a senior faculty member, I have often been queried by American undergraduates as to whether I have any children. These students are mostly from rural and small town backgrounds. I have often wondered whether the information that I have two adult daughters gives students a sense of security because mothers are viewed as both nurturing and forgiving. The American ideas of ‘motherhood and apple pie’ represents the common American view that these two things are essentially good for us and nothing can go wrong with them. However, we know that not all mothers are the same, just as all apple pies are not equal in quality. Another cross-cultural expectation across continents is that mothers should conduct themselves in a way in which they become role models for their children. This expectation also applies to fathers in traditional cultures. In closing, I am reminded of the effect of motherhood on women’s identity in West Bengal prior to the women’s movement in India. We, as children, were instructed to address women domestic workers with respect by addressing them as “Mother of [their oldest child],” and not by their given names. Over the years, I have observed that this practice has been discontinued in favour of using the woman’s first name with the suffix for

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older sister. This transition is interesting, suggesting that there is perhaps less emphasis on motherhood as identity across social classes in West Bengal. Mitali P. Wong, PhD Professor of English Claflin University Orangeburg, SC 29118 USA

INTRODUCTION and I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. A child is not a poem, A poem is not a child. There is no either/or. However. 1 Prajâpati (“Lord of Creatures”) said to himself: “Well let me make a firm basis for it” (semen). So He created her, He placed her below and worshipped her, therefore one should worship a woman by placing her below. He (Prajâpati) extended His organ that projects and with it he impregnated her.2

Adrienne Rich opens her Of Women Born with a glaring veracity, “All human life on the planet is born of women.” ‘Mother’ (Mata: mother, mater, maternal; Latvian equivalent “mate”) is one of the oldest known words. Roman Jakobson hypothesized that the nasal sound in ‘mama’ comes from the nasal murmur that babies produce during breastfeeding when their mouths are blocked, which is probably why ‘mother’ in many languages of the world contains a nasal sound.3 Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and nurturing are associated tasks of motherhood. The Collins dictionary defines ‘mother’ as “a female who has given birth to offspring,” and more broadly as a person who demonstrates ‘motherly qualities,’ such as maternal affection. The definition ‘mother’ thus focuses on the gestational capacities of women, the ability to give birth and experience pregnancy, which by extension means look after, care for, protect, nurse, and tend. Lately, ‘mother’ has been defined as a person who engages in the act of mothering. ‘Mothering’ is a term constructed in late modernity that denotes a woman providing the physical and psychological care needed for a child.4 Motherly qualities include caring, tending, and compassion, which by extension include cooking, washing, or other necessary activities entailed by the patriarchy from which others/fathers are released.

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Introduction

A woman is physiologically equipped to bear children. She attains motherhood through the act of carrying a child in her womb and giving birth. A deep-rooted biological determinism, employed and interpreted by the patriarchy for its own benefits, lets the society carry on in the belief that all women are to bear children, and assumes that mothering and childcare knowledge come naturally to them once they give birth. Both assumptions are harmful to the women and their children. Women with little knowledge of prenatal care during pregnancy end up with a sense of isolation, which may result in depression. They often fail to filter out superstitious beliefs and practices/family customs from real healthcare issues, resulting in complications during childbirth or giving birth to unhealthy children (health does not only mean physical health). A confirmation of the bio-deterministic patriarchal view keeps the fathers free from childcare responsibilities, whereas the mothers reel under the tremendous pressure to provide the best health, education, and moral wellbeing to their children. Biological essentialism is used conveniently by the patriarchy to overlook the construction of motherhood and assign the childcare-related activities as the responsibility solely of the mother, who could win accolades for being a good mother. As Sarah Hardy puts it, “the idea of a good mother is deployed through material and discursive spaces in order to mobilize subjectivities that are socially adapted and useful.”5 I undertook a project on motherhood in 2011–12 through the Women’s Studies department at the University of North Bengal. My minor project involved case studies, and it exposed many things for me. I was introduced to the dichotomy of the convolutions of the real and ideal motherhoods, in which we as mothers are trapped. It was then that I planned to expand parts of my research into a full-length book, with points of views from scholars who would not only engage with motherhood seriously but also open doors and windows in the minds of the readers. Serious work on motherhood is now being done in India as a whole. To understand the concept of motherhood in India we need to reflect on its ethos, its strong mother-goddess tradition that is reflected in the name by which all women, irrespective of their age, when relationship is not specific, are called “Ma.” Private buses and taxis plying their trade on the streets, sweet parlours, department stores, and restaurants bear names of the mother ‘Ma Tara’, ‘Ma Kali’, or carry the mother’s blessings – ‘Mayer Ashirbaad’ etc. These are reflections of a deep-rooted belief in the mother as the protector and food giver (Annapurna). But, as we shall see, these emotive responses to the mother archetype have little or no connection with the real-life status women get to enjoy as mothers in India. ‘The

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Breast Giver’ by Mahasweta Devi depicts this phenomenon in a hyperbolic dimension where the maternal figure feeds scores of mouths, but herself remains metaphorically starved. Motherhood as a lived experience is not measured in the same way as in the past – both mothers and society have undergone changes. Now we have a different familial structure in India, with working mothers, nuclear families, and changing models of parenting. There are homosexual marriages, IVF conceptions (cytoplasmic and nuclear transfers, cloning), and surrogacy to be considered. The concept of motherhood in India thus needs to be revisited. Maternity was focused on in the United States at the beginning of the millennium. Popular culture turned its attention to high-profile celebrity pregnancies, hi-tech fertility treatments, water births, IVF, and surrogacy. Celebrities in their late thirties and forties went public with their pregnancy experience on TV chat shows. Hollywood caught up with ‘Motherhood’ (2009), directed by Katherine Dieckmann, which dealt with a mother’s dilemmas over marriage, work, and herself. The Business of Being Born, directed by Abby Epstein and produced by Ricki Lake, is a 2008 documentary film that explores the contemporary experience of childbirth in the United States. It compares various childbirth methods, including midwives, natural births, epidurals, and the Caesarean method. It advocated natural and fewer medicalized parturitions. Dr Sears’s baby care books have become standard reads, and ‘Ask Dr Sear’s’ grew into a trusted website on pregnancy and childbirth. The culture conjointly witnessed the opt-out revolution, activism, ‘momoirs,’ and mommy bloggers. Books that emerged out of a rich feminist tradition of thinking about motherhood in the West may be said to have begun with Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), wherein Rich wrote unflinchingly about women who gave birth to and raised children while decidedly doing their share of the necessary productive labour. Yet, by the 1990s, voices were raised against the idea of the working mothers and in praise of the mothers at home. These voices reached a crescendo just as technology began to reduce the level of physical hardship and economical concerns reduced the size of families. “In the last century the idea of full-time, exclusive motherhood took root and the ‘home’ became a religious obsession” (Rich 1976, 44). In order to have real choice, wrote Rich, we needed to “understand the power in

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powerlessness personified in motherhood in patriarchal culture.” Rich wrote from her personal experience as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother. Motherhood is undeniably an experience determined by the institution imposed on all women everywhere. Erma Bombeck’s Motherhood: the Second Oldest Profession (1983) examined motherhood with heart and humour. A supermom who can balance husband and children is finally a good actor. Bombeck chronicles three decades of frustrations and victories to conclude that motherhood tops the list of professions, not only in its burdens but also its triumphs. The 1990s propounded further feminist interrogations of the ideology and experience of motherhood. Lauri Umanst's Motherhood Re-conceived (1996) provided a historical account of feminist thought and activism through the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how the feminists struggled against the most oppressive aspects of biological reductivism while at the same time working towards the incorporation of these perspectives and needs of women as mothers. Sharon Hays’s The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) critically examined aspects of the ethos of everyday life that are so deeply held and taken for granted as to remain unquestioned and treated as common sense. Books that need a mention here are Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions (2001), Rickie Solinger’s Beggars and Choosers (2001), and Ann Crimnden’s The Price of Motherhood (2001). Carla Barnhill, in The Myth of The Perfect Mother: Rethinking the Spirituality Of Women (2004), addressed several issues of mothers’ struggles that included the home-schooling of children, spanking, working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, depression, and social isolation. She offered a positive view of motherhood based on biblical principles. Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood Within the Age of Anxiety (2005) questioned the assumptions about motherhood while dealing at length with mothers who compete for their children to be perfect in most spheres of life and panic at each developmental benchmark. Motherhood, understood as the apotheosis of women in India, has been recurrently referred to in religious and secular texts since ancient times. From Mahabharata and Ramayana, to plays like Abhigyana Sakuntalam, to the myths that grew around Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, the texts of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhay, and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, there abound references and stories of reverence to motherhood. Motherhood gained some other kind of limelight in Indian thinking with the publication of Mother India (1927) by the American historian Katherine Mayo. Mayo’s Mother India is a polemical book, which maliciously attacked Indian

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society, religion, and culture. It pointed out the society’s ill treatment and cruelty towards animals, untouchables, and women and opposed India’s demand for independence from British rule. The book also discussed the problems of child marriage. Mayo singled out the ruinously abating sexuality of Indian males as the core problem that led to sexual aggression, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mayo’s book created outrage across the country. Newspapers labelled it as defamatory vilification of Hindus and Hinduism. Mayo was accused of being racist, pro-imperialist, and Indophobic. Copies of her book and her effigy were burned in the streets. The book prompted angry refutations and pamphlets in response, which emphasized that she was erroneous and her perception of Indian society was false. Mahatma Gandhi’s response is well known – to him, it was a “report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon.” 6 In order to counter Mayo’s assertions, Dalip Singh Saund (later a congressman) penned My Mother India (1930). Another important response to Mayo's book was Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s A Son of Mother India Answers (1928). The title of Mehboob Khan’s (1957) epic Hindi film Mother India was a deliberate rebuke to Mayo’s book. Representations of motherhood have undergone a noticeable change in Bollywood. From the archetype of sacrificing mothers of Mamta and Deewar, India recently witnessed Bollywood movies like Kya Kehna (2000) that argued in favour of the reproductive rights of women in pre-marital pregnancy, celebrated strong single mothers in Paa (2009), and the mother hero in Mom (2017). The Hindi thriller film Kahani 2 (2016) directed by Sujoy Ghosh questioned the very concept of biological motherhood. The recent Bengali film Ekla Cholo (2014) directed by Abhijit Guha and Sudeshna Roy deals with a woman’s choice of becoming a single mother and the challenges she faces because of this choice, which is still considered out of place in a patriarchal society. Motherhood in the films of India is no longer simply an appeal to the emotions, and thus raises some pertinent questions. The books on motherhood that emerged in India include Jasodhara Bagchi’s Interrogating Motherhood (2017). Bagchi gauged the concept of ‘mother,’ exhuming its paradox, manifestation, and lived reality within the Indian society. The paradox comprises the powerlessness and glorification of motherhood, which in turn legitimizes the oppression that in turn leaches motherhood of its joyful meaning. Bagchi explored the situation of women in colonial Bengal and argued that motherhood had become a tool

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for female enslavement situated within the framework of family, culture, state, and scientific and technological enterprises. Bagchi asserted that motherhood in India was used as a nation-building tool against the colonizers and was further celebrated in the imagination of a postcolonial nation. Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? (2010) by Maitreyi Krishnaraj presented 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 motherhood is an ideology that is manufactured. This is established by investigating institutional structures of society like language, religion, media, law, and technology. Spectres of Mother India: the Global Restructuring of an Empire (2006) by Mrinalini Sinha tells the complex story of an episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. At the centre of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Mayo’s work exposed the social evils in India, and disclosed the plight of women and child brides. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for self-governance. Mayo’s book was reprinted in the United States and the United Kingdom, and translated into several languages. Sinha traced the trajectory of the controversy from the publication of the book to the passing of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in India in 1929. Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India by Anu Aneja and Shubhangi Vaidya (2016) explores motherhood discourse in urban India from a feminist perspective. It revisits ancient myth and religion, psychoanalysis, literature, and cinema within which motherhood is constructed. The book contributes to the ongoing research on motherhood. This list of books is not exhaustive. While some books on motherhood might be newly emerging, many others on related topics may have incorporated relevant discussions on motherhood. Indian mommy bloggers became a vogue with ‘Artsy Craftsy Mom’ by Shruti Bhat that started in 2010, and ‘Bumps and Babies’ by Sangeetha Menon that that started in early 2012. Other similar blogs include ‘My Little Moppet’, ‘Sishu World’, ‘Mommyswall’, ‘Kids Stop Press’, ‘The Champa Tree’, ‘Kidskintha’, ‘Whole Some Mamma’, ‘MomScribe’, ‘Kiddie

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Story 365’, ‘Being Happy Mom’, ‘Being Momma’, and ‘Confused Parent’. There is also ‘Mom Community’ with 1.3 million followers, which offers a free menstrual cycle calculator, tips on how to get pregnant, symptoms of pregnancy, useful tips on body care, and counsels on infertility. Motherhood encompasses a proverbial self-sufficiency that involves putting the requirements of children before one’s physical and emotional needs. Mothers need to reflect that motherhood requires some basics like economic security, good health, and happiness – in short, the very things that have been dismissed by the institution praising it. Singe Hammer says: “Not all women become mothers, but all obviously are daughters, and daughters become mothers. Even daughters who never become mothers must confront the issues of motherhood, because the possibility and even the probability of motherhood remains.” 7 Given the historical conditions inherited as a result of masculine hostility to nature from capitalist and self-proclaimed socialist states with women now free to regulate reproduction by separating copulation and conception, rendering them equal to men in the choice of reproduction, women ought to rethink on motherhood to ensure the lost balance between population and resources. The Concept of Motherhood in India : Myths, Theories, and Realities endeavours to understand the concept of motherhood in the Indian subcontinent created and promulgated through myths that were and are used consciously and compellingly for the subjugation of women, which has drilled into our minds a continuance of the patriarchal lineage. The book endeavours to look into the theories of motherhood, taking into account the changing realities of postcolonial India. The essays explore motherhood from religious, theoretical, political, and modern Indian urban perspectives. The essays on motherhood are by scholars from India and overseas. This book is divided into two parts: Part I, ‘The Myths’, tries to locate motherhood, look at the historical context, and reread the myths as overarching social constructs. It attempts to read into the myths of motherhood established through the ages through slokas, fables, folklore, and literature that have steadily constructed the concept of motherhood from an idealized patriarchal point of view. The one-sided conversations have had very concrete results. At some point, nearly all of us, as mothers, get entrapped in the unrealistic expectations

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about ourselves and strive for the impossible ideals of the perfect womanhood/motherhood only to end up frustrated. The chapters interrogate the cultural and religious practices that invigorate and idealize motherhood as a concept while remaining oblivious of the real-life situations that mothers confront, ignoring their health and emotional issues. The essays included in this section are “Mother: Archetype and Beyond” by Tutun Mukherjee, “Myth, Motherhood, and Mainstream Hindi Cinema” by Shoma A. Chatterji, and “Mother is the Buddha at Home Gedara Budun Amma” by Daya Dissanayake. Part II, ‘Theories and Realities’, takes into account the different theories which have developed around motherhood that attempt to define, explain, and understand the lived reality of motherhood through multifarious approaches. Biological determinism, which believes anatomy is destiny, sees the division of gender roles as natural. Marxism links the oppression of women to the growth of class society. The sociobiologist Richard Dawkins sees the foundations of male-female connections as lying deep in the egg and sperm cells. Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed the nature/culture binary (1969), and affirmed that humans differ from animals because of their capacity for culture, offering his own model of human society. The much criticised hypotheses of Sigmund Freud concerning penis envy and the Oedipus and Electra complexes gave rise to terms like ‘womb complex’ in psychoanalytic approaches to motherhood. Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed that women’s ability to give birth was the source of their subordination. Single motherhood and child adoption have put to question the long-standing preaching in the line of biological determinism. Mosarrap Hossain Khan’s “Muslim Motherhood and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)” explores the idea of ‘Birangana’ and the new notion of political motherhood through a reading of Jahanara Imama’s Bengali memoir, Ekattorer Dinguli [The Days of 71] (1986) and Tahmima Anam’s novels A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2011). The paper examines the ways by which Muslim women negotiated the difficult topography of religiosity and secular nationalism during the war. Anuradha Kunda’s “Single Motherhood: a Decentralized Status in Search of a Centre” engages with motherhood at different levels and questions the very intangible base of the conception. My work began as a project at the Women’s Studies Centre at the University of North Bengal under the title “Motherhood in Bengal: Myths, Realities, and Changing Perspectives.” Working on the project of motherhood felt like a prolonged labour in itself, ruptured by the reality of

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the demanding role of my own motherhood. My returning visitations to the bleak stereotypes still prevalent in our society, the blind male point of view that imprudently ignores the women’s perceptions, and the reiterated clichés made me despondently return to the fact that nothing much has changed. However, I discern a faint silver lining in the way the educated young men and women are beginning to think today. Mothering is now seen as more of an activity of bringing up children than the actual experience of giving birth. Girls and boys now question if they should give birth to another life when the world is already overpopulated, and raise questions about carrying forward the family lineage in the male line when the world can actually be one family if we open ourselves to the adoption of destitute children. Perhaps we are one family, as a group of paleoanthropologists and geneticists point out, non-Africans can trace their ancestry to a single populace that emigrated from Africa between fifty and eighty thousand years ago. 8 Adoptions work in two positive ways: lonely men and women find the warmth of human company and a hungry stomach finds food. It is time to enlarge the very foundations on which the concept of motherhood was built. We would do well to listen to each other and learn.

Notes and References 1. Margaret Atwood, “Spelling,” in Poets of Americas, edited by Ajanta Dutt (New Delhi: Worldview, 2015). 2. Swami Nikhilananda, The Upanishads vol. III, Brihadâranyaka Upanishad Adhaya IX, Brahamana IV (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. 3. Roman Jakobson, “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’,” Selected Writings vol. I, Phonological Studies, 538–45 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 4. “And then, of course, there was poor Hester Prynne – branded with a scarlet letter for mothering a child with another man.” Jessica Bennett, “Is Cheating the Secret to a Happy Marriage?” Daily Beast (October 11, 2011), 2; “Katie continued to blog in excruciating detail, chronicling the worst parenting experience of them all – mothering a dying child.” K. Emily Bond, A Mommy Blog’s Heart breaking Turn, Daily Beast (October 6, 2010). 5. Sarah Hardy and Wiedmer Caroline, Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home and the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 16. 6. Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: an Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas (Random House Digital, 2002), 214. 7. Singe Hammer, Daughters and Mothers (New York, 1976), xi.

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8. Joshua M Akey, University of Washington. http//www.washington.edu/globalaffairs/2016/09/21/research-shows-a-singlemigration-from-africa-populated-the-world.

PART I: MYTHS

MOTHER: ARCHETYPE AND BEYOND TUTUN MUKHERJEE

There was a beginning of the universe which may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe. From the Mother, we may know her offspring. After knowing the offspring, keep to the Mother. Thus one’s whole life may be preserved from harm. (Tao te Ching, Ch 52, tr. Lin Yutang) I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand. (Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song”)

The conversation between two brothers in the Hindi film Deewar is unforgettable. The elder brother who has made money through smuggling boasts that he has money, houses, and cars – and what does the poor younger brother have? The younger brother declares solemnly that he has a “mother.” The answer mortifies the elder brother and his bravado pops like a balloon. Such is the mystical and reverential halo conferred on the mother that she alone can outweigh all material wealth. The archetypical ‘mother’ has always been a generic term synonymous with love, nurturing, and sacrifice. She is a possessor of infallibility and unparalleled virtues. Carl Jung describes three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths. All cultures, from ancient to modern, glorify the mother as Magna Mater, Terra Mater, Mother Goddess, Tao Mother, Adishakti, and so on, connecting them to the Earth, nature, the primeval flows of the lifecycle, transformation, and resurrection. Whether Isis, Gaia, Demeter, Cybele, Cihuacoatl, Kuan Yin, Tara, Durga, or Mary, their mother lore is connected

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to the idea of the Divine Feminine conferred with power over human life and destiny. As the universal mother, she can succour and also punish. This paper explores how much of this aura is transferred to human mothers and their experience or travails of motherhood. Adrienne Rich warns of a fissure between the ideal and the real. In her manifesto Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, she states that all born of women are inevitably connected to motherhood, but cautions that the images, ideals, archetypes, and theories of the archetypal mother are sanctioned and promoted by patriarchal culture to reinforce the conservatism of motherhood as an ‘institution’ and so “convert it to an energy for the renewal of male power” (1976, 15). This note of caution must be kept in mind as it gives nuance to the ideal and real situations of motherhood. So, in the general understanding, the power of the mother has two aspects: the biological potential or capacity to bear and nourish human life, and the magical power invested in women by men, whether in the form of Goddess worship or mother-aura. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s book Real and Imagined Women also argues for a dialectical relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’, because the study of ‘real’ women cannot take place apart from the exploration of ‘imagined’ women. Erma Bombeck writes in her fascinating book Motherhood: the Second Oldest Profession that: Motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all, a mold that is all-encompassing and means the same to all people … No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence runs through their veins. (1983, 10).

Indeed, motherhood is a life-changing experience and women’s response to it across generations, societal practice, background, and age cannot be the same, so the aspect of ‘ambivalence’ is understandable. But instances of really ‘bad’ mothers are rare, although, according to Sudhir Kakkar: The theme of the bad mother merits particular attention in the Indian context not just because it exists, but because it is characterized by a singular intensity and pervasiveness … In all societies the image of the “bad” mother combines both the aggressively destroying and the sexually demanding themes. (89–90)

In this regard, Indian myths and history do not quite offer a Medea analogy, but wicked stepmothers and mother impersonators are many.

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Fictional representations of mother and motherhood invariably repeat the archetype. Let me share some of my often-read narratives on motherhood. Through school and college, books like Little Women and Gorky’s Mother were read avidly. Recalling Mother now suggests several intertextual connections, especially with Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084. Both narratives are about a mother’s love and support for her revolutionary son and his ideology. The context for Mother is the Russian Revolution of 1905 in which Gorky himself was involved. The narrative is said to be based on real people and incidents. It was published in an English translation before its Russian version, and Gorky wanted the translation to be considered as the original. The story is of Pelagueya Nilovna, a factory worker who hopes to bring up her son Pavel Vlasov well so he is not an uncouth brutal drunkard like his father. Her anxiety is similar to that of Paul Morel’s mother in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, but while Mrs. Morel is educated, Pelagueya is not, yet out of love involves herself deeply in her son’s activities and interests, and even tries to educate herself. Pavel grows up a gentle intellectual who becomes involved in the Leninist socialist movement, and soon starts bringing his ideologues home. His mother embraces them all with love and becomes their ‘nenko’ or ‘mamasha’. The young revolutionaries win the support of factory workers who are locked out of the factory. When they are arrested after the May Day demonstration, Pelagueya commits herself to her son’s fight and participates in socialist activities, secretly circulating their pamphlets. During the ensuing trial, Pavel delivers an impassioned and stirring speech but is found guilty and sentenced to exile in Siberia. Pelagueya devotes herself fully to her son’s cause and decides to spread Pavel’s fiery words. She is caught by gendarmes at the railway station with a valise full of mimeographs of the speech, and is beaten and choked. Now fully converted to the socialist cause, she exhorts the surrounding crowd before losing consciousness: “People, gather up your forces into one single force! … Fear nothing! There are no tortures worse than those which you endure all your lives!” Rereading Mother triggered intertexts like Gulzar’s film Mere Apne, a Hindi remake of an earlier Bengali film Apanjan by Tapan Sinha. The unlikely protagonist of Mere Apne is Anandi, a poor ageing widow who becomes ‘Nani Ma’ to a bunch of misunderstood, aimless, rudderless, and unemployed youths who get sucked into political violence and gang fights. She creates a surrogate family for them with her gentle care, affection, and sincere interest in their troubled misguided lives. She shares their angst and advises them. The other text is Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974), concerning a mother seeking the truth about her son after his unidentified body is released by the police as prisoner number

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1084. The context is 1970s Bengal during the intensity of the antiestablishment Naxalite Movement that drew in so many young people, who were killed in so-called ‘encounters’ with the police. Sujata wonders how the family – and particularly she as his mother – had been so unaware of Brati’s ideology and preoccupations. She wants to understand the reason for his death and learns that 1,083 people have died with him fighting for their revolutionary cause. She wants to embrace them all in her love as the ‘universal mother’ and is moved by their death-defying dedication to the struggle. She herself is transformed in her mourning for her son and the yearning to ‘know’ him, and through that process discovers herself. The story is told in flashback after a passage of two years after the incident. The time has been punishing for Sujata struggling against patriarchy and middle-class morality that refuse to even acknowledge Brati for fear of social stigma. Sujata’s journey ends with her overpowering mental anguish and an apparently burst appendicitis. These narratives present the processes of mothering that builds a relationship between the mother and the child that is non-patriarchal and defies institutionalization. This becomes increasingly evident in many other narratives on motherhood that were written from the late twentieth century onwards. Motherhood is often defined as an automatic set of feelings and behaviours that is switched on by pregnancy and the birth of a baby. It is also seen as a moral transformation whereby a woman comes to terms with being different in that she ceases to be an autonomous individual because in one way or the other she is attached to another individual – her baby. But does motherhood really efface the mother or abrogate the woman’s selfhood and identity? As there is pain, travail, and stress that test a mother, there is also joy, happiness, and a sense of fulfilment. The mother does not lose her selfhood; rather, she passes her spirit on to her children. Two exceptional memoirs explore the difficulties and hardships that grandmothers and mothers overcome to leave behind a rich and creative legacy. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, which inspired an earlier essay of mine on my own mother, 1 and Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance elaborate that, despite their difficult and stressful lives, our foremothers rejoiced in their creativity that Walker says must be recorded and celebrated. Walker’s essays collected in the anthology are about black women who had to obey their slave masters and, after abolition, their husbands. They bore and raised children and did back-breaking housework. They were not really free and were still enslaved with no scope to pursue or fulfil their dreams.2 Walker embraces them all collectively as mothers and grandmothers, and writes: “They were

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Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality, which is the basis of art, that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane” (233). In the particular essay that gives the book its name, Walker wonders how these women – oppressed, silenced and pulverized by circumstances – kept their creative spirit alive, and asks what fed their indomitable inner strength. She writes about her own mother: “it is to my mother – and all our mothers who were not famous – that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day” (357). Walker recalls that her mother was overworked, bringing up her large family of eight children as well as working as maid to supplement their family income, yet found opportunities within her domestic life to let her creativity thrive. It seemed that, through sheer strength of will, she transformed the rocky land around their humble home into a beautiful garden that passers-by stopped to admire. Walker recalls that her mother spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits, and winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all their beds. She made all the clothes they wore, their bedsheets and linen. Walker recalls that there was a never a moment for her to sit down undisturbed to unravel her own private thoughts, never a time free from chores, yet she revelled in her work and found joy in telling stories to her children. These heart-warming stories came naturally to her and later became Walker’s stories, who wanted them to be retold and shared. Learning from the legacy of her own mother, Walker believes that every mother is somehow responsible for the achievement of her daughter. She believes that any artistic output by a person is also a product of their mothers and grandmothers. Indeed, the children are their best creations, their very own wonderful gardens. Walker reveals how she found and understood herself while researching her heritage . In her memoir, Louise Erdrich traces her winter pregnancy through spring and summer that is actually an amalgam of her three pregnancies. It is inevitable that, along with physical and emotional changes, the experience brings raw emotions to the surface and an introspectiveness that impacts all aspects of one’s being. Erdrich connects with the passing seasons and identifies the changes in nature with her own mental and physical changes as her pregnancy advances. Landscape figures prominently in her dreams and her thoughts. She writes, “I fall sick with longing for the horizon … I want the clean line, the simple line, the clouds marching over it in feathered masses. I suffer from horizon sickness” (91). Her dreams are

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deeply Native American and metonymical, in which the persons, creatures, and spaces inhabiting the realms of the unconscious actually represent other persons, creatures, and spaces from her conscious everyday life. The connections are both tenuous and mystical. The narrative is probably a metaphorical representation of a specific Native American ritual of ‘the dance of the blue jay’ performed during the advent of spring. The participants chirp and caw, perching and twittering in bird fashion, seized with a desire to escape and explore open vistas. This is also the style of Erdrich’s writing. Furthermore, Erdrich tries to structure her identity as wife and mother through domestic rituals such as cooking, which though done mostly by her husband, provide moments of shared joy of togetherness. Reminiscent of Walker’s mother’s efforts, for Erdrich gardening is a pleasurable activity which links her to the memory of her Ojibwa grandfather, her Polish grandmother, and her mother and father – all avid gardeners. It is not only the actual and physical planting of gardens, the desire to make things grow, that gives her pleasure, but the mental activity of planning them in the dead of winter, of leafing through seed catalogues and imagining gardens in the mind, giving her a sense of self and rootedness, and therefore peace. She writes in luminous prose: Drowsy with possibilities, I fill the snow-sheeted yard with crab-apple trees, pink and white blossoms studded with bees … These pictures vanquish the frozen monotony and calm me, but of course they also exceed the reality of what will, in truth, turn out to be my garden … Full of the usual blights, mistakes, ruinous beetles and parasites, glorious one week, bedraggled the next, my actual garden is always a mixed bag … The ground I tend sustains me in easy summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I’ll hoe for the rest of the year. It is finally the winter garden that produces the true flowering, the saving vision. (32–3)

Again, like Walker, Erdrich recalls her foremothers to make sense of her role as a woman, a mother, and a writer. Not only do the female members of her family provide her with a sense of self, but she feels connected with other female writers whose example has been decisive in her own work. She says: Every female writer starts out with another list of female writers in her head. Mine includes, quite pointedly, a mother list. I collect these women in my heart and often shuffle through the little I know of their experiences to find the toughness of spirit to deal with mine. (144)

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Erdrich’s list begins with Jane Austen and ends with Jane Smiley. Clearly, the emotional links which bind her to all the foremothers convey the idea of powerful ties as an enduring source of strength and creative inspiration. The notable feature of both Walker’s and Erdrich’s memoirs is their emphasis on the expansive energy of creativity inherited from foremothers, their ability to “write” their lives that influences the lives of other women. Although vigorously challenged by feminists from 1970s onwards, cultures like India which are predominantly patriarchal define woman’s essential purpose to be her reproductive function, fostering the idea that motherhood has to be a woman’s primary identity. So motherhood and mothering became complicated in matters of a woman’s identity along with her rights and entitlements which would be dependent upon the act of giving birth. Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the futuristic Gilead, a patriarchal society that denies women education, jobs, and economic freedom, or even the use of money, and uses dress codes to categorize and subjugate them. While some must bear children, others are relegated to other chores to serve the society. The narrator Offred recalls being made to wear a red dress and a white veil and held against her will at the Red Center to be trained as a handmaid, a surrogate mother, for powerful military families. The chief function of such women is to bear children since there has been a drastic decline in the birth rate. Offred’s place in the society is as a breeder of children. She has no other identity. Adrienne Rich cautions that such is the “Kingdom of the Fathers” that enforces serfdom of women. She writes that it is: “The relationship at the core of all power relationships, a tangle of lust, violence, possession, fear, conscious longing, unconscious hostility, sentimental rationalization: the sexual understructure of social and political forms” (56). Typically, on attaining puberty, a young girl is seen as a woman and has to be trained to shoulder the responsibilities ahead of her. She is given lessons on different household duties, social etiquette, obedience, and wifely duties on how to serve her husband and his family, and such other matters that define her womanhood in a hierarchical society. In some cases, these lessons also include her responsibility to the society. Buchi Emecheta’s novel Joys of Motherhood is an ironic comment on the motherhood cliché and a critique of Nigerian society. It is the story of Nnu Ego, Agbadi’s daughter from Ona with whom he has fallen in love after she nursed him through an illness. Agbadi, who already has several wives and children, is very fond of the pretty Nnu Ego and arranges for her marriage into a wealthy titled family. But the marriage fails because she doesn’t conceive. Agbadi gets her married again to a rotund washer

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man Nnaife, and she has to leave her hometown Ibuza to go to the faraway and unfamiliar Lagos. She hides her disappointment at Nnaife’s looks when she becomes pregnant, and attempts suicide when her firstborn dies. After she is persuaded to come home, she becomes pregnant again and over the years has seven children. Nnu Ego is very happy to give birth to sons since that gives her a dignified social status. Nnaife leaves home after he gets a job on a ship. During his absence, Nnaife’s brother dies and Nnu Ego ‘inherits’ all his wives and children. She struggles to feed and sustain her large family, and as a result lives in poverty and misfortune. The brother’s wife gets involved in trade and is soon quite well off. Nnu Ego bears the burden of the family, pinning her hope on a glorious future that her children, especially her sons, would make possible. She plans her daughters’ marriages to get money for her sons’ education: Nnu Ego realized that part of the pride of motherhood was to look a little unfashionable and be able to drawl with joy: “I can’t afford another outfit, because I am nursing him, so you see I can’t go anywhere to sell anything.” One usually received the answer, “Never mind, he will grow soon and clothe you and farm for you, so that your old age will be sweet.”

This however does not happen. Her reward is abject penury, and ridicule from her husband and neighbours. The story unfolds describing Nnu Ego’s responsibility as the ‘Senior Wife until her sad death, when her sons Oshia and Adim who had migrated to America and Canada return and organize an expensive funeral for her. They build a shrine so her descendants can pray to her and ask for children. But Nnu Ego refuses to answer those prayers! Through Nnu Ego’s story, Emecheta describes the joys, misery, despair, and disillusionment of motherhood. The desertion of ageing parents by children is a bitter and harsh reality and is becoming increasingly apparent in all societies, and is especially distressing for indigent parents or single parents. Nnu Ego’s poignant end brings to mind the death of Jashoda, the protagonist in Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Stanadayini’ (1997). Destitute and desperate, Jashoda must breastfeed the babies of a rich family that employs her to nurse the infants. She keeps breeding children of her own so her breasts keep yielding milk, as the money she earns thereby sustains her large family. Thus she is a ‘mother’ to many. But when her breasts dry up, are cancer-afflicted and yield not milk but blood, there is no one to care for her. Her unclaimed dead body lies in the government morgue and is finally dragged away as a carcass for quick disposal. The story is multilayered and has been translated and interpreted in several ways, discussing Jashoda as a foster mother and also as an object exploited and used by the capitalist system and then thrown

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away. There is also the symbolic dimension of Jashoda as India, a mother to many, but uncared for by her offspring. India as a ‘mother’ is also invoked by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s hymn “Vande Mataram” which galvanized India’s Freedom Struggle. Mehboob Khan’s iconic Hindi film Mother India draws upon the concept of the Indian woman as allembracing ‘mother’, as earth spirit and homeland, and as universal mother or Jagatjanani, that will sustain and nurture but can also punish, thus indicating the cyclic return of the mother archetype. The attitude to motherhood and the circumstances surrounding maternity are similar in many countries, as in India. It is expected that a woman must conceive soon after marriage and bear a son, and thereby acquire dignity in the family hierarchy. A mother of daughters is not accorded the same worth and may even be blamed for increasing the family burden because daughters must be married off with dowry. It is customary that a woman who is unable to birth a son should silently accept her husband marrying again to beget an heir. The condition of the abandoned and neglected wife, not necessarily divorced, is understandably pitiful. There are many issues regarding motherhood that must be discussed and debated today. Most important is the matter of a support system, whether familial and/or social, being available to a woman on becoming a mother. This becomes especially important for older women who become pregnant and working women who are expected to balance the professional sphere and domestic sphere with equanimity. She is expected to remain committed to her domestic chores, including being a dutiful wife and a mother. But this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, ‘traditional’ motherhood is devalued by insisting that women should contribute to the economy. On the other, it is regretted that ‘modern’ mothers are no longer like those of yore; they are obsessed with their own fulfilment and no longer wake up when the child cries with fear of thunder and lightning. This raises questions of maternal obligation, responsibility, and expectations. Today’s women must also combat deep-seated cultural assumptions and stereotypes about mothers and motherhood that caring for children is not real work with true social and economic value, and also that motherhood doesn’t require intellect. These are related crucially to details of gender equality, women’s rights, and the degradation of women’s labour. There are many other equally significant matters of immediate social relevance. Recently, nationwide attention was drawn to the plight of a thirteen-year-old victim of rape whose unborn child was twenty-one weeks old, which the courts refused her permission to abort, being fearful of her life. Such issues of unwanted pregnancies, teenage pregnancies, birth

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control, and unwilling mothers who want abortions are serious global concerns with wide ethical and socio-legal consequences. As Adrienne Rich explained in Of Woman Born: “Rape and its aftermath … marriage as economic dependence … the theft of childbirth from women … laws regulating contraception and abortion … the absence of social benefits for mothers” (281) are among the core social issues that must preoccupy us today. Another contentious contemporary issue is of surrogacy. There are many aspects that must be examined since the idea of surrogacy or ‘rent-awomb’ arguments fragment maternity into three components of genetic motherhood, birth motherhood, and social motherhood,3 with their many ramifications. Mothering-as-biological birthing against those of motheringas-nurturing pose ethical, legal, and, some would argue, moral issues. India has been a favourite country for surrogacy due to the availability of cheap ‘service’. The booming surrogacy industry in India has no proper laws to monitor its working. A study conducted in July 2012, backed by the UN, put the surrogacy business at more than $400 million, with more than three thousand fertility clinics all over the country. While surrogacy is a blessing for infertile couples yearning for a child or a gay parent who wants a child, there is a need to reflect upon it being treated as ‘fashionable’ for women who would like a child without going through the travails of pregnancy and childbirth, and its exploitative and crass ‘commercialization’, rather like the organ harvesting brilliantly dramatized in Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest. Admittedly, to a certain extent today’s world accords more freedom to a woman, but this is not true of a large percentage of women in India who remain shackled by patriarchal conventions. So the struggle for the liberation of women must continue. However, to cite the gains, divorced women can choose to be single mothers like many other women who adopt children as single parents. There are also women who for reasons of their own do not wish to be mothers. Unthinkable even fifty years ago, these choices do not carry any social stigma today. In fact, freedom about making decisions marks a victory for women’s rights over their lives and bodies. Yet, French Feminist Elisabeth Badinter invites debates with her provocative book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, and argues that motherhood has held women in ‘thrall’ to the new-fangled norms of ‘attachment parenting, co-sleeping and ondemand breastfeeding’, which, as hallmarks of contemporary motherhood, have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Not only does this discussion recall Betty Friedan’s seminal study on the deliberate construction of Feminine Mystique, the critical question for Badinter appears to be whether

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women’s obsession with being the perfect mother has destroyed feminism. One of the most tenacious cultural assumptions is that motherhood equals selflessness/self-sacrificing, and that, on becoming a mother, caring for oneself and caring for children become mutually exclusive. Obviously the idea of ‘sacrificial motherhood’ is open to all women across cultures to accept, resist, reject, or negotiate. On International Women’s Day this year, a lively and entertaining discussion was organized and aired by ABC Radio Melbourne on: “Is Motherhood Overrated?” The announcement read: Mothers. Everyone has one. Most know one. Not every woman wants to be one. And not every woman gets a choice. The merit of Motherhood for the Modern Women is a question that can still confound, confuse, astound and confront.

The participants brought in humorous, insightful, and contemporary takes on mothers and motherhood, a discourse that is richly multivalent, contributing new and critically enriching understandings of what Rachel Kubie describes as the “wrestling embrace between making art and the allconsuming daily-ness of mothering.” There is no doubt that the terms ‘mother’ and ‘motherhood’ suggest many interpretations, aspects, and values. The anthology The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman, traces the progress of the discourse from earlier brutalities of the private and social ‘institutionalizing’ of motherhood to that of the ‘speaking subject,’ ‘spiritual restlessness,’ and ‘new ways of thinking.’ By inviting creative writers to record their experience of being a mother and also an artist/poet/writer at the same time, the editors offer a compendium of delightfully frank heart-searching explorations. Rachel Blau du Plessis writes in her foreword to the book that: motherhood is incredibly tangled, a space in which one is learning and changing all the time, understanding the process in a new way. Thus motherhood leads to knowledge, to thinking, to literary thinking, and to poetics.

The narratives cited in this paper connect motherhood with other aspects of creativity, emphasizing the inviolable umbilical connection of a child with the mother for its growth and development – that is, mental growth and thinking capacities. It is not an empty boast that an educated mother ensures an educated family. Indeed, the first relationship an infant has is with its mother. Across cultures, an infant’s first attempt at word-forming starts with babbling the sound “ma” and its many variations, like “amma,”

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“maman,” “mummy,” “mater,” “mutter,” “mother,” justifying the logic behind the acquisition of the mother tongue. As argued above, the language that shapes our perception, structures our world, and articulates our thoughts emerges from the motherlode. Language helps us to formulate our identity. That said, let us conclude our discussion by asking again if motherhood is a social construction or a natural state. Is ‘mother’ a fixed idea? In futuristic utopian/dystopian terms, would ‘mother’ necessarily mean a female of the species? Judith Butler’s theory of identity as performance contends that all identities are constantly in flux, always in the process of becoming, problematizes this notion. What if ‘mother’ need no longer apply to a woman who has given birth to a child? Then, would going beyond the Mother Archetype mean that anyone could become ‘mother’ – even birth-mother – and perform the maternal role, regardless of gender? Is it possible? And what would that mean for patriarchy and heteronormativity? Or, as the above discussions elaborate, is a woman the normative choice for the mother?

Notes 1 2

3

See “My Mother’s Gardens” in Janani, Mothers, Daughters, Motherhood, edited by Rinki Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), 80–6. See Ann Dally Inventing Motherhood: the Consequences of an Ideal (London: Burnett Books, 1982); Elizabeth Badinter Mother Love: Myth and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1981); Shari Thurer Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), all showing the full-time “good” mother isolated within the domestic sphere, separated from the public See Susan Markens’ Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Works Cited 1. ABC Radio Melbourne, “Is Motherhood Overrated?” http://www.abc net.au/radio/programs/nightlife/iwd-comedy-debate/8336450. 2. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986). 3. Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (New York: Harper Collins, 2013).

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4. Erma Bombeck, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (New York: Dell, 1984). 5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006). 6. Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman (eds.), The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). 7. Rachel du Plessis, “Foreword,” The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). 8. Buchi Emecheta, Joys of Motherhood (Lagos: Allison and Busby, 1979). Maxim Gorky, Mother. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/gorkymother.pdf. 9. Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: a Birth Year (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995). 10. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). 11. Sudhir Kakkar, The Inner World: a Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). 12. Rachel Kubie, http://www.oysterboyreview.org/issue/19/reviews/KubieR-Dienstfrey html. 13 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Duckworth Overlook, 1913). 14. Tao te Chung Of Lao Tse. Translated by Lin Yutang 1948. “Stealing the Absolute,” Ch. 52, https://terebess hu/english/tao/yutang.html. 15. Mahasweta Devi. Hazar Churashir Ma. Calcutta: Karuna Prakashani, 1974. Translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay as Mother of 1084 (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997). 16 Mahasweta Devi, “Stanadayini,” Breast Stories (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997). 17. Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997); Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/morning-song. 18. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977). 19. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, Postcolonialism (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 20. Alice Walker, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, 1983). 21. Carl G. Yung, “Four Archetypes,” Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part I. Translated by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

Films Apanjan, 1968 (Dir. Tapan Sinha). Deewar, 1975 (Dir. Yash Chopra). Mere Apne, 1971 (Dir. Gulzar). Mother India, 1957 (Dir. Mehboob Khan).

MYTH, MOTHERHOOD, AND MAINSTREAM HINDI CINEMA SHOMA A. CHATTERJI

Introduction The mainstream filmmaker has found it fruitful to use the different archetypes of mythical goddesses to model many of their women characters on. These mythical goddesses – Radha, the poet-saint Meera, Sita, Durga, Kali, and Shakti (the inner energy that invigorates Durga and Kali) – form a sort of a composite archetype in Indian culture which is easily traceable to the Indian psyche which venerates the female in myth as well as fantasy. The principal hallmarks of the unified goddess figure, or the Devi, attain an idealized and exalted state in motherhood. When subjected to abuse and humiliation, her triumph is sometimes established by total destruction brought about by her brave sons until peace and harmony are restored and everything ends on a note of happiness or hope. The Indian myths are so great that they are capable of countless interpretations. In India, mythology often borders on history, or social history at any rate. Hence, the renewed material consciousness of today can find inspiration in the mythological tales. One basic idea in the present resurgence of India is that it is the reassertion of an ancient civilization reoriented to the problems of the present.1 Myth occupies a particular space in culture, mediating between the sacred and the profane, the world of everyday common sense and the arcane, the individual, and the social. Myth is a form of speech, distinct in its character, marked by definable narratives that are familiar, acceptable, and reassuring to their host culture. Myths are stories. Some are heroic. Most are formulaic. They are public dreams, the product of an oral culture musing on itself. Myths shade into folktales, more secular, more literal, more narratively predictable or coherent, not asking to be believed in quite the same way, nor marking so insistently the cultural heartland of a society. Myths are associated with ritual, as beliefs in action, together defining a transcendent and liminal

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space and time for a people in their otherwise mundane reality. Myths are logical, and they are emotional. Myths persist, though often in a diluted form, and like some good wines, “do not always travel well without at least changing some part of their character.”2 This very change is manifest in a myriad different ways through the leading female characters in popular Indian cinema, mainly the Hindi cinema which is duplicated many times over with commercial films in regional languages. Filmmakers over the years have allowed their imaginations a free rein, underscored with constraints of the commercial viability of the final product, as they have used, misused, and abused the stereotypical images of women in Hindu mythology modernized and contemporarized for mass consumption.

Mythology and Mainstream Indian Cinema Mainstream cinema in contemporary India often tries to establish the autonomy of the Indian woman through its narrative, but the images are often at variance, or vice versa. The evolution of technical finesse and thematic complexity might attempt to cloak the mythical symbols along with their distortions, but a peeling off of the glamorous surface will reveal the same story all over again. The model of the goddess in Indian myth, in her varied manifestations, remains subtly present in every film, though most filmmakers are aware of the need to evolve a more contemporary idiom. The commercial viability of an easily acceptable model always wins over the filmmaker’s personal conviction and choice of putting across a more credible alternative. Thus, the distortions of these goddesses through their human counterparts on celluloid, relocated in terms of time and geography, go on. This mythical goddess model appears to have one or more of the following characteristics: * she is an exalted image of female chastity * she suffers humiliation so that a new order is brought about through chaos * her ‘sons’ must fight for her and thus those who fight for her must have ‘son’-like qualities * the fight for justice is also a fight for her honour.3 These apply rigidly to the celluloid impositions of the Mother Goddess and her counterparts. There are others, like Radha, Sita, Meera, and Savitri, who appear in other kinds of distortions of their mythical originals in mainstream cinema. One needs to take a brief look at the original

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mythical goddesses in order to understand how distanced the celluloid representation is from the original. Also, as and when it appears, how the image varies from the characteristics of the woman from how she appears within the narrative of the film. Contrary to Mark Schorer’s contention about myths being ‘the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves,” these Indian filmmakers constantly weave dream stories around our mythological women, mainly goddesses, and try to present them, cinematographically and in terms of narrative, in a way that these celluloid distortions become the instruments by which we continually struggle to translate our fantasies and dreams into identification within the darkened theatre or reality within our own lives, albeit to end, in the manner of fairy tales, happily ever after.4 Though Hindu goddesses do not necessarily serve as paradigms for social values, they do demonstrate certain suppositions about female behaviours, powers, desires, and characters. As Wendy Doniger has shown, the mythic, especially Puranic traditions have much to say about constructions of not only metaphysical but also social realities and norms in Indian culture.5 The obvious question that often comes up in discussions on the relationship between mythical goddesses and Indian women in real life is – if goddesses are so revered, why are women so oppressed? The question is based on the assumption that women are powerless pawns in the male game, or that the power women wield within the domestic and religious spheres in society is not worthwhile, or at least is not as important as the power wielded by men in the public world.

The ‘Mother’ in Mythology While Hindu goddesses have many names and forms, they are often thought of as ultimately identifiable with a unified female deity, often referred to simply as Devi, ‘the Goddess.’ Though the goddess, who is frequently addressed as Mata or ‘Mother,’ is understood as a single power or presence, she has no single form that captures or conveys the depth and complexity of her character. In fact, she has some characteristics that are logically opposed. These tend to be identified with two different personae and iconographies, one fierce, the other docile. The fierce form is often represented as dark or malevolent, whereas the docile form is represented as light or benevolent. But these oppositions are also dogged with problems.6 The dark form is most clearly illustrated by the Goddess Kali, or the ‘Dark One,’ who is depicted with pointed, shrivelled breasts, a sharp tongue dripping with the blood of demons, a garland of skulls, and a wild

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tangle of locks. The light form is illustrated by Gauri, the ‘Golden One,’ who is also Parvati, ‘Daughter of the Himalayas,’ depicted with fulsome breasts, a gentle smile, lovely jewellery, and properly braided or chignoned hair. The complexions and iconographies of these goddesses however, become mixed in other goddesses. For example, there is Durga, a warrior goddess who, like Kali, slays demons, but is often described or depicted as having a radiant complexion, a gentle expression, and copious breasts. Even the personalities represented in the forms of Kali and Gauri are fluid and transmutable. This fluidity is traced back to the famous myth in which Shiva teases his wife Kali about her dark complexion. In India, dark complexions are by and large considered less desirable than light ones, and marriage negotiations often take into account the fairness of the bride. So, embarrassed, Kali steps into a ‘cosmic beauty parlour’ and returns with radiant golden skin, which is suitable for her as the wife of the great Lord Shiva.7 While these representations of Kali and Gauri set out contrasting modes of the feminine, their volatility and fluidity point to the mixture of these modes in actual women. Therefore, it is no surprise that this would ultimately spill over into the narrative and cinematographic space of the popular Indian film. The goddesses’ opposing iconographies represent disjunctive dimensions in the depiction of women who, though ideally docile, can be angry, fierce, and destructive. Psychoanalytic perspectives locate this ambivalence about the powers of the goddess as part of a complex cultural processing of the infant’s experience of the mother as the omnipotent and alternatively giving and withholding figure.8 Traditional legal texts and popular beliefs affirm that the woman who feels mistreated is understood to have the capacity to curse, and so harm or destroy those who have wronged her. This explains films featuring the avenging woman breathing fire and brimstone in many films within Indian popular cinema. In myth and in society, female rage and the destructive capacity are felt to have greater devastating potential than male rage. Therefore, in Hindu mythology, when gods are in danger of losing their heavens to their enemies, the demons, they produce from their combined wrath a goddess who is capable of destroying the demons that so overwhelm them. The Goddess Durga produces Kali from her own wrath, and Kali, the dark warrior, finishes what Durga started by destroying the forces of anarchy with her power – her shakti. Sometimes, Kali’s rage is so violent that it deprives her of discrimination. Destroying the demons, Kali loses control

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and becomes frenzied. She is calmed only when she sees Shiva, her husband. When Kali is uncontrolled, her power is indiscriminate, but within the constraints of her marriage to Shiva, her power is directed towards the establishment of order and wellbeing. She is responsible not only for defeating the forces of disorder but for promoting creativity and fertility. This notion of controlled shakti as promoting social order finds expression in the widely shared understanding that women should never be independent. Women should not be left to their own devices, and should be supervised and protected by men. The main concern behind this notion is not that women will go about indiscriminately killing and maiming like the frenzied Kali, but that they might succumb to sexual temptation, which will destroy their “purity” and the purity of their lineage. The linkages between female freedom and sexual license are made in mythology – the goddess fighting various demons is often portrayed as a sexual combat. Fighting the demon Mahisasura, the goddess is also engaged in battle flirtations, as only an unsupervised woman can be.9 The feature of the Goddess in the non-Brahmin religion symbolizes popular resistance to the control of women’s power in the Brahmin religious tradition. Lawrence Babb, through his study of goddess worship in the Chhattisgarh region, shows that in the Brahminical version, the goddess has a dual, changing nature.10 As Kali, she is a malevolent destroyer, the manifestation of a terrible, sinister force, with black anger, implacable and bloodthirsty. In her malevolent form, she receives blood sacrifice.11 As Lakshmi she is benevolent, the bestower of wealth, progeny, and happiness, and passively devoted to her husband. She never receives blood sacrifice. The goddess is Lakshmi when she is under the control of the male god. She stands meekly behind her husband Vishnu. But as Kali she stands alone. If Shiva is there, he is not her husband but her servant, also in terrible form but subordinate to the goddess. Susan Wadley says that marriage and the dominance of the male transforms the goddess’ dangerous power into benevolence. 12 The Brahmins would have liked to annihilate the Shakti cults (female power principle) altogether and replace the female with the male as the dominant and superior principle. The roots of these cults have persisted to this day. We need to understand Shakti as an energy within ourselves which generates the power to act.13 These myths and legends and the goddesses that form their central figure form the base for the characterization of most women in mainstream cinema. Mehboob’s

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Mother India (1957) offers one example of the distortion of one of these mythical women.

Mother and Motherhood in Indian Mainstream Cinema14 Discussing the material from which this kind of an aesthetic draws its symbols, Amaresh Mishra offers an alternative perspective to the link between women characters from Hindu mythology and their use in the context of popular Hindi cinema.15 He analyses the importance of myths and idols, not in the abstract sense of the Indian psyche, but very specifically in how they have served to project ideals associated with the modern context. He states that these are very different from, say, Hollywood films produced in the 1940s and 50s. When we view the Indian scene we find that symbols pertaining to tradition and myth have been effectively mixed and eclectically combined with a superficial recognition of modern elements. The structure of the film is itself based on this kind of hybridization with many traditional emotions and settings being reconstructed in the idiom of modern genres. Here, too, it is the image of woman that has suffered the most. In Meena Kumari, the elements of the traditional motif reassert themselves very strongly. But no longer does she carry the force of an assertive ideal for the hero, albeit rarely in a few exceptional cases, such as in Prasad’s Sharda (1957). The sentiment exalting the woman continues through the Meena Kumari phase, but her image is more of a reduced, beautiful instrumental agent for preserving family values. Nargis’s image in Mother India, according to Mishra, literally celebrates the traditional motif of Indian womanhood only in a very different context. The symbol, the moral force of the nation, is shown suffering in independent India, but emerges triumphant in the end as a new kind of ideal by shooting her own son. This sustains the balance of society and dominance of traditional values amidst suffering and anarchy. When femininity is affirmed and exalted, it is either de-sexed and therefore negated, or relegated to the status of a sex object. In either case, it is woman as a human and social being with a distinct individuality that dies a designed and intended death. This kind of schematism also constructs whatever distinct aspirations and assertions she might have possessed. The dominant, traditional motif with respect to women is the most valid enunciation of this scheme, and despite many deviations and distortions, mainstream cinema clung to it for decades.

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In this paper, I have studied the changing face of the Indian mother mainly through three major films: Mother India (1957), Shraddhanjali (1981), and Rudali (1993). This is followed by the slow but sure change in the image, characterization, attitude, and perspective of the mother in Indian mainstream cinema at the turn of the century until today.

(a) Mother India (1957) The poster for Mother India with Radha, the mother, pulling at the plough has become a universal metaphor for the “mother” and its portrayal in Hindi mainstream cinema. It was a remake of Mehboob’s earlier classic Aurat [Woman] (1959), said to have been inspired by The Good Earth (1937). Aurat’s success helped Mehboob set up his own studio, which featured a hammer and sickle as its logo.16 Although it is often taken to be a sign of communist propaganda, Mehboob’s use of the hammer and sickle is better understood as a strong evocation of his humble origins as a farmer and his love of the peasant life. 17 In Mother India (1957), the protagonist (Nargis in a memorable portrayal) is named Radha. The name, however, is a misnomer because her image and positioning within the narrative of the film are more attuned to Sita, “the quintessence of wifely devotion.” Soon, however, she is sucked into a vortex of tragic events, both circumstantial and natural – situations she is neither responsible for nor in control of. As the narrative grows, so does Radha, defying the name her parents bestowed her with, as if in vengeance. She metamorphoses into a strange blend of Durga and Kali. The Durga image is that of a strong, powerful, and brave goddess who is a fighter of adversity, emerging as an epitome of the triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong, of truth over untruth. Over the main narrative, unfolded in flashback, Radha is trapped within the Mother Goddess image which the two personifications of Shakti, namely Durga and Kali, represent. And yet, she is also out of it. She develops the courage to kill her own son for the sake of justice. In this way, she transcends the personal to reach the universal, bringing herself closer to the mythical goddesses who gave her shape. This justifies the title of the film, freeing her from the emotional and biological ties that bound her to her own offspring Birju, the dacoit. The opening and closing shots of the film, showing a very old Radha’s thickly wrinkled face in close up, symbolize her as the Earth Mother who is ‘mother’ to the entire village only because she ceases to ‘mother’ Birju.

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Ironically, however, the characterization of Radha and her image as it unfolds in the audio-visual text do not quite tally. The visual and verbal images, enriched as they are with song and music, reinforce the mother goddess image repeatedly by making Radha the central focus of the frame, towering over everything and everyone around her. But the characterization as it comes across in the film’s narrative, on closer inspection and ‘read’ in retrospect, does not quite bear this out. It is as if it is an argument the director began with himself when he started the film but could not see out to give it a more credible basis. Unlike the all-powerful, omniscient Durga, Radha is as vulnerable to the assaults of destiny as any ordinary woman. Her husband deserts her while she is pregnant with her fourth child and with three little ones to look after. She faces the natural calamities of flood and drought, losing two of her four boys to them. She is chased and assaulted by the moneylender who rapes her, and she can do little about it. The retribution comes much later. In the final analysis, Radha does live through all this chaos to see her own triumph of good over evil, but she has to kill her own son to achieve this. She is a loser in the battle of life in her role of natural motherhood because, of her four sons, only one survives. Ironically, the only son who loved her with a fierce, almost passionate intensity dies at her own hands. Even after he dies across her shoulders, the camera, in a reverse shot, focuses on his bloodied hands which slowly open up in death, releasing his mother’s beloved kangans [bangles], which the moneylender had held on to for so long. The triumph of this screen Mother Goddess in the end is undercut by the loss of the son she loved the most dearly of all. Viewed today, Mother India would perhaps appear to be little more than a soppy, sentimental melodrama geared at raising the sympathies of a mixed audience. The men would still love it because of the Indian man’s famous (notorious?) obsession for his own mother. The women in the audience would not come out dry eyed because real life goes differently. Radha offers them all a sort of warped role model – not to imitate, but perhaps to dream about and idolize. The thumping box-office success of Mother India spewed forth a flood of celluloid imitations, including some with top actresses playing an imitation of Nargis’s Radha. They vied with each other to do this role of a lifetime. Smita Patil’s portrayal in two films, Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (1984) and Waris (1988), are just two examples of a dozen cheaper and cruder imitations which could not repeat the success of the original. Mother India was shown in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and the Soviet Union, and was extremely popular. In Spain, the film is reported to have run in the theatre for months: “This international dimension is revealing in terms of

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the shared experiences of many societies in transition from peasant culture with their oral-folk tradition to industrial city based states and the anonymity of urban life. In Spain for example Mother India did good business in Andalusia where the power of the landlords over illiterate day labourers is similar to that portrayed in Mehboob’s masterpiece” (E. Johnson Artrage 19).

(b) Shraddhanjali (1981) Rajshri’s hit Shraddhanjali (1981), which marked the directorial debut of Anil Sharma and starred Raakhee in the lead role, sold the image of a strong heroine who denies motherhood in order to dedicate her proxy motherhood to her husband’s little brother. Shraddha lives in Mahim, Bombay, with her widowed dad, younger school-going brother, Bittu, a step-brother, and his wife, Rani. When her dad passes away he leaves all the property in Bittu’s name, which does not auger well with Rani and her husband. They lock Shraddha and Bittu in a room, and refuse to feed them in order to force him to sign the papers. Both manage to escape, but Bittu is killed when boiling oil falls on him. An unconscious Shraddha is rescued by her long-term boyfriend Amit Kumar, who takes her to a hospital, and after she recovers he marries her. She begins as an ideal daughter, sister, wife, daughter-in-law, and sisterin-law. Her husband’s sudden death compels her to take over his business. She aborts the child she is carrying so that love for her biological offspring does not divert her responsibility and love for her little brother-in-law, and also because her brother-in-law distrusts and detests her. This self-denial of motherhood, the highest ideal for any married woman within the majority Hindu family, was in a sense unique to Hindi mainstream cinema. Yet, the audience lapped it up and empathized with this woman instead of hating her for denying motherhood to herself. Her entry into her husband's business is underscored as a devotional offering (shraddhanjali) to the memory of her late husband. As the brotherin-law grows up, Raakhee turns stronger by the day, proving herself better than a man in a man’s world and field of work. But beneath the veneer of her vicarious ambition lies the sole aim to avenge her husband’s murder by means as violent as the murder itself. In a grotesque version of Durga, she ceases to be a passive Parvati, Shiva’s devoted wife. The characterization, while pretending to superimpose goddess-like qualities on her, actually reduces her to a non-human, a robot who has been programmed from birth to use herself as an “offering” first to the memory of her husband, and then

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to the life of her brother-in-law. She deliberately kills her husband’s arch enemy and killer, slowly and diabolically, making him feel every minute of pain and anger, and understand the power and strength of a woman bent on revenge. The most outstanding feature of Shraddha’s character as she evolves from a vulnerable young orphan practically thrown out on the streets to die, lost when she loses her small brother, then turning into a submissive and ideal housewife, and is not once shown regretting her decision to deny motherhood to herself. This could be read as a celebration of the sati savitri image, albeit in a different way since remarriage at the time this film was made would have been unacceptable for the mass Indian audience.

(c) Rudali (1993) The term ‘rudali’ was a new addition to the lexicon of Indian literature thanks to Mahasweta Devi, who introduced it and its sociopolitical ramifications within little known pockets of tribals and other neglected groups in the country. Rudali refers to a group of professional mourners called upon to shed synthetic tears, cry loudly, and beat their chests for money when someone important and affluent dies. Rudali, based on a Mahasweta Devi novelette, explores the psyche of professional mourners of Rajasthan, a vanishing breed of poor women who sell tears for basic sustenance. Sanichari, who has a cursed life, owes her name to her penchant for attracting death and bad luck. She has lost her husband, her mother left her as a baby for another man, and her son leaves her for good when he grows up and falls in love. Having suffered all her life, she discovers that when she became heir to her mother’s profession her tears dried up and the ‘cry’ simply fails to come. She cries eventually, drawing upon her personal tragedy. She learns that the professional mourner from another village, Bheekhni, who she had developed a close bond with, has died of smallpox. Bheekhni was the mother who abandoned her when she ran away with another man. When the landlord dies, Sanichari’s pathetic wails pierce the silence of the sky and the horizon, until they bounce off the high walls of the zamindar’s haveli. Kalpana Lajmi, after debuting with Ek Pal based on a novel by Maitreyee Devi, ventured to adapt Rudali. She changed the backdrop from a remote area peopled by a tribal community in the fringes of the countryside to Rajasthan, immediately investing the ambience with a lavishness of colour and glamour the story did not need. The music by Bhupen Hazarika relies

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on melodies from his home state of Assam, and with one song too many the film almost becomes a musical. A drawback of the film is the casting of two top commercial stars in two lead roles – Rakhee as Bheekni and Dimple Kapadia as Sanichari, her daughter. Though Dimple bagged the Best Actress Award at the National Awards the following year as well as the costume designer award, when all is said and done, Rudali was a brazen, commercial film spilling over with the commercial ingredients of big stars, wonderful music, hummable songs, excellent production values, and picturesque landscapes. So, Lajmi did not really need the framework of a famous Mahasweta Devi story. Lajmi’s fondness for spectacle tends to diffuse the focus of the film. Spectacle, used for its own sake, creates distance between the observer and the observed. The understanding of the mind of the human being in a predicament requires closeness between the observer and the observed. Lajmi loses out to the lavish mounting and the musical gimmicks of commercial cinema. She ends up denying the film the identity it deserves. As a celluloid representation of a Mahasweta Devi story, Rudali fails. But as an independent film, separated from the Mahasweta link, it is entertaining and educative, and tries to inform the Indian audience about the oppression of a people it hardly knows about. For the first time, we find a mother in Bheekhni, leaving her child and motherhood behind for someone else. She does not subscribe to the ideal mother who is ready to lay her life down for her child. Sanichari grows up without a mother to take care of her. But as a mother herself, she is caring and loving so that her son gets utterly spoilt and deserts her when he grows up. When Bheekhni and Sanichari meet, the daughter has no clue that Bheekhni is her mother and the two bond very well. She learns much later after Bheekhni dies in another village that Bheekhni was the mother who left her when she was a baby and weeps for the mother she could not recognize.

The Changing Image of the Screen Mother in the Twenty-first Century The screen mother in mainstream Indian cinema is now a strong, modern woman with a voice of her own who guzzles whisky every night with her mother-in-law (Vicky Donor, 2012), runs her own dhaba (Rang De Basanti, 2006), and works 24/7 as housewife and mother while running a successful home industry in laddoos (English-Vinglish, 2012), though her family refuses to acknowledge her success on both fronts. Even if she is

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poor and uneducated, she has the guts to pick up a gun and shoot down her son when he appeals to her desperately (Vaastav, 1999) before the police can take him down. Across most Asian cultures, mothers are considered to be the backbone of the family. However, for decades together, the mother image in Bollywood has stripped most mothers of their ‘backbone’ and reduced them to glycerine factories. Barring few exceptions, these mothers have been boxed within clichéd roles and the audience has lapped it up. Viewed today, Mother India is little more than a soppy, sentimental melodrama geared to raise the sympathies of a mixed audience. More realistic would be the mother Dimple Kapadia portrayed in Dil Chahta Hai (2001), who is a gifted painter and an alcoholic who is kept away from her young daughter by her ex-husband – a reality portrayed with touching pathos. What makes the modern mum in Bollywood tick? Time, they say, manipulates changes across characterizations, plots, and storylines, which gravitates towards the change in the character of the self-sacrificing mother who, even when strong such as Nirupa Roy in Deewar, ends up a tragic figure torn between her two sons forever. Neetu Singh essays the mother of Meera (Kareena Kapoor) in Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012) who leaves her husband and family to live with another man because her marriage is already dead. The late Reema Lagoo, who initiated the change from the simpering and sobbing mother to the strong and modern mother, said: “The modern day mothers are different in the sense that they come across more as a friend to the children. In Hum Aapke Ke Hain Kaun (1994) or Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) I was seen as someone with whom children could share their problems. While in Aashique I played a single working mother who advised the heroine to pursue her dreams of becoming successful rather than succumb to the demand of marriage. All these mirror the changes in women in the present society.” One recent example of two mothers belonging to two different generations comes across in Jazbaa (2015), directed by Sanjay Gupta. The younger mother Anuradha Verma is portrayed by Aishwarya Rai, who is the single mother of a little girl and also a criminal lawyer appointed by a rape-andmurder victim’s mother Garima Chaudhary (Shabana Azmi), who presents the older generation of mothers in the same film. Both these women are sophisticated, independent, and ideally exemplify two independent, strongwilled and sharp-tongued women who do not need a man’s shoulder – or

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anyone’s shoulder for that matter – to lean on for support – financial, emotional, or moral. The film revolves entirely around the courtroom trial and the kidnap of the criminal lawyer’s daughter, but as the film moves at speed towards an electrically charged climax, one comes away deeply impressed with two strong mothers, the generation gap notwithstanding. Kahaani 2 (2016) and Mom (2017) are two new films that turn the screen mother on its head by offering insights into two mothers whose daughters are not their biological offspring but are no less caring or stressed by the fact that they are not biological mothers. The sparkling performances of Vidya Balan and Sridevi bring out how well two powerful actors across two generations can realize the challenge of turning the tables on the screen mother for good. In Drishyam, Tabu plays the role of the IGP. The portrayal of this woman IGP depicts a gross misuse of administrative powers by the woman whose official duty as IGP is surrendered to her maternal anxieties. She is openly shown torturing an entire family of suspects whose guilt in her son’s disappearance has yet to be proved. She commands her juniors to beat up and thrash a little girl and her mother without reprieve, though this is illegal and wrong. This is the portrayal of a very successful woman who failed as a mother and subconsciously tried to transfer this failure onto her professional powers as the IGP of Goa by abusing her professional powers without even knowing what her failed motherhood has led to.

Conclusion Times have changed and so have screen mothers, replicating mothers in the real life around us. Modern moms are found in the form of Shabana Azmi, Lillette Dubey, and Dimple Kapadia. These women are clearly ahead of their time. They have completely shed the sari act, dyed their hair and told their children to venture out on their own in matters of love and life. Not only are they done with being the sacrificial goat but they will go the extra yard to ensure their happiness is taken into consideration. Playing a widow in Pyar Mein Twist, Kapadia did just that when she ran away with Rishi Kapoor only to cause mayhem among her children. Realizing their mother's loneliness, the children succumb and understand their mother’s need for companionship. Sorry Bhai saw Azmi encouraging her son to indulge in a live-in relationship, courtesy of a bizarre situation, and lastly, Dubey was seen parading around huffing and puffing on cigarettes while planning her daughter’s shaadi in Monsoon Wedding.

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Into the twenty-first century, this change has been socially and culturally significant and cinematically visible. The most recent example that takes serious pot shots at the patriarchal marginalization of an ordinary woman, though she is a self-respecting earning woman, is English-Vinglish. This film shows how the protagonist, Shashi Godbole (Shridevi), earns a comfortable income through her indigenous business of laddus. In the US, she gets a big ego boost when her English teacher calls her an entrepreneur. But back home, she is made the butt of jokes because she cannot speak English fluently. Her husband has the gumption to tell her to give up her laddu business and she stares back at him and asks “why?” While many Indians would agree that the power women wield is insufficient and therefore their fight for greater social and political equality is an ongoing one, many do not see women as entirely without power. Social conventions, patrilineal inheritance, and patrilocal residence impose many limitations on women, but women do have certain powers that are not obvious to outsiders or valued by all insiders. These powers are made visible in mythology and folklore, where female figures, women and goddesses, exercise considerable power. The veneration of goddesses as virgins, mothers, and warriors and its attendant valuation of the female suggest certain important assumptions about the character and abilities of women in society. 18

Notes 1. Chidananda Dasgupta, ‘Talking About Films,’ Orient Longman, 1981, 25. 2. Roger Livingstone, ‘Television, Myth, Science, Common Sense,’ paper presented at the International Communication Association conference in May, 1986, 2. 3. Dr Kishore Valicha, ‘Femininity and the Indian Film,’ in Cinema IndiaInternational 1 (1988). 4. Mark Schorer, “The Necessity of Myth,” Daedalus 88 (Spring 1959): 359. 5. Wendy Doniger, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1–13. 6. Harlan Cartright and Paul B. Cartright, “Introduction: On Hindu Marriage and its Margins,” in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture, edited by Harlan Cartright and Paul B. Cartright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9. 7. This is Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's phrase; see Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, 93. 8. This interpretation is developed by Sudhir Kakar in The Inner World, and more recently by Stanley Kurtz in All Mothers are One: Hindu India and the

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Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 9. Cartright and Cartright, “Introduction,” 10. 10. Lawrence Babb, “Marriage and Malevolence: the Uses of Sexual Opposition in the Hindu Pantheon,” Ethnology IX, 137–49. 11. Ibid. 12. Susan Wadley, “Women and the Hindu Tradition,” in Women in India: Two Perspectives, edited by Dorian Jackson and Susan Wadley (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977). 13. Manjulika Dubey, “Interview with Chandralekha,” The Book Review VII, (May-June, 1983): 272. (Note Chandralekha is a woman-activist, a Bharat Natyam dancer, graphic artist and writer who works in the villages of India teaching low-cost communication techniques and defining new dance forms.) 14. Shoma A. Chatterji, Subject, Cinema, Object: Woman – a Study of the Portrayal of Women in Indian Cinema (Kolkata: Parumita Publications, 1998). 15. Amaresh Mishra, “The Girl Next Door – Icon in a Changing Context,” Deep Focus, A Film Quarterly III, no. 4 (1991). 16. Aurat was produced by National Studios. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen note that Mehboob started out as an actor in the silent era, gradually working his way up to direct films for some of the most important studios of the late silent and early sound era, including Imperial and Sagar movietone. See Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 145. 17. Mehboob explains in an article published in Filmfare in 1957: “I took the hammer and sickle as our symbol, because we considered ourselves workers and not just producers, directors and stars. I am not communist” (quoted in Chatterjee 2002, 72) 18. This is one reason for the proliferation of articles and books concerning goddesses. Some recent examples include Evelyn Meyer, Ankalaparmecuvari: A Goddess of Tamil Nadu, Her Myths and Cult (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1986); William Sax, Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kathleen Erndl, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Lynn Bennett, Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of HighCaste Women in Nepal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

MOTHER IS THE BUDDHA AT HOME GEDARA BUDUN AMMA DAYA DISSANAYAKE

In Sri Lanka we have a saying that our “Mother is the Buddha at home.” Another is a wish – “May our Mother attain Buddhahood.” In our culture, the mother has always come first, Mata Pitu. In the Mitta Sutta we have “mata mittam sake ghare”1 [Mother is one’s friend at home]. All mothers (sabbe satta, human or animal) cultivate Brahma-viharas [sublime attitudes] – Metta, Karuna, Mudita, Upeksha [loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity]. The Buddhists have a Pali gatha to worship their Mother. Dasa mase urekatva-posesi vuddhi karanam Ayu digham vassasatam-matu padam namamaham

[For protecting me within the womb – for almost ten months, and for bringing me up well, I worship the feet of my Mother wishing her a life of a hundred years]. Such is the place of motherhood in Buddhist Dhamma. However with the transformation of the Dhamma preached by the Buddha into a chauvinistic, androcentric religion, the mother was pushed aside to become a secondclass creature, as just another woman, even untouchable on certain days. To this end, Buddha has been misquoted and misinterpreted with no one making any effort to verify such statements. We can never know the exact words of the Buddha on any subject, but from what little we know of Buddhist Dhamma today, we do not need any further confirmation that Buddha held motherhood in the highest esteem and respect, and that a mother is a living Brahma, or a Deva. This is an attempt to understand how Buddha saw motherhood, and how motherhood could have been accepted by his followers, trying to sift through the mountain of debris covering the truth.

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Mother is the Buddha at Home Gedara Budun Amma

The patriarchal society still sees the mother as just a woman, or refuses to see the mother as she truly is. However much Buddha tried to place the mother above men and women who had not entered motherhood, the society and the male Sangha managed to drag the mother down into femininity, in every culture and society where Buddhism spread, except perhaps in Sri Lanka. It is probably because Sri Lanka had, over the past two or three millennia, an environment most suitable for the people to understand and accept Buddhist Dhamma. Metta, loving kindness, was inherent among the people. They did not hurt any other living creature intentionally, for food or for fun. There was more than enough vegetable matter for their food in the fertile tropical climate. Violence, even the concept of violence, would have been totally absent. Our ancestors were gatherers of floral material and not hunters, confirmed by the absence of any painting scenes of hunting in our prehistoric caves. That is why Sri Lanka was the most suitable country to study the relationship of motherhood and Buddhist Dhamma. Motherhood has often been associated with the feminine, and in a patriarchal society as the inferior, weaker, second sex, even though, in reality, in the entire animal kingdom, the female is the stronger and more intelligent sex. Motherhood is a higher state than the masculine and the feminine. A mother rises beyond the mere female or the male. In conceiving, carrying, delivering, and caring for a child, she goes through an experience which no man could ever imagine. She becomes one with the universe, or the Brahma. Her love is pure and unselfish, like the love of a true god. She can feel love, empathy, and kindness through her sharpened senses. From the moment her ovum is fertilized by a spermatozoa, she becomes the creator of new life, while she nourishes the embryo with her own blood, and then with her own milk, and throughout the life of the progeny, with her Metta, Karuna, Muditha, and Upeksha. She is able to achieve all this without the aid of the male who impregnated her. Yasodhara brought up Rahula without any support from the father, Siddharta Gautama. Since Buddha was trying to show the path for all humanity to escape from its suffering, he would never have discriminated against the women or had any bias based on caste, gender, or social status. However, cultural factors greatly influenced inequality, even in the Buddhist society. Kancha Ilaiah tries to describe the position of women in the pre-Buddhist society in India: “The Indus Valley culture of equality had been reduced to oblivion. After this the Rig Vedic Brahmanical society was established in

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which women lost all their social and political rights.”2 It was only during the time of the Buddha that she was able to regain at least some of her lost status. The rules for householders and the duties and responsibilities mentioned in the Sutta Pitaka are most probably later inclusions, influenced by the Vedic norms, as mentioned in the Satapatha Brahmana. By this time, Manu, Kautilya, and Vatsyayana had added their contributions to enslave women, even in the teaching of the Buddha in the later literature. As the mother was pulled down to the feminine, and the gender division in society took hold however much Buddha preached against all inequality, the mother was still a prisoner of the culture and the social norms. She was compelled to care for her children in addition to all other household chores. That is why, among the Bhikkhuni Sangha, we come across mostly grandmothers who had no domestic responsibilities, and young unmarried women and courtesans who never had any domestic duties. Many of these were also rich, with their own wealth, or enjoyed the wealth and power of their families. That is probably why we find five hundred matronly women following Maha Prajapathi Gotami to seek ordination and to found the Bhikkhuni Sasana. We also find five hundred ladies from the royal and elite families in Anuradhapura following Queen Anula to establish the Sri Lanka Bhikkhuni Sasana on the arrival of Sanghamitta theri. The young mothers with young children had greater responsibilities at home, and did not have the time or the selfish interest to seek their own salvation by leaving their children unattended. Many young mothers would not have been able to leave the household and become a Bhikkhuni, because they would not have enjoyed the services of domestic servants to care for the children and attend to the chores of the household. Sometimes they would have been compelled to earn their living too, to feed their children. We do not hear much about such helpless, suffering mothers, and they would have been the true Brahma mentioned by Buddha. We also find many mothers, lay disciples, who placed their names in Buddhist inscription as they donated residential caves, monasteries, and other beneficial gifts to the Buddhist institutions and the Sangha from the time of Buddha. At the same time, archaeologists have not been able to find any relics or relic stupas containing the remains of any of the female Arahat or Bhikkhunis, either in India or any of the other Buddhist countries. There is literary evidence, recorded centuries later, of the relic stupa of Maha Prajapathi Gothami or Sanghamitta theri, with no archaeological

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evidence discovered so far. This does not mean that the Bhikkhuni mothers were ignored or forgotten, but the influence of the male Sangha and even the kings, would have ensured that any relics of the Bhikkhunis were pushed back into oblivion, and buried for ever. Yet motherhood would have continued to be venerated and respected among the Buddhist community. The closest the Indian subcontinent would have come to venerating motherhood could have been during the time of Ashoka, brought about through his Ashoka Dhamma, but unfortunately with his demise and the collapse of the Chandragupta dynasty the re-emergent Brahmin power allowed the male laity and the Sangha to push women and mothers back to servility. Ashoka always had equality in mind, as we can read in his inscriptions. He said, “save munisa SDMƗ PDPƗ” [all men are my children] (First Separate Rock Edict), wherein munisa means all human beings, not just men. When he inscribed “VƗGKX PƗWDUL cha pitari cha VXVUXVƗ´ [meritorious is obedience to the mother and father], the mother significantly came first (Third Rock Edict). But in the Ninth Rock Edict he blames “mothers and wives practicing many and various vulgar and useless ceremonies” (Inscriptions by Asoka, Corpus Inscriptinoum Indicarum, translation by Hultzsch p. 38).Probably he had been ill advised that it was the mothers and womenfolk who organized all pagan festivals, which contradicts his statements elsewhere. Ashoka appears to have ignored his mother, and even the mother of his children (Mahinda and Sanghamitta), as he makes no mention of them. Among the mothers of all his children he only mentions the second queen, ³.ƗOXYƗNL the Mother of Tivala,” for some unexplained reason. There may not have been any regard for motherhood in his non-Buddhist environment. Even if he favoured Buddhism, he apparently had not taken any interest in Buddha’s mother or stepmother, or searched for their relics. If the place of birth of Buddha was important to him, the mother who gave birth to Buddha should also have been of importance. It is not easy to understand Ashoka, his leanings towards the Buddha, or his attitude towards mothers and women. In the Calcutta Bairat Rock Inscription he requests “EKLNKXSƗ\H cha bhikhuniye” and “XSƗVDNƗ cha XSƗVLNƗ cha” to read the teachings of the books suggested by him. This shows that the Bhikkhunis and the female lay devotees in his society were intelligent and perhaps literate enough to listen to or read Buddhist

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Dhamma. This inscription also shows the influence of Buddhist Dhamma on Ashoka. Ashoka also mentions only parents and elders, not mothers specifically. But King Ashoka was never a Buddhist, as the historians want us to believe. Ashoka respected all doctrines “save SƗVDীঌƗ,” even if he was influenced by the Brahminic culture. Before his time, motherhood could have received the rightful place of respect and veneration from the Buddha, and perhaps the people of greater Magadha were not under the heavy influence of the Brahmins at the time. Johannes Bronkhorst believes that the Brahmins of the mid-first millennium BCE looked upon the eastern Ganges valley as more or less foreign territory, but by the second or third century CE they looked upon it as their land. The region which came to be known as Magadha, east of the Ganga and Yamuna, had not considered the Brahmins as having a more important position in society. The rulers, Bimibisara, Ajatasatru, and then the Nandas, followed by Chandragupta and Bindusara, favoured either the Jain, Ajivika, or Buddhists, or all of them, and not the Brahmins. Greater Magadha covers Magadha and its surrounding lands; roughly the geographical area in which the Buddha and Mahavira lived and taught. With regard to the Buddha this area stretched by and large from Sravasti, the capital of Kosala, in the north-west, to Rajgrha, the capital of Magadha, in the south-east. It is in this area that most of the second urbanization of South Asia took place around 500 BCE onward. It is also in this area that a number of religious and spiritual movements arose, most famous among them, Buddhism and Jainism. 3

This is also the region where veneration of the mother found a resurgence, and credit should go to all the new thinkers who blossomed from this environment. The Buddha preached to both men and women and recognized the spiritual potential of women … The woman’s place within the family contributing to the spiritual aspects is well recognized in the sermons of the Buddha and the literary works which emerged around the doctrine. The Mother brings stability, care, patience and compassion into the home, but is yet capable of dynamism, activity and even physical exertion … The inability to grasp the distinction between the lifestyle of the householder and the recluse has resulted in misunderstanding the place of women in Buddhism … the virtues in which they (women) excel and the spiritual heights they attain, as well as the magic power they have in converting a house into a home, are central to a Buddhist perspective on women.4

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Thus we have to also accept that Buddha would never have refused or delayed the ordination of Bhikkhunis, or lamented that with the entry of Bhkhhunis the Buddha Sasana would not last five hundred years, or that he had laid special Vinaya rules for Bhikkhunis to be subservient to Bhikkhus. Because most Bhikkhunis would have been mothers by the time they were ordained, and had cultivated the four Brahmavihara by then, through the love for their children, and through the children to all life on Earth. In Buddhism, the mother has been considered as one with the Brahma. Living with Brahma are those families where, in the home, Mother and father are revered by the children. Living with the first devas are those families where, in the home, Mother and father are revered by the children. (Itivuttaka 106, translated by Thanissaro).

In the Sabrahma Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya, Catukka Nipatta) Buddha is reported to have said: Bhikkhus, those families are with Brahma, where the Mother and father are worshiped by their children. Those families are with the first teachers (SXEEƗFƗUL\Ɨ), where the Mother and father are worshiped by their children. Those families are with a former god (pubbadeva), where the Mother and father are worshiped by their children. Those families are worthy of reverence (DKXQH\\Ɨ), where the Mother and father are worshiped by their children. Bhikkhus, Brahma is a synonym for Mother and father. The First teacher, is a synonym for Mother and father. A former god is a synonym for Mother and father. Worthy of reverence is also a synonym for Mother and father. What is the reason, Bhikkhus? Mother and father have done a lot for their children, feeding them and showing them the world when they were helpless.

The addition of the father is probably a later dilution of what the Buddha may have said, where the mother had been mentioned. Even though we have to accept a father’s contribution in the creation and the development of the new life, it is almost negligible when compared to the role of the mother. It is well explained in the Filial Piety Sutra treasured in the Far East among the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans since the time of the Sui and T’ang dynasties (589–906): “The Sutra presents probably the most touching descriptions of the Mother’s kindness that one can find in literature.”5

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However, even in the Filial Piety Sutra, patriarchy raises its head, adding the need for piety towards the father and mother. The Sutra is probably influenced by the ancestral worship met with in the Far East, as it begins with the question by Ven. Ananda about Buddha worshiping a pile of bones, and Buddha's response: “This pile of bones could have belonged to my ancestors from former lives. They could have been my parents in many past lives.” The entire Sutra is about the love, suffering, and sacrifices of the mother. Buddha further explains that a mother’s bones are black in colour and light in weight, because of the drain on the mother’s body whereby the child takes milk for its nourishment. Each child relies on its mother’s milk for life and nourishment, and the milk is the transformation of the mother’s blood, the mother becoming worn and haggard. The Sutra gives details of the nine months the child is in the mother’s womb, what she suffers during this time, and the pain at childbirth. Next we learn of the ten types of kindness bestowed upon the child by the mother. Yet the Sutra is about filial piety towards parents, though it does not mention the contributions of the father. We come across our previous mothers in the Mata Sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya: At Savatthi. There the Blessed One said: “From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating and wandering on. A being who has not been your Mother at one time in the past is not easy to find … A being who has not been your father … your brother … your sister … your son … your daughter at one time in the past is not easy to find.”

This is probably a simple way to remind people that we are all of the same blood, we are all related and equal in society, whatever labels we may come under. Based on the widely accepted biography of Gautama Buddha, he had not been fortunate to receive the love and affection of his biological mother. Yet he would not have missed the motherly love due a child, because Maha Maya Devi’s sister, Maha Prajapati Gotami, nursed and cared for him as if he was her own flesh and blood. Buddha in turn loved and respected Prajapati Gotami as his own mother with the highest regard a person could have for another. This is described in Buddhist literature through the incident where Buddha closely followed the corpse of Prajapati Gotami at her funeral.

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A true symbol of motherhood should have been Maha Maya Devi, not only for delivering the Bodhisattva Siddharta, but also for bringing him up. The biography of the Buddha records that the mother died seven days after giving birth, but does not describe how she died. It is well known that the maternal mortality would have been very high in the mid-first millennium BCE, but such high mortality would have been only more common among the oppressed and the downtrodden women than the women of royal and elite families. It is also recorded in all the biographies of Buddha that Maya Devi was in perfect health at the time of conception, that she had gone through a very safe and uncomplicated pregnancy and also that it was a perfect childbirth, painless and unpolluted. Since there are no details about Maya Devi or her health conditions after delivery, her death remains a mystery for biographers. The mystery of Maya Devi, the birth of Buddha and the place of birth continues, as excavations at Lumbini have revealed evidence of preAshokan and even pre-Buddhist places of worship. Conningham et al. report: “Not only was there evidence of permanent constructions older than the Asokan temple but the presence of non-durable architecture had also been identified. Radiocarbon samples from two contemporary posthole fills (contexts 553 and 557) provided dates of 799–546 BC and 801–548 BC … suggesting an extremely early delineation of sacred space within this locality, and pushing activity at Lumbini far before the reign of Asoka.” 6 An attempt has been made to link the early evidence of fine organic materials and possible wattle-and-daub structures to the platforms found in the early Anuradhapura period in Sri Lanka where platforms were erected at the foot of Bo trees (Ficus religiosa). However, so far there is no evidence of a Bo tree at the place of the Maya Devi temple. If Lumbini had been a sacred space before the time of Buddha, then it could have been a place of worship of a tree goddess or a Mother Goddess, a symbol of motherhood, for fertility and safe childbirth, and the sacred tree could have been a Sal or Asoka. In that case, the space would have been appropriated at a later date, as a Buddhist sacred space with Maya Devi as a mother goddess, or a symbol of motherhood. After the death of Maya Devi, her sister, Prajapati Gotami, steps in to fill the place of the biological mother, and becomes the symbol of motherhood. But it was much later that the Buddhists began to consider her as a mother figure, and with the influence of the Christian concepts certain Buddhists sects believe in a “Virgin Mother” of the Buddha. Much

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is written and reviewed about Maha Prajapati Gotami’s battle to be ordained as a Bhikkhuni, about Buddha’s refusal to admit women to the Sasana, and how Buddha’s closest disciple, the young Ananda, convinced Buddha to admit Gotami and her followers. If Buddha had at first refused to ordain females and create a Bhikkhuni Sasana, the reason, in some instances, may have been because of his genuine concern for the woman or her family, especially when the woman had to take care of her young children. Buddha would have realized the child’s need for the mother. With Buddha’s infinite knowledge he would also have known that a woman could follow the path shown by him, even if she remained a lay person, and a mother perhaps was placed in a far better position to attain Arhatship as she cared for her children and her family, as she was able to cultivate Brahmavihara: “A female lay disciple grows in conviction and virtue, discernment, generosity and learning: she takes hold of the essence right here within herself” (Vaddha Sutta, SN 37.4). A woman, especially a mother, who has listened to the Buddha, who had developed a greater awareness of Brahma Vihara, who was stronger in mind, and even her body, as she has undergone so much pain and sacrifice, would have realized she could attain Arhatship whether she remained at home or in the forest. She would also have known that she was needed by her family, that she could be of service to her family and society at the same time she could reach her own salvation. There would not have been a need to leave the household. Mata yatha niyam puttam, Ayusa ekaputtam anurakkhe, Evampi sabbabhutesu, Manasam bhavaye aparimanam

[Just as with her own life, A Mother shields from hurt, Her own son, her only child, Let all-embracing thoughts, For all beings be yours.] (Karaniya Metta Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya) Mata pitu upatthanam, Putta darassa sangaho, Anakula ca kammanta, Etam mangala muttamam

[The support of Mother and father, the cherishing of spouse and children, and peaceful occupations, this is the supreme blessing] (Maha Mangala Sutta)

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In Sri Lanka perhaps we have a unique position in the relationship of Buddhahood and motherhood, as mentioned above. Many centuries ago, our Buddhist poets used the term, Ama Meniyo to call Buddha the mother, who feeds us Amrta or guides us towards Nirvana. The Sri Lankan Sinhala Buddhist also worship a Mother Goddess known as ‘Pattini Meniyo’. Her origin is South India, and she is known among the Tamil Hindu Community in Sri Lanka as Kannaki from the epic Silapadikaram of Ilango Adigal. “In the low country infectious diseases and children’s illnesses were cured by Pattini. In other areas this role was taken over by Kiri Amma; sometimes the Kiri Ammas were viewed as servants of Pattini, sometimes as manifestations of her.”7 Pattini was the ‘good Mother’ and the ideal wife, and people propitiated her for the welfare of crops and from freedom from disease. Pattini is a future Buddha. The good Mother image used to be institutionalized in the public pantheon. The bad Mother appeared in the image of the evil demoness Kali … since Pattini no longer can combine in a single image both the emotional and the practical, the loving Mother is projected onto another omnipresent being in the public pantheon – the Buddha himself. The Buddha, as contrasted with Pattini, has little say over man’s material interests: people do not ask him for health, wealth or freedom from disease. The purely loving aspect of the Mother can be canalized into the figure of the Buddha, who appears in the contemporary ‘Bodhi Puja’ cult as the ‘Mother Buddha.’8

There are also many regional female deities among the Sri Lankan Buddhists, which are sometimes even shared with the Hindu community, who are often accepted as mother figures. They are addressed as ‘Amma’ [Mother], even if they themselves have not borne children. One such deity met with in the deep south is ‘Amma Hamuduruwo,’ ‘Hamuduruwo’ being the term of address of a Buddhist monk. ‘Maha Loku Amma’ is considered the elder sister of God Saman at Sri Pada [Adam’s Peak].9 It is also recorded in the Pali chronicles that God Saman was requested by the Buddha to take care of the Buddha Dhamma established in Sri Lanka. We also have ‘Tevani Amma’ and ‘Valli Amma’ as the consorts of God Skanda at Kataragama, again shared by the Buddhists and Hindus. Mother Earth is always considered as ‘Mahi Matha’ and is worshipped, whenever the farmers begin their new planting season or whenever people disturb the earth. ‘Kiri Amma’ (a woman who has produced milk and nursed a child during her lifetime) is considered an assistant of Pattini Amma, and they are offered alms (made of coconut milk as a substitute for cow’s

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milk), especially when children suffer from infectious diseases. Tara is accepted as a goddess and a Bodhisattva in most of the Buddhist countries, including Sri Lanka. Though in Pali and Sanskrit Tara is often taken to mean ‘star,’ the more popular approach in Buddhism is to interpret Taaraa's name as coming from the causative form of the verb t,'r ‘to cross,’ ‘to traverse’ or ‘to escape.’ So we reach the idea of ‘she who ferries across,’ ‘she who saves.’10 Tara is also believed to have been born from a tear drop shed by Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva in his compassion on the pain and suffering of humanity. Tara is a later introduction to Buddhism, probably in the fifth or sixth century CE, although she has not been considered as a mother figure, but venerated as a feminine deity, with Buddhists seeking her help, especially in Tibet and Nepal. In Sri Lanka people pray to Avalokiteshvara for health and wealth. We find the figure of Tara’s figure, along with Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, in Ajanta and Ellora as well. In Sri Lanka several statues of Tara have been found, dating back to about the eighth century CE. She has close similarities to the Brahminic Durga and Parvathi. In China and Japan Kuan Yin is the iconic figure close to Tara. Dr. Raja de Silva, the former commissioner of archaeology, claims that the famous frescoes at Sigiryia are of the goddess Tara, and even the small terracotta figurines found at Sigiriya resembling the paintings are also of Tara. He believes that at Sigiriya there had been a considerable presence of Dhammarucis with their Mahayanist leanings within the framework of Theravada Buddhism. Devotees or visitors would have seen around five hundred paintings (as mentioned in the Sigiriya graffiti). De Silva says the “reduplication” in the background of the sky, space, or the heavens would mean that the deity is omnipresent and can be seen from whichever direction a devotee comes up the escarpment. He also adds that the Taras were on the way to offer flowers to the Buddha. Even if we accept Raja de Silva’s idea, we do not have any way to connect it to the veneration of motherhood in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE. We may never be able to discuss motherhood and Buddhism in a rational manner using confirmed facts. The original words of the Buddha would not have been preserved during his lifetime, because, by the time the words were committed to writing, so much could have been changed, omitted, or added on. When his words were passed down orally for generations, what was written later may have greatly differed from the original. The meanings of the words would have been different, in

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different dialects or regional languages, even in the sixth century BCE. Over the past twenty-six centuries the meanings would have changed many times over. Almost all quotes degrading and critical of women and motherhood which are attributed to Buddha were added later by the androcentric male Sangha who attempted to monopolize the Buddhist Dhamma, and shut out one half of the human population from following the path shown by the Buddha. All such words are contrary to Buddha’s teachings, and we should not blame Buddha for such comments. All we can accept are the Four Noble Truths, pointing humanity towards the end of his samsaric suffering. And we need the four Brahma Viharas to achieve it. We can accept that Buddha would have realized a mother to be the most eligible person to achieve Nibbana. He may never have felt a need to tell his followers to respect and worship their mother, because it is inherent in living creatures, and anyone trying to follow the Path would have realized the position of motherhood, that the mother was the living Buddha at home. This was realized by the Sri Lankan Buddhists when they said the mother is the Buddha at home. However, as humanity began to follow the practices of other religions, with their deified leaders and saints, and began to worship the relics of the Buddha, or his statues or the Stupa, or even the Bo tree, it began to lose its way amidst all the “sacred” objects, and could not see the Dhamma in or through them. It has forgotten that Buddha said people can see the Buddha only through the Dhamma. Had they realized that, then they would still be considering motherhood as being next to Buddhahood, and if they wanted to venerate and worship Buddha, they always had their mother at home. Buddhist Dhamma is one with motherhood, and as long as motherhood is with us, Buddhist Dhamma will be with us, whatever creed we believe in. Motherhood will be with us as long as the cycle of rebirth continues, or until the last living creature achieves Nibbana, or becomes a non-returner. In modern terms, until as long as multi-cellular creatures depend on sexual reproduction, with the female caring for the fertilized ovum, motherhood will be with us.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

SN 1.6. Jara Vagga, Mitta Sutta. Kancha Iliah, God as Political Philosopher (Kolkata: Samya, 2001). Johannes Bronkhorst, Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism (2011). Padmasiri de Silva, “The Concept of Equality in the Theravada Buddhist School,” in Equality and Religious Traditions of Asia, edited by R. Siriwardena (London: Frances Printers, 1987), 74–97. Kyu-taik Sung, “The Kindness of Mothers: Ideals and Practice of Buddhist Filial Piety,” 2001. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1011360216052 R. Coningham et al., The Earliest Buddhist Shrine: Excavating the Birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Antiquity Publications, 2013), 1109. Gananath Obeysekere, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 293–6. R. Gombrich and G. Obeysekara, Buddhism Transformed (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 159–62. Manohari Manamperi, Mother: a Tribute to my Mother (Colombo: Godage, 2017). Dharmacari Purna, “Tara: the Origins and Development,” http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol2/tara_origins_a_development html. Raja de Silva, Sigiriya and Its Significance (Sri Lanka: Bibliotheque, 2002), 85–123.

PART II: THEORIES AND REALITIES

BODIES AND EMBODIMENTS: THEORIES OF MOTHERHOOD ZINIA MITRA

In India, where motherhood is both politicized in the national agenda and spiritually endorsed, where sentiments centred on mother figure contribute towards award-winning movies, theories on motherhood have been rather scarce. Western feminists have postulated theories, asked elementary questions on biological determinism, weighed whether motherhood can be a choice or whether it is the given biological destiny all women are to fulfil, and inquired if motherhood is only a social construction. Eve had to undergo the pain of childbirth as punishment for her transgression, (Genesis 16), but for mothers childbirth remains the most cherished experience. Mothers are programmed to love their children unconditionally throughout their lives – delivering, feeding, cleaning, washing, teaching, scolding, loving, cuddling them, and letting them go when they grow up. Theorists have asked whether motherhood implies instinctive caregiving or a skill that needs to be acquired. Friedrich Engels (1884) claimed the overthrow of the mother’s right specified the historic defeat of the female sex. Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976) and Nancy Chodorow (1978;1989) advanced their object-relation theory to examine motherhood as entirely a cultural construct. The concept of motherhood requires serious engagement in India where recently the Supreme Court’s declaration of Section 497 as unconstitutional overturned three previous rulings, quashing the 150-year-old penal law on adultery (The Supreme Court of India Criminal Original Jurisdiction writ petition No.194 of 2017).1 Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) defines adultery as an offence committed by a man against a married man if the former engages in sexual intercourse with the latter’s wife. Justice D. Y. Chandrachud ruled that women should not be treated as a commodity. The section was abolished for being anti-women; consequently, some people celebrated their freedom to adultery on social media while others feared that the verdict could weaken the family structure in India. Adultery, no longer a crime, remains a civil wrong as well as providing

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grounds for divorce. It has also been underlined that if an act of adultery instigates the aggrieved spouse to commit suicide, then the adulterous partner can be prosecuted for abatement of suicide under Section 306 of the Indian Penal Code. Sexual faithfulness is central to the idea of family, and it is the women who bear the weight of faithfulness given the erstwhile polygamous structure of the Indian society from which the monogamous family is whittled. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it, a man “can have slaves, pallakখs, concubines, mistresses and prostitutes in bed; but he is required to respect certain privileges of his legitimate wife …” (453), and a woman “is annexed to her husband’s universe; she gives him her person; she owes him her virginity and strict fidelity” (455).2 With the amendment of the Hindu Succession Act 1956, daughters now hold an equal share in their ancestral property. Lineage is still emphasized and purity of blood required to qualify as an heir. An heir can inherit all the private property a man collects throughout his life. If we glance at history, we will find that a whole war took place based on the idea of purity of blood. The institution of motherhood (not just bearing children) is believed to have been erected by the patriarchy, encumbering the career and personal ambitions of women. During the first wave of feminism (1830s to early 1900s), the political agenda expanded to include issues of the reproductive rights of women. The second wave of feminism (1960s to 1980s) enunciated women’s reproductive rights reiteratively between its other goals. Simone de Beauvoir posed solicitous questions on the structures of patriarchal order and motherhood in The Second Sex (1949). It was important to focus on motherhood because it is “through motherhood that a woman achieves her full physiological destiny” (537), and, by becoming a mother, she “takes the place of one who gave birth to her,” which amounts to a “total emancipation” (548).3 Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) contested the prolonged post-Second World War belief that a woman’s destiny is to marry and bear children: “The problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of old-age material problems of man,” or in terms of “poverty, sickness, hunger, cold” (28). She identified a “problem with no name” that gained wide unanimity with women. All agreed that homemaking in the suburbs sapped them of their individualism and left them feeling discontented.4

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Is Motherhood a Choice? Radical feminists assert the cause of subordination of women is not because they mother children but rather the cultural construction of motherhood and sexuality that firmly outlines the status of women. One of the first clear asseverations of the radical feminist position was Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), wherein Firestone contended that women’s accountability as birth givers and guardians pushes them into a subservient role. She argued that even if legal, financial, and political obstacles to women’s equality were abolished there would still be no change in the status of women – as long as they choose to be mothers, they will remain underlings. Firestone’s arguments concerning reproductive organization were persuasive and applauded by many women; however, the solution she offered was not. Firestone asserted that real emancipation could only be accomplished if women chose to opt out of childbearing. She championed artificial reproduction and cybernation, as artificial reproduction is not inherently dehumanizing. At the very least, the development of an option should make an honest re-examination of the ancient value of motherhood possible (119).5 Many feminists, however, thought that the solution she offered was bizarre. While the proposals of Firestone were rejected, radical feminists continued to rethink the issues of reproduction and sexuality. As an almost full reversal of Firestone’s stance, many radical feminists rationalized that women should not deny motherhood but rather look into its problems. In The Reproduction Policy (1981), Mary O’Brien voiced the concerns of ‘isolation’ and ‘devaluation’ of reproduction. Reproduction, by its very process, enforces a sequential gap between sexuality and parturition. Men are disconnected from all its stages, except the copulation. However, they control the reproductive process of women through medical, social, and cultural structures, such as structures of family, inheritance, and patriarchal domination. Woman are relegated to the private realm: in part to ensure her isolation from other men. For if she has no association with other men, ‘her’ man need not fear that his children may not be his own. Continuity will be easier to maintain. Consigned to the private realm, woman is rendered invisible not only to other men, but also to other women; from whom she might (and now, in the upsurge of feminist thinking, does) gather sustenance, both moral and spiritual. (119)

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Thus distanced from the public participation a woman also becomes “invisible to herself,” her productive and reproductive labour rendered “virtually imperceptible” (119).6 Adrienne Rich reinforces and labels the positive position of motherhood as the unique role of women – “the one unifying incontrovertible experience.” She, along with other radical feminists, contends that mothering is unique to women and ought not be denied, but rather redefined as a constructive activity that brings life on Earth, and not only as a provenance of subjugation: “The repossession of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers” (xvii).7 At the root of the arguments provided by the radical feminists is the thesis that the stereotype of women is cultural rather than biological. The differences of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have perceptibly been at the core of feminist theory and practiced since the 1980s, when non-white feminism disregarded white women’s point of view as the singular universal point of representation for women. For a modernist who understands the world in binaries, a male is perceived as privileged while the female is always the unpredictable ‘other.’ Writers like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helen Cixous were en route to postmodernism. Although the works of these writers are not homogenous, they unanimously rejected modernist dualisms. Irigaray adduced that the existing dualism that defines females as ‘other’ creates an indentation for women. An unambiguous alternative is to adopt a pluralistic epistemology that can defy such dualism. She promoted the development of écriture féminine (phallocratic writing) that closed up the so-called phallocentric texts in the postmodern world. She contended that “women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction within the discourse of identity itself” (Butler 13).8 Lacan’s hypothesis was that women are not just ‘others’ in phallocentric language but quite literally absent in the discourse. Kristeva exploits this hypothesis of Lacanian ‘lack’ to claim that the situation of women beyond the discourse gives them the radical capacity to disrupt and transform the existing discourse. Kristeva, like Irigaray, promotes the uniquely feminine writing, the ‘feminine imaginary,’ that unsettles the dualism. Butler sees gender identity as a fiction, the “internal essence of gender if manufactured through a sustained set of acts posited through the gendered stylization of the body” (Butler xv).9 She points out that the essential subject is maintained by the actions dictated by a concept. Butler’s theory

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can be seen as the culmination of the rejection of biological determinism and essentialism, and a move towards phonological meaning production.

The Patriarchal Evaluators and Feminist Critiques Motherhood is an integral function in every society given that society thrives to continue. Theorists from various disciplines have tried to understand and examine this phenomenon from diverse viewpoints. This essay briefly examines the major theoretical approaches to motherhood: biological determinism verging on a sociobiological approach, the anthropological approach, the Marxist approach, the psychoanalyst approach, and the socio-psychological approach. Biological determinism sees the differences between women and men as rooted in biology, suggests an immutability of such differences, and instils a hopelessness for change. The biological-deterministic approach is founded on the belief that ‘anatomy is destiny.’ It affirms that women are ‘natural’ mothers and have an inherent ‘maternal impulse,’ which implies a biological drive to give birth to children along with an inherent willingness to nurture them. Curiously, the abilities needed to nurture children are, in our given culture, thought to emerge instantaneously at childbirth. This is a convenient escape route for a society unwilling to explain the absence of efforts towards maternal education and/or the needed family infrastructure, and/or to provide women with the awareness to combat post-natal depression, because the emphasis is smoothly shifted to the inherent maternal instinct solely, thereby releasing the father and others from responsibility. Scientists from various areas have held the biology of a woman accountable for her “innate tendency” to the maternal role. The idea that males are superior, with more emotional and physical abilities, and the women are, at best, stay-at-home moms rearing children, is a derivative of this biological determinism. The belief that women are inferior to men has hovered in the air for a millennia in most cultures around the globe. In De parbitus animalium, Aristotle said humans have more “sutures” in the skull than other animals, and that males humans have more of “sutures” than females for the sake of ventilation in addition to having a larger brain size. The supposition of female mental inferiority to that of the male was reinforced in the work of anatomist and psychologist Paul Pierre Broca (1824–80). In 1861, he weighed male and female brain samples as part of his experiment and discovered that 292 male brains had an average weight of 1,325 grams, and 140 female brains had an average weight of 1,144 grams. The

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difference of 181 grams revealed that female brains weighed 14% less than male brains.10 This convinced him that women were the less intelligent of the two sexes and were incapable of performing intellectual tasks. His explanations paved the way for concepts that bolstered the claim that female physiology is better suited for maternity than other publicsector tasks. In The Descent of Man (1871), British scientist Charles Darwin (1809–82) acknowledged the motherly instinct to subsist in women. He asserted that a [hu]man[s] shared emotions with lesser creatures, one of which was the mother’s desire and love for her baby. Darwin perceived a clash between the persistent forces of migration and the maternal instinct, with one of the urges, in some instances, dominating the other. He gave an example of a swallow, where the maternal instinct is stronger than its migratory instinct when feeding or flying around her nestlings. Conversely, when the sparrow’s offspring are not in the vicinity her migratory instinct takes over, leading the mother to desert her offspring. However, Darwin believed that she is unable to escape the sorrow of abandoning her offspring after reaching her destination and fulfilling her migratory instinct (113). 11 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) reiterated this idea of the presence of an ‘instinct,’ stating that it gifted women with a better maternity capacity skills than men. He argued against giving women suffrage rights on the grounds that their maternal instinct is too great to allow for the fittest choice. He acknowledged that women could accomplish tasks better than men under special training, but underlined that the input would be in vain if the maternal role was reduced since that was the most significant of all the roles a woman could choose to have.12 Another detrimental concept was that of power preservation advocated by Professor Edward Clarke (1820–77), which did the rounds in 1873. In Sex in Education or a Fair Chance for Girls, he articulated that identical education for boys and girls was unwise and a “crime before God and humanity,” as in it the “physiology protests” and the “experience weeps.”13 He pledged that since women need more power than men for sexual development during puberty, using much energy to explore the intellectual development could impede the growth of reproductive machinery. Since education would be achieved at the cost of women’s reproductive health, Clarke discouraged it. He justified the denial of education to women on the grounds of health, and also declared “female

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college education to be a flagrant violation of the laws of nature,” one that he predicted would “lead to racial apocalypse” (546).14 Until the late 1880s, Clarke’s hypothesis cast a long shadow over the intellectual aspirations of young women. He had put the reformers in a hopeless bind. Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first American regularly ordained woman minister who stepped down from her post to study evolutionary biology, and she confronted Clarke by pointing out that biological law should indeed determine women’s space, but their potentials and limitations cannot be said to be “scientifically settled.” She wrote: “in these days, science is testing everything,” including the “irrepressible women question … woman herself must speak hereafter, or forever holding her peace, consent meekly to crown herself with these edicts of her inferiority.”15 Clarke’s perspectives were further endorsed by Maudsley (1835–1918), who concurred that those who view without preconception, or with some consideration, “the movements for improving the higher education of women and for throwing open to them fields of activity from which they are now excluded” are carried away by their zeal to “ignore the fact that there are significant differences between the sexes,” for “women are marked out by Nature for very different offices in life from those of men,” and that for a woman healthy performance of her special functions “renders it improbable she will succeed, and unwise for her to persevere, in running over the same course at the same pace with him.”16 He consequently inferred that in picking professions over parenthood, women would imperil their own wellbeing and likewise harm the durability of their posterity. Maudsley refused to accept the choice of women to remain childless: Whatever aspirations of an intellectual kind they might have, they cannot be relieved from the performance of these offices [of motherhood] so long as it is thought necessary that mankind should continue on Earth.17

These bio-determinist hypotheses persistently discouraged women from engaging in work power. Allen Grant wrote in “Woman’s Place in Nature” (1889) that, “Marriage and childbearing were a woman’s primary responsibilities.” He opined that it is understandable why women aspire to step into the “shoes” of men. Women struggle to obtain rights and expand their “roles” in nature to follow “man’s jobs” or male roles because they try to surpass their biological role.18

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These theorists also saw in women a seat of maternal impulses. Nobel Laureate Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) and author of Man the Unknown stated, “Women should develop their aptitudes in accordance with their own nature, without trying to imitate the males.” Although he acknowledged that women play an important role in reproduction, which lasts nine months, he pronounced that the “same intellectual and physical training and ambitions fed to boys should not be given to young girls. Educators should pay very close attention to the organic and mental peculiarities of the male and the female.”19 The sociobiological approach to motherhood overlapped with biological determinism to frame theories that justified women’s stay-at-home job. Sociologist Alice Rossi (1977) argued for the natural, unique, and superior abilities of mothers to parent children. She supported the hypothesis of separation of labour in childrearing and stressed the general shift of focus from learned to unlearned childrearing skills. She argued that weeping infants stimulated their mother’s oxytocin release and areola erection, which is an unlearned response, a natural arrangement for nursing. Women lactate when they bear children. Rossi claimed that because sexual division of labour is essential to human survival, it has been integrated into human physiology.20 These arguments served to demonstrate that women are better equipped to respond to the errands for supporting a child than men. Numerous tests were conducted for the purpose, some on female rhesus monkeys by Liebowitz (1978), which showed that when the female monkeys are reared in isolation and have no opportunity to observe maternal behaviour they do not display maternal behaviour instinctively towards their young ones. Moreover, normally reared male rhesus monkeys tend to display maternal behaviour when placed with rhesus infants in the absence of mature females. These studies suggest that maternal behaviour is not instinctive, but rather learned; it depends on experience and social conditions for both males and females. Steven Goldberg in The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1977) explains the more important degrees of forcefulness in men in an attempt to justify the low-status employments in women. Desmond Morris in The Illustrated Naked Ape (1986) suggests that a mother’s heartbeat after birth can have a calming effect on the infant. Such hypotheses helped misrepresent women’s potential and pushed her to a childrearing role, relieving the man and other male members of all nurturing responsibilities. Theorists however came to discard bio-determinism as the arguments pressed forward. Carmen Schifellite (1987) critiqued bio-determinism to forward her social construction theory:

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In any social formation in which inequality is structurally and systematically created, it is likely that both the science and the ideology of that society will generate theories that accentuate the apparent differences between different social strata. It is also likely that the causes of these differences in behaviour traits, habits and customs of various groups will be attributed to some type of immutable ‘human nature.’21

Nancy Chodorow points out in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) that, “as long as the labour market is hostile to parents and as long as the roles in the American family continue to be allocated on the basis of gender, the labour market gap between the sexes will continue.”22 Chodorow discarded the three traditional arguments for women’s mothering, namely: (1) the evolutionary or functionalist theory, (2) the instinctual theory, and (3) the role training theory, in favour of the socialisation theory. Women become mothers because they are mothered by women, which leads them to grow up with stronger relational capacities and needs, whereas men seek location in the public sphere and nonfamilial roles. Chodorow postulated that “women’s roles are basically familial and concerned with personal affective ties.”23 Dr. Michael E. Lamb points out: with the exception of pregnancy, parturition and lactation, there is no reason to believe that men are inherently less capable of childcare than women, although these potential skills often remain undeveloped or underdeveloped.24

Warren Farrell (1993) discerned that it is our culture that “teaches women, discourages men,” and then claims the “instinct for parenting is unique to women.”25 He asserted that gender roles and mothering roles are learned sociologically and are not products of economics or biology. Helen Deutsh befittingly pointed out that the maternal instinct is not a product of women’s biology; some women possess it even without going through pregnancy.26 Ann Oakley also refuted the theory of a biological drive for maternity and emphatically stated that there is no such thing as the maternal instinct, that there is no biologically based drive that propels women into childbearing or forces them to become child nurturers once the children are born.27 We may recall the Egyptian ritual of Cauvade (a term coined by anthropologist E. B. Tylor, now popularly known as “sympathetic pregnancy”) where a man experienced ceremonial labour pain and underwent fasting and purification with his partner’s childbirth.28

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Most feminists during the 1960s and early 1970s acknowledged that there certainly existed a biological phenomenon that differentiated men and women and is used in all societies in similar ways to generate a male/female distinction. Gender was introduced as a concept to supplement sex and not replace it. Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” (1975) introduced “the sex/gender system” and defined it as “the set of principles upon which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (159). When the concept of gender as a social construction was introduced in the 1960s it was welcomed, as it helped to extend the concept of gender. Ethnology, ecology, genetics, and biological determinism attempted to derive the general principles concerning the biological foundations of social behaviour in animals and humans. The foundations of socio-biology rest upon Darwin’s theories of natural selection and sexual selection, as well as the contemporary theories from evolutionary biology. Sociobiologist Richard Dawkins (1976) saw the foundations of male-female connections in the plans of eggs and sperm cells. The male and his sperm are both nonessential and unbridled. The male sperm scans for, goes after, and assaults the egg. The egg, by examination, similar to a lady, is profitable and remains at home, acknowledges just a single sperm (implying the longing for monogamy) and afterwards starts to support it.29 By the 1980s sociobiological research focused on the uniqueness and importance of female reproductive behaviour. Woman scientists such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1981), Linda Fedigan (1982), and Barbara Smuts (1985) studied female primates not just as passive participants in the reproductive process. While the primates could be selective in their choice of mates, they could also be assertive and sexually active, providing reproductive benefits for themselves and their offspring. P. A. Gowaty in Evolution Biology and Feminism premised, “Human nature asserts that the feminist critics have failed to recognise that the data and theories within evolutionary biology are not inconsistent with the goals of feminism.” Gowaty (1992) argued that feminists and biologists shared interests in the study of male and female social behaviour, and the variations of behaviour and female resistance to control their sexuality. While feminism in general focuses on the proximate realisms of what happens to women, evolutionary biology, especially sociology, can be ultimately difficult. The patriarchy is not a natural order between male and female, and the feminist critics of socio-biology ignore the evidence of self-interested female strategic agents.30 Adrienne Rich argued that:

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Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education and the division of labour, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male.31

Marriage and motherhood are strongly founded within the patriarchal community in India to the point that both remain universal or nearly universal, and the criminalization of marital rape remains a distant dream.

Frailty, thy name is woman A number of anthropologists have attempted to examine the role of women in the given contemporary patriarchal society to explicate why women remain chief caretakers of children in most societies. They studied the gradual evolution of civilization from the primitive savage state to the present capitalist society, where each stage of evolution exemplified a different division of sex roles. In the primitive stage, when human beings survived by hunting and gathering food, men and women shared equal status. With the emergence of agronomy, the emphasis fell on the cultivation of land and domestication of animals, which eventually left the women homebound. The division of labour became more pronounced with boys helping the father in outside work while girls helped in household chores. According to Richard Lee and Richard Daly in “Man’s Domination and Woman’s Oppression – the Question of Origins” (1987), “patriarchy can best be understood as the reproduction of state hierarchy within the family.” 32 Sherwood Washburn and C. Lancaster claim that the division of labour existed when men were hunters and women gatherers, “the results” being “shared and given to the young.” It was this “habitual sharing between a male, a female and their offspring” that became the basis of survival for the human family (Washburn and Lancaster 1968, 301).33 Anthropologists have also tried to understand the division of labour based on the difference of physical strength between men and women. Men were physically stronger and therefore thought to be agile and aggressive, which made it natural for them to hunt, while woman who bore children remained back to nurture them. Childbearing restricted women’s movement. This hunting-based model for the evolution of the nuclear family and cooperative sexual division of labour dominated an important part of anthropological thinking.

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However, Washburn and Lancaster’s theory also had its strong critique. In Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, Liam D. Murphy points out that the male bias has hindered the study of human animals: Too often the word man is used in such an ambiguous fashion that it is impossible to decide whether it refers to the male or the human species in general … hunting by implication as well as by direct statement, is pictured as a male activity to the exclusion of females. This activity, on which we are told depends the psychology, biology and customs of our species, is strictly male. A theory that leaves out half the human species [the halfspecies theory] is unbalanced (339).34

Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher in The Human Revolution speak of the proto-humanoid society, where adult males were sexually interested in females and “paternally” interested in infants without any permanent family bond or jealousy when sexually satisfied.35 Another anthropological debate is the nature/culture division that correlates to the female-male relationship. The binary of nature/culture was perceived by Claude LéviStrauss (1969), who asserted that human beings differ from animals basically because of their capacity for culture. There occur two points of interest for us: first, the basis of social organization is founded in the exchange of women, which arises from the principle of exogamy (exchange of women giving rise to kinship systems and larger structures with an exchange of goods and services), and second an underlying structural pattern that determines the permutations and combinations of every type of exchange.36 Carol MacCormack explains the basic premise of the Lévi-Strauss model of human society in Nature, Culture and Gender – a Critique (1980): “It is the men who own and the women who are owned … wives who are acquired and sisters and daughters who are given away” (136). For her, men and women are interchangeable and equal from a formal point of view, but they are not so from a social point of view – a sister changes to the role of a wife through the transactions men make. However, she chooses to ignore the fact that men also undergo changes within marriage, most markedly with uxorilocal residence following marriage. Structuralists using the Lévi-Strauss model of kinship thus define men as actors and women as being acted upon, i.e. men are subjects and women are objects (12).37 MacCormack referred to Sherry Ortner who, in her hypothesis, advanced Strauss’s question about humanity and set out to answer it. Ortner posed the question of how we can account for universal female subordination:

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Moving quickly to a biological reductionist argument, she sees that the woman's body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male, in contrast, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, ‘artificially,’ through the medium of technology and symbols. In doing so he creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcending objects, while the woman creates only perishables – ‘human beings’ (16).38

Ortner reiterates that women’s equation with nature is a natural result of their reproductive capacities. MacCormack rejects Ortner’s view: Each human who is born fits into a great social chain of being, ensuring the immortality of both self and group. Houses rot, villages are moved, empires fall, but the great faith is that the lineage, including the ‘real’ company of ancestors, will endure forever (16).39

She further asserts that both Ortner and Lévi-Strauss retreated from the hypothesis that women are doomed by their biology to be natural and not cultural. A woman cannot be consigned fully to the category of nature: it is perfectly obvious that she is a fully-fledged human being endowed with human consciousness just as man is; she is half the human race, without whose cooperation the whole enterprise would collapse; or, as Lévi-Strauss, expresses it, “women could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man’s world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs” (17).40

Anthropologist Margaret Mead travelled for her field studies to Nebraska and Papua New Guinea. She found first-hand that the differences between the sexes were culturally determined rather than innate. She describes her findings in Sex and Temperament, Three Primitive Societies (1935) and Male and Female (1949). Mead found a difference in the pattern of male and female behaviour to widely vary in each of the cultures studied from the gender role expectations in the United States. Studies conducted by Richard Lee and Richard Daly between 1963 and 1986 on Kung women (southern Africa), published in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers (1999), reveal that, in their culture, women not only take responsibility for the children but also exercise their rights over them. The women there give birth under a bush, from which men are completely excluded. They examine the new-borns for defects and commit infanticide upon finding any. Consequently, they lie to the men that such children were born dead. Nobody can refute the statement as no one is present at the time of the birth. If the children are born healthy, they rear them. They

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have a strong support system of other mothers of the tribe such that a mother does not need to refrain from any productive work. Men carry out the household chores and participate in childcare. In India, women were perceived as kshetra [field] and men as beeja [seed]. Reference to this concept can be found in Aitereya Upanishad, Sushruta Samhita, Charaka Samhita, and Manusmriti. According to this concept, just as the field nourishes the seed, in a similar way the mother’s body nourishes the embryo. The male represents the sower and the woman the nourisher. Manu viewed beeja as superior to khsetra. A field without a seed remains barren. The role of a mother was thus rendered secondary. The man could claim rights over his children and also his women. Anthropology had different findings for different societies that served to break the rigid fences around the sexual divisions in contemporary society. However, the construction of history of how human society has evolved is based on speculation rather than evidence.

The Historical Defeat? Marxist theory studies the oppression of women as parallel to the development of the class society. Friedrich Engels in the “Preface” (1891) to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State wrote: (1) originally, man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term ‘hetaerism’; (2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity and that descent could, therefore, be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity; (3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honour that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy); (4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman) and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period (6–7).41

The three chief forms of marriage he hypothesized to have evolved in the development of class society were: (1) group marriage in the first stage when society was savage, (2) pairing marriage in the second stage of

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society, and (3) monogamy supplemented by adultery and prostitution in the third stage of the development of human society. During the system of group marriage, the certainty of the mother led to the recognition of the female lineage and supremacy of woman in the house. When the pairing family prevailed, the natural father was placed with the natural mother, and the children did not inherit from the father. In a primitive society, the work of both men and women had the same social value, where the wealth was shared by the entire community. The acquisition of greater wealth, such as cattle and crops, gave rise to private ownership, and the key passed down to the hands of the men. The women were relegated to an inferior position. The male lineage was established and the right of inheritance from the father instituted. While Marx perceived this as a natural and inevitable transition, Engels claims: The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children (67).42

This, according to the Marxist theory, gave rise to the patriarchy, where man represented the bourgeoisie and woman the proletariat. Engels distinguishes between two types of production: production of food, clothing, shelter, and tools, and production of human beings. The social organization under which people live in a particular time and place is characterized by both kinds of production. Women produce double – they produce consumables for home consumption, where they do not leave any surplus, and also produce children to ensure the continuation of their species. Men, on the other hand, produce only for exchange. This helps them accumulate surplus wealth and gain social power based on that wealth. With the introduction of division of labour, women were confined to the private domain and, in time, this was considered natural. Man’s superior position because of the accumulation of wealth incontrovertibly placed him on a higher plinth also within the household. Reproduction never came to be translated as production. What women produced at home did not leave any surplus. Thus, women were not counted as contributing towards any visible wealth income. With the reproductive function excluded in the definition of “production,” women’s contribution to the household came to be regarded as secondary and negligible. Engels points out that the “first class opposition” in history coincided with the growth of “antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage”: Monogamy arose out of the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of one person – and that a man – and out of the desire to bequeath

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Bodies and Embodiments: Theories of Motherhood this wealth to this man’s children and to no one else’s. For this purpose, monogamy was essential on the woman’s part, but not on the man’s so that this monogamy of the woman in no way hindered the overt or covert polygamy of the man (81).43

The Marxist approach thus saw the subordination of women to be linked to the class-based system and the family structure that functioned within this system. They believed that the exploitation of women and labourers could end only if the capitalist economic system was overthrown. Marxist feminists saw the need to relocate women as a separate category. They saw reproduction as a means by which the patriarchy oppressed women. Some Marxists believe that a socialist revolution is necessary to change the situation and that women need to become economically independent if they are to escape subordination. They also, however, recognize that women’s joining the labour force has resulted in an increase in their workload while they continue to perform the task of childrearing, as paid labour imposes an additional burden upon them. While home represents a place for relaxation for men, women will continue to remain confined to the role of mothering. The theories of Marx and Engels have been critiqued by various theorists from different fields. Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) points out that the patriarchy as a system is historical, and that it was established and institutionalized. She acknowledged the contribution of Engels in establishing the theoretical framework and also accepted the theoretical formulation of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the exchange of women as a part of the alliance theory, but postulates that the first division of labour was determined culturally rather than biologically. She opines that in egalitarian societies – those of hunter-gatherers, for example – the relative status of women was equal and complimentary. During the development of the agricultural society, the women’s reproductive system was commodified; women were turned into resources, which resulted in their exchange, and even capture. In Lerner’s opinion, private property was created out of women as reproducers. In “Engels and Women,” Peter Aaby (1977) countered Engel by saying that if we apply Engel’s logic, women as the direct producers within agriculture should have had the means to produce and, consequently, be in control of part of the strategic social resources. 44 Zillah Eizenstien in the Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978) argues that Marx categorized women as proletariat, as an undistinguished group from other proletariats or a malicious class division

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of labour. She observes that women’s activity in reproduction, which limits her activity in production, is not considered problematic as per Marx’s view, while Engels, however, acknowledges the problem of women’s existence within the domestic sphere – the problem is observed as being linked to the roots of private property. Eizenstien says that women play crucial roles in perpetuating patriarchal structures – they reproduce as well as participate in the paid economy, thus performing dual tasks. They also produce for consumption at home. In addition to taking care of the men and children in their family, they work in the labour force for lower wages and stabilize the economy through their role as consumers. Nancy Hartsock in “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism” (1998) also asserts that women in contemporary society enter a double labour – that of production and reproduction. However, unlike men, “women’s lives are institutionally defined by their production of use value in the home.” She points out that: Here, we begin to encounter the narrowness of Marx’s concept of production … It is no surprise, to feminists, that Engels, for example, merely asked how women can continue to work at home and also work in production outside the home. Marx too had taken for granted women’s responsibility for household labour. He repeats, as if it were his own, the question of a Belgian factory inspector, “if a mother works for wages, how will the household’s internal economy be cared for? Who will look after the young children? Who will get the meals ready and do the washing and mending?”45

The thrust of Mary O’Brien’s analysis focuses on “genderically differentiated processes of human reproduction itself,” which generated gender differences in human consciousness. She marks Marx’s production-centred alienation as problematic. Extricated from Rossi’s biologism, she scrutinized the sexual differences in reproduction as material, and the labour conditioned by historical development in productive and reproductive relations reconciled with consciousness. For both men and women, reproduction remains an instance of alienation to be overcome. For the male, it “rests squarely on the alienation of the male seed in the copulative act.” Male projects are therefore attempts to create artificial forms of community and continuity, constructions of social systems devised to earmark children and assert control over female sexuality and reproductive powers through marriage and family in the face of uncertain paternity. “Women, unlike men, do not have to take further action to overcome their alienation from

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the race, for their labour assures their integration” and structures a consciousness conversant by pain and labour that unites the actual with potential and confirms the integration of women with the continuation of the species in both nature and history (32).46 Gaytri Chakravarti Spivak articulates the Marxist failure to recognize the womb as a workshop in “Feminism and Critical Theory” (1996). She refers to the idea of “externalisation” or “alienation” when she writes: One could indefinitely allegorise the relationship of women within this particular triad – use, exchange and surplus – by suggesting that the woman in the traditional social situation produces more than she is getting in terms of her subsistence and is, therefore, a continual source of the production of surpluses, for the man who owns her, or by the man for the capitalist who owns his labour power. Apart from the fact that the mode of production of housework is not, strictly speaking, capitalist, such an analysis is paradoxical. The contemporary woman, when she seeks financial compensation for housework, seeks the abstraction of use value into exchange value. But the situation of the domestic workplace is not one of “pure exchange.” The Marxian exigency would make us ask at least two questions: what is the use value of woman’s unremunerated work for husband or family? Is the willing insertion into the wage structure a curse or a blessing? How should we fight the idea universally accepted by men that wages are the only mark of value producing work (not, I think, through the slogan “Housework is Beautiful”)? What would be the implication of denying women entry into the capitalist economy? Radical feminism can here learn a cautionary lesson from Lenin’s capitulation to capitalism (56).47

Shulamith Firestone agrees with Marx and Engels’s concept that an early egalitarian society is evident in the title of her book The Dialectic of Sex. Nevertheless, she is dismissive of Marx and Engels’s belief: “About the condition of women as an oppressed class, they know next to nothing, recognising it only where it overlaps with economics.” She dismisses Marx as “worse” than Engels: “There is a growing recognition of Marx’s bias against women (a cultural bias shared by Freud as well as all men of culture).” Finally, she dismisses their analysis of women’s oppression as “dangerous” and in any event “only incidental insights.”48

The Psychoanalytic Approach The issue of women’s psychology being distinct from that of men has been studied since the nineteenth century. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud posited his controversial theories of penis envy, and the Oedipus and

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Electra complexes. His hypotheses have been severely attacked by numerous feminists. Melanie Klein developed a psychoanalytic theory of “object relations” during the 1920s, which focused on the development of a child’s psyche in alliance and entourage, and the pre-Oedipal child’s deep attachment to its mother. However, she modified the hypothesis and found the role of biological drives in the formation of adult personality to be less accentuated (5).49 Although Klein regarded the father’s involvement in the psychological development of a child, she identified the relevance of the mother on the child’s inner world as primary, because she is the source of the child’s nourishment. Klein’s work implied that the problems a child may face could be an indication of deficient mother care. Psychoanalytical feminists have often argued that the psyche is a social product, a result of formative influences in early childhood rather than the expression of an innate nature. With the exception of the argument for dual parenting, these theorists are not interested in exploring how men and women could become equal. Rather, they pursue the differences that characterized the sexes and what the implications of those differences are. They unequivocally reject Freud’s thesis that identified women as incompetent to resolve the Oedipal complex that elicited glitches in their matured sexuality. Karen Horney, who is credited for founding feminist psychology, in response to Freud’s theory of penis envy, acknowledges that it may occur occasionally in neurotic women, but indicated that “womb envy” occurs just as much in men. She asserts that men are envious of a woman’s ability to bear children. Men’s mad pursuit of success may basically be a substitute for the fact that they cannot reproduce children. Horney is flabbergasted at the psychiatrist’s predilection for placing so much emphasis on the male sexual organ. She also redrafted the Freudian Oedipal complex of the sexual rudiments. She adduces that clinging to one parent and showing distrust in the other is an ingenuous consequence of apprehension which may be precipitated by a disturbance in the parentchild relationship.50 Although Karen Horney is primarily credited for the genesis of the concept of ‘womb envy’ in her 1926 article “The Flight from Womanhood: the Masculinity-Complex in Women as Viewed by Men and by Women,” Luke gives credit for the coinage to Eva Kittay’s 1984 article “Rereading Freud on ‘Femininity’ or Why Not Womb Envy?”51 Kittay asked the question of why there is no analogous concept to penis envy. Later hypotheses relating to ‘vagina envy,’ ‘womb envy,’ ‘breast envy,’ and

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‘parturition envy’ were introduced by theorists that attended to men’s anxieties and the envy of women’s biological capabilities of pregnancy, parturition, breastfeeding, and the social role of nurturing children.52 Brian Luke, in his Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (2007), categorizes the three kinds of reactions by men who have displayed womb envy as (1) constructing a realm of exclusively male activity, (2) devaluing women’s specific functions and duties, thereby amplifying male specific functions, and (3) administering female specific functions.53 It has also been suggested by certain socio-psychological theorists such as Montagu that in the case of men the inability to reproduce is recompensed by a craving to produce in other areas. Men derive satisfaction from the projects they engage in or expand, and also use terms such as “that’s my baby” to indicate their pride in ideas they have conceived. Montague observed the biological functions of reproduction as the most significant of feminine qualities, and regarded the woman as the artist who is busy creatively living the life that men can only “paint or write about.”54 Daily’s Gyn/Ecology (1978) claimed that men envy not only a woman’s womb but also her creative energy, Preoccupied with the reproduction of their own male selves, men envy not just the womb but women’s creative energy in all its forms. Their envy gives rise to an identification with the foetus for, like the foetus, they draw on female energy to fuel projects of pseudo creative technology.55

Firestone argues against the Freudian concept of penis envy and the Oedipus complex in The Dialectic of Sex (1979). She acknowledges Freud’s penis envy as a metaphor rather than a reality: “I believe Freud was talking about something real though, perhaps, his ideas taken literally, led to absurdity.” She saw his intellect as poetic and not scientific: “his ideas are more valuable as metaphors than as literal truths” (46).56 Firestone blamed the intransigent patriarchal societal structure for the ontogenesis of the Oedipus complex, which can make full sense only in “terms of power,” which is common to individuals who grow up in patriarchal nuclear families and is on the verge of decline in societies where the patriarchy is relaxed (47).57 Kate Millet, categorically resistant to biological determinism, saw the concept of penis envy as an instance of “male ego centrism” (134). She found Freud’s logic only succeeded to mutilate the “impressive female

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accomplishment … into nothing more than a hunt for a male organ.” (134)58 John Bowlby developed a theory of attachment (1958) that suggested that children were pre-programmed to be attached to the others around them in order to survive. He argued that childcare in the early years was crucial for a child’s mental health. He developed a theory of “maternal deprivation,” where he maintained that a child might be left damaged if taken away from its mother’s care in the early years of its life. His studies revealed that more than half of juvenile thieves had been separated from their mothers for longer than six months during their first five years. The popularity of Bowlby and other attachment theorists resulted in intensifying the guilt that working mothers already felt when they left their children back home to work outside. Fathers were always dismissed from childcare; working mothers have always felt that childcare duties are imposed on them, even in the presence of fathers and others.59 Dinnerstein and Nancy upheld that women are different, not because of their connaturally differing psyches, but because their parenting involves a cultural confirmation to clichéd images of females, which pervade the society. Mothers treat boys like young ‘men,’ teach them to play competitively and discourage them from expressing impassioned expressions, while girls are encouraged to stay in the house, often discouraged from competing, and are taught how to ‘mother’ dolls and cope with emotional interactions. This results in the diverse psychological compositions of men and women. Men are good at competition and autonomy and bad at relationships and expressing emotions, while women handle relationships and emotions well and may be bad at competition and autonomy. Chodorow refuted the contention that mothering is a product of biology. She pointed out that non-biological mothers, and sometimes also men and children, can exhibit nurturing capacities as well as the biological mother. She asserted that there is no substantial evidence to prove that female hormones or chromosomes are responsible for the maternal instinct in women: “women’s mothering, then, is seen as a natural fact … The assumption is questionable, however, given the extent to which human behaviour is not instinctually determined but culturally mediated” (14).60 Chodorow acknowledges that many feminist theorists and anthropologists, including Engels and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, fathomed the position of women as mothers or the sexual division of labour, but did not investigate how women endure in that particular position. Biology is an assumption, as is “universal is instinctual” and “what is instinctual is inevitable and

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unchanging.” Another popular explanation for the sexual division of labour is that it is necessity for the survival of the species (14–15).61 Harvard moral psychologist Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice (1982), analyses women’s moral decision-making processes. She examines the distinction between women and men from the vantage point of moral perception and concludes that women customarily approximate moral choices from interpersonal and circumstantial evidences while men appeal more to abstract universal principles. Lacanian feminists link gendered identity with language where the phallus is symbolic of a child’s entrance into language and culture constructed under The Law of the Father. They examine and resist the oppressive constructions of gender and sexuality encoded in language. Through the varied postulations, three views came to dominate psychoanalytical feminist methods. First and most importantly, psychoanalytical feminists consent to the differences between the two sexes rather than their similarities; second, the majority of psychoanalytical feminists substitute biological essentialism with social and cultural explanations, and, finally, they developed a resistance to the oppressive construction of gender in language. Nancy Chodorow said that the terms “mothering”’ and “fathering” mean different things in our society. Indeed, these are differently conceived in different societies. While a man can possibly “mother” a child, it is unheard of for a woman to “father” a child. In present-day motherhood, the contraventions which have surfaced from feminist arguments on the one hand and formalistic transformations in culture which have bisexualized the labour market without likewise affecting the childcare model on the other, have created a isochronal predicament for women who desire to elude the responsibilities of motherhood but reserve the love for babies. It can be seen as the residue of the conflicts of unpaid childcare and the paid labour force given the present structure of society where women are often primary the solitary “psychological parent” of the child. The rapid development of medical technologies, collectively referred to as “the pill,” has dissolved the alliance of sexuality and reproduction. With reproduction now having become a choice for women with equal footing to men, there is a notable increase in the age of women who enter marriage and mother children. But the notion of guilt-ridden ideal motherhood remains. It is rooted in the idea of biological determinism and the social constructivism of ideal motherhood. Women, preferably non-working women, giving birth and

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being adept in childcare, may be close to accomplishing the criteria of ideal mothers. Working mothers handle the guilt of leaving their children behind to work by being overtly lenient, and often compensate by buying them presents. But since it finally involves the good health of children, good behaviour, good education, and well-established, well-groomed, and well-married men and women, who would give birth to good children who are well groomed and well mannered, parenting is never a complete task and ideal motherhood is an unattainable paradigm for any woman to achieve.

Works Cited and References 1. THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA CRIMINAL ORIGINAL JURISDICTION WRIT PETITION (CRIMINAL) NO. 194 OF 2017 Joseph Shine … Petitioner(s) VERSUS Union of India … Respondent(s), India Today (September 27, 2018). 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 2011). 3. Ibid. 4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 5. Sulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1970), 119. 6. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 7. Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). 8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2010). 9. Ibid. 10. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1982), 152–9, as cited in Women’s Brains by Stephen Jay Gould, faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/wbgould. 11. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (New York: Penguin, 2004[1871]), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The Descent of Man(Darwin)/Chapter IV. 12. Margaret D. Costa and Sharon Ruth Guthrie, Women and Sport: Interdisciplinary Perspective (California State University: Human Kinetics, 1994). 13. Quoted in Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female,” History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1989): 545–569. 14. Ibid. 15. Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, The Sexes Throughout Nature (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1875), 229–31. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7007332M/The sexes throughout nature. 16. Henry Maudsley, “Sex in Mind and Education,” Popular Science Monthly 5 (1874): 198–215. 17. Ibid., 203. 18. Allen Grant, “Women’s Place in Nature,” Forum 7 (1889): 258–83.

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19. Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Penguin Books, 1935). 20. Albert C. Cafagna et al. (ed.), Philosophy, Children, and the Family (New York: Plenum Press, 1982). 21. Carmen Schifellite, “Beyond Tarzan and Jane Genes: Towards a Critique of Bio-determinism,” in Beyond Patriarchy, edited by Michael Kauffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 46. 22. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 180. 23. Ibid., 178. 24. David E. Bergquist, “Who’s Bringing up Baby: the Need for a National Uniform Parental Leave Policy,” Law & Inequality: a Journal of Theory and Practice 5, no. 2 (1987). 25. Warren Farrell, The Liberated Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 31. 26. Helen Deutsh, A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, vol. 1 (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944). 27. Ann Oakley, Housewife (New York: Penguin, 1990). 28. Mama Zogbé, Mami Wata: Africa’s Ancient God/dess Unveiled, vol. I (Martinez, GA: Miami Wata Healers Society of North America, 2007). 29. “The Great Debate: Darwinism Today,” selected notes from a ten week course by Caspar Hewett, http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/darwinismtoday1 html, cited in Women's Studies Collective, University of West Florida, 95. 30. P. Gowaty, “Evolution Biology and Feminism,” Human Nature 3, no. 3 (1992): 217–49. 31. Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1986), 57. 32. Richard Lee and Richard Daly, “Man’s Domination and Woman’s Oppression – the Question of Origins,” in Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power and Change, edited by Michael Kaufman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 33. S. L. Washburn and C. K. Lancaster, “The Evolution of Hunting,” in Man the Hunter, edited by A. Roe and G. G. Simpson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 421–36. 34. Liam D. Murphy and Paul A. Erickson, Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 35. Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher, “The Human Revolution,” Current Anthropology 5, No. 3 (1964): 135–68. 36. C. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1969). 37. Carol MacCormack, Culture and Gender – a Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 17. 41. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Resistance Books, 2004).

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42. Ibid., 67. 43. Ibid., 81. 44. Peter Aaby, “Engels and Women,” Critique of Anthropology 3, no. 9–10 (1978): 25–53. 45. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole R. McCann and 6ǎQJ-J\ǂQJ Kim (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 46. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981), 32. 47. Gayati Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Spivak, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 56. 48. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. 49. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the “Good Enough” Mother (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 8, 12. 50. Lindsey Hockenberry, “How Womb Envy has Caused Men to Control Women’s Bodies,” Medium Corporation, 47, https://medium.com/appliedintersectionality/blargh-fbfd39098f42. 51. Eva Feder Kittay, “Rereading Freud on Femininity,’ or Why not Womb Envy?” Women’s Studies International Forum 7, no. 5: 385–91. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(84)90038-4. 52. Ibid. 53. Brian Luke, Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 10. 54. Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women (New York: Collier Books, 1952), 176. 55. Heather Jon Maroney, “Embracing Motherhood: New Feminist Theory,” as quoted in Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 9–10, 57. 56. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. 57. Ibid., 47. 58. Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought: a More Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009), 134. 59. Saul McLeod, Bowlby’s Attachment Theory (2017), https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html. 60. Nancy Chodorow, Why Mother Women (London: University of California Press, 1978), 14. 61. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

MOTHERHOOD AND THE BANGLADESH LIBERATION WAR (1971) MOSARRAP HOSSAIN KHAN

Introduction While West Pakistan was moored on the founding principle of “pure Islam,” East Pakistan harboured Bengali linguistic sub-nationalism, which became a contentious issue once Urdu was declared as the official language of Pakistan in 1952. After the 1970 general election in which Awami League won an overwhelming majority in East Pakistan, in his historic speech on March 7, 1971, Sheikh Mujib spoke explicitly in favour of the “economic, political and cultural freedom” of the people of East Pakistan, but not of “religious freedom,” reiterating an ambiguous space for Islam in the Awami League’s larger commitment towards the idea of a secular, socialist, and democratic republic. However, the Pakistani ruling elite, which sought to deploy Islam to gain legitimacy for their rule, termed such demands for autonomy in the east as a “conspiracy against Islam” (Hakim 1998, 101). In the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), the Father of the Nation and the first Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, referred to the violated, raped, and defiled women as ‘birangona’, or war heroines. The term ‘birangona’ idolizes/idealizes women as a spiritual entity, invested in the task of upholding the national honour, thereby divesting them of the somatic and the affective. In this essay, I analyse oral testimonial narratives, diaries, and fiction, Anglophone as well as vernacular Bengali, set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War in order to engage with the question of motherhood at a time when the country grappled with the conflict between secular Bengali and Islamic nationalism. Through a reading of Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchhi [I am the War Heroine, Speaking] (1994–5), Jahanara Imam’s diary, Ekattorer Dinguli [The Days of ’71] (1986), and Tahmima Anam’s novels A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2011), in which the figure of the mother is vaguely modelled on Imam, this chapter explores how motherhood in literary productions around the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 moves

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from an erasure of motherhood of birangonas to the conceptualization of a chaste and nurturing mother anticipating a combative ‘political motherhood’ in the 1990s.

Birangonas and the Erasure of Motherhood On December 23, 1971, AHM Kamruzzaman announced that all women raped during the war would be addressed as birangonas or war heroines, women who sacrificed their “chastity and womanhood for the sake of motherland” (Ibrahim 2013, 21), in an attempt to rehabilitate them in society with honour. Immediately after the war, Sheikh Mujib, while applauding the sacrifice of these women, appeared ambivalent about their position in Bangladeshi society. The pregnant women were forced to abort because he did not want polluted blood in his country: “[children] without the identity of their fathers must be sent abroad … I don’t want any polluted blood in this country” (Ibrahim 2013, 22). Despite the initial state effort to rehabilitate these women, the term ‘birangona’ gradually came to denote ‘barangana,’ a prostitute, because of its Bengali phonetic closeness (Murthy 2012, 2012), in the way birangonas were first left to fend for themselves and then consigned to memory because of the sense of shame attached to them. Thereafter, the narratives of raped women during the war operated as an ambiguous nexus between revelation and concealment, as the memory of rape was pushed to the background as a public secret (Mookherjee 2006, 434). These women resurfaced only in 1992 when three of them were photographed in a civil-society movement demanding the trial of collaborators, leading the way for a public remembrance of “wartime rape through various literary, visual (films, plays, photographs) and testimonial forms, ensuring that the birangona endures as an iconic figure” (Mookherjee 2015). The three-decade silence around birangonas was largely because of the way the nation had been conceived in the popular imagination, as “the image of the nurturing and sacrificing woman, as mother, wife or nurse that is authorized by the discourse of Muktijuddho” (Mookherjee 2008, 45). In this popular conflation of nature, mother, and nation in Bangladesh, the sexualized figure of violated and pregnant birangonas appears to challenge the chaste maternal figure confined to domesticity, given to the task of caring for and nurturing her children. The state-sponsored mass abortions of birangonas were necessary to restore the image of the nation as a chaste mother without the sexual excesses encoded in the figure.

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Jahanara Imam, the mother of Rumi martyred during the war and the author of Ekattorer Dinguli, a diary account of Pakistani repression, organized a gono adalat [public court] in March 1992 for the mock trial of the Pakistani army and their non-Bengali and Bengali collaborators of 1971. Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchhi (1994–5), one of the earliest systematic attempts to record the oral narratives of birangonas in the 1990s following the mock trial, is a continuation of her work at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre in 1972. The seven survivors of sexual violence in Ibrahim’s testimonial narrative – Mrs. Nielsen (Tara Banerjee), Meherjaan, Reena, Shefali, Moyna, Fatema, and Mina – recount their wartime experience and their life in post-war Bangladesh and abroad. Mrs. Nielsen alias Tara Banerjee migrates to Denmark and marries a Danish journalist after her family refuse to take her back from the rehabilitation centre. Meherjaan crosses over to Pakistan after the war with a married Pakistani army man, Layek Khan, who treats her like a birangona, a war heroine, without ever asking about her past, contrary to the way her own family tries to hush up her visit home because of her supposed shameful past. Before migrating to Pakistan, Reena, another survivor, asks: Did women make no contribution in earning Bangladesh’s freedom? There are so many memorials dedicated to the martyrs of the war. So many streets, culverts, bridges dedicated to the martyrs. The parents, wife, and children of the martyrs are treated with empathy and respect, but what about us? Has there been a single street named after a ‘Birangona’?1 (Ibrahim 2013, 69–70)

Shefali pities the men who treat birangonas like prostitutes (barangonas) out of their own emasculation and sense of shame at not being able to protect their women during the war. The title birangona assumes the function of an ornament, as another survivor Moyna says, “Neither could I wear it nor could I discard it. In people’s eyes, I became a Barangona (prostitute)” (106). In independent Bangladesh, Fatema fails to secure a teaching job because no school wants to invite trouble by appointing a birangona, who “cannot be upheld as an ideal in front of students” (138). When the last survivor Mina reminds Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib on his birthday that she is a birangona, he touches her forehead and says, “That’s why you are my mother” (152). The accounts of the seven survivors testify to the impossibility of actual motherhood for these women, as the process of mass abortion purges the nation of enemy blood in its attempt to idealize a desexualized and chaste mother. In the conflation of mother and nation, the only form of legitimate motherhood is that of a caring and nurturing mother like nature in the

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Bangladeshi national imaginary. This is why two birangona survivors, Tara and Meherjaan, proclaim their actual experience of motherhood outside Bangladesh and other survivors’ experience remained shrouded in silence for three long decades. In this gendering of the nation as a mother, “the impure woman, epitomized in the figure of the birangona, seems to be excluded” (Mookherjee 2008, 45), their motherhood erased from public memory.

The Caring and Nurturing Mother While Nilima Ibrahim’s oral narrative foregrounds the larger discourse of the erasure of motherhood for birangonas, Jahanara Imam, the mother of the martyr Rumi, embodies the idealized figure of a suffering, caring, and nurturing mother. In Ekattorer Dinguli, a diary entry written during the turbulent days of 1971 starting in March and ending in December, Imam documents her journey as a caring and nurturing mother with a growing political consciousness, largely confined to the domestic space. While the diary is essentially a private mode of communication, it forges Imam’s political consciousness as a mother of two boys who absorb the excitement of the war. As a loving mother, she scours the New Market in Dhaka looking for ingredients for her son Rumi’s favourite burger. Imam’s engagement with the public sphere is contingent, mostly based on her occasional interaction with the writers and artists of the Bangla Academy: There is an emergency meeting of the artists at the Bangla Academy at 2.30 pm today. Although I am neither a writer nor an artist, I have had personal interaction with many of them because I have been living in Dhaka since 1949. I frequent most of the seminars, meetings, and movement as a participant or observer. (Imama 2003, 19)

On the day of Sheikh Mujib’s crucial meeting on March 7, 1971, Imam listens to his speech on Kitty’s radio, as the male members of the house join the meeting in person. Imam feels safer when her son Rumi spends time at home instead of frequenting political meetings and processions, exhibiting her care and motherly concern in the domestic sphere. Kitty, an American who studies Bengali at Dhaka University, plays an important role in the growth of Imam’s political consciousness, as she demands to know how West Pakistan has been exploiting East Pakistan. It is to satiate Kitty’s curiosity that Imam starts reading up on the political movement, while being stationed in the domestic space, while the radio acts as a window into the political world. In the days preceding the war, the radio

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and the television expose her to the public political sphere as in the case of many other women in Bangladesh: When these [patriotic] songs are broadcast on television, the calm and quiet people sitting on the sofas of their sitting rooms in Dhaka feel the storm brewing. They feel like running out of their homes and joining the bloody struggle on the streets, in the ports and at the stations. (32)

Imam and her husband agree unwillingly to let their son Rumi, who abandons an opportunity to study engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, go to war. Seeing the grand celebrations on the day of Eid in 1971 in the middle of the war, she writes, “After severing the neck of Islam, Pakistanis are now trying to join it back to the body!” (81). Imam almost becomes a cog in the machine of war when she hosts Rumi and his friends in her house, in addition to driving Rumi to different destinations when he is sent to Dhaka to carry out operations. As other muktijoddhas [freedom fighters] start frequenting her house, Imam reflects on how the war has come home: “I heard about all the operations and actions that took place in Dhaka before from other people. This is the first time I hear the descriptions of these actions from the eyewitnesses and from people who take part in them” (172). Her active role in sheltering and caring for freedom fighters destabilizes the boundary between the private and the public, between civilian life and the war front. On the night of August 29, 1971, the Pakistani military cordons off Imam’s house and takes Rumi and other freedom fighters to the police station. Despite not being deeply religious, she exhibits increasing religiosity after Rumi goes missing, as she visits Pagla Pir’s shrine regularly: “In my life, I have never believed in pirs and fakirs. Now I have decided to visit the shrine of Pagla Pir for Rumi” (194). When Imam meets other victims at Paglababa’s shrine, she feels a maternal compassionate political awareness because of other mothers’ similarity of experience during the war. Despite losing her son Rumi to the war and her husband to a heart attack at the same time, she dedicates her younger son, Zami, to the service of the newly-independent nation. Lorraine Sim (2009) writes that it is often in women’s memoirs, diaries, and writings, unlike their male counterparts, that the domestic life is endowed with a moral and ethical value during war. Women authors’ focus on ordinary, everyday objects and figures in the domestic space is therapeutic because the domestic everyday acts as a space of personal happiness and ethical possibilities during the war. Thus, the women writers’ exploration of the domestic space and “small sensual things” is

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not an oversimplified, unreflective act but rather an attempt to maintain a “façade of normality” (Sim 2008, 6) during the war. In the case of Imam, the domestic acts as an ethical space in the way it upholds the values of care and nurture through the figure of a sacrificing mother caught in the vortex of conflict and personal crisis. In Tahmima Anam’s novels A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2012), which engage with the contentious place of Islam in East Pakistan during the Liberation War and independent Bangladesh, the figure of Rehana, the caring and nurturing mother with growing political consciousness, is a veiled intertextual reference to Jahana Imam. A Golden Age begins in March 1959, the year the military ruler Ayub Khan imposed martial law, suspending Pakistan’s first constitution that was adopted in 1956. The novel opens with Rehana, an Urdu-speaking Muslim widow who grew up in Calcutta and is married to a Bengali Muslim in Dhaka, losing the custody of her two children, Sohail and Maya, to her brother-in-law, Faiz, in Lahore, for her financial and supposed moral inability to care for them after her husband’s death. As Rehana’s financial situation improves, she brings back her children from Lahore only to lose them to the ensuing Liberation War, when Sohail decides to join the liberation fighters and Maya volunteers to work in Calcutta during the war. While A Golden Age narrates the story of Bangladesh’s political struggle and its impact on the life of Rehana and her family, The Good Muslim moves the action to independent Bangladesh in 1984, thirteen years after the freedom struggle. However, the narrative traverses between the past and the present, weaving the changing trajectory of Rehana’s family and, allegorically, that of Bangladesh. The Good Muslim explores the schism between religion and secularity at the cusp of the Liberation War far more directly, but also in a somewhat stereotypical fashion (Farrukh 2012) by setting up Sohail and Maya as two poles of contrasting values. Anam’s realist novels delve into the violent logic of nation formation by anchoring their narratives in the allegorical mother figure of Rehana, embodying a more fluid sense of religiosity, metonymically substitutable for Bangladesh. Rehana’s lived Islam is “flexible and syncretic, but rooted in the religion’s teaching” (Chambers 2015, 148). By focalizing her narratives through the caring and nurturing mother figure of Rehana, Anam’s novels recover the domestic for its redemptive possibilities. As part of this caring and nurturing ethic, Anam, like other women writers, emphasizes that the right ethical and political stance is to demand an “everyday life without war” (Sim 2009, 82). A Golden Age foregrounds small sensual ordinary details of gardening, cooking, and

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poetry, which could still restore the normalcy of the pre-war days. Every morning Rehana unfurls the prayer mat and sinks to her knees, reciting the Aytul Kursi and Surah Yahseen from the Qur’an, praying for Sohail and his friends’ success against the Pakistani army. When Sohail and the other boys (guerrillas) leave to carry out an explosion at the Inter-Continental Hotel, Rehana leads a prayer in the morning: “Rehana closed her eyes and said Aytul Kursi for what felt like the thousandth time that day” (Anam 2012, 113). Defying the limits set by traditional Islamic piety, Rehana falls in love with a major who comes to live in her house and acts as a guide for Sohail and the other freedom fighters. While she fasts during Ramzan, she also makes love to the major on the night of an important operation. The end of The Good Muslim returns the readers to a semblance of ordinary pre-war domestic life: The bungalow sank back into its habits. Downstairs, Rehana prepared the garden for the winter and took up knitting; Sufia emptied the kitchen of all its contents and scrubbed each surface until it mirrored her hard hands and the sharp line of her jaw. (Anam 2012, 211)

As the new country reels under successive dictatorships after Sheikh Mujib’s murder, the recovery of the ordinary creates a shared sense of common (Williams 1988, 71) in the domestic space. While generally a sense of “casual inattentiveness … defines the everyday experience of everyday life” (Felski 2000, 90), the fictional representation also provides a heightened sensitivity towards the ordinary. Anam’s depiction of the domestic sphere thus encapsulates something that is unrepresentable because of its ordinariness, and yet offers the possibility of restoring normalcy after the war in a schizophrenic nation. The everyday interactions in Rehana’s household make possible what Marita Eastmond (2010) calls a “thin” reconciliation with the religionists, denoting a more open-ended and fragmented reconciliation in societies which have witnessed violence. In Anam’s allegorical narrative, Rehana’s fluid religiosity exceeds the ideological limits set by West Pakistan. At the same time, having come from an Urdu-speaking Muslim family in pre-Partition Calcutta and with relatives in West Pakistan, her children’s staunch leftist and nationalist posturing makes her feel ambiguous about the self-determination of East Pakistan: “‘I’m not sure I’m a nationalist,’ she said. She was thinking of the well-loved volumes of Urdu poetry on her shelf, right next to the Koran” (Anam 2009, 141). Rehana eventually comes to support Bangladesh’s self-determination because of her children’s intense involvement in the

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war and attends Shaikh Mujib’s historic speech on March 7, 1971, in which he demands a separate country, Bangladesh. This leaves her with the feeling that people love Mujib “the way orphans dream of their lost parents; without promise, only hope” (49). In the larger national imaginary of Sheikh Mujib as a caring paternal figure, Rehana’s contingent engagement with the public sphere represents a nurturing maternal instinct, whose temporary cancer conflates the national-public with the domesticprivate. Rehana’s nascent political consciousness does not assume the shape of the combative militant mother that we witness in the case of Jahana Imam in the early 1990s.

Political Motherhood Whereas Jahanara Imam’s diary and Tahmima Anam’s novels depict mothers within the largely acceptable template as caring and nurturing with a growing political consciousness committed to their children in the domestic sphere, unlike the sexually exceeding figure of birangonas in the public sphere, Imam turns into an icon of ‘political motherhood’ in the public sphere in the early 1990s. Following the appointment of Ghulam Azam, accused of war crimes, as the Emir of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1991, the Imam-led public court organized a mock trial of Pakistani army and their non-Bengali and Bengali collaborators during 1971 in March 1992. Imam’s role in mobilizing the younger generation made her “the embodiment of motherhood in the national discourse” (Mookherjee 2008, 46). Over about three decades, Imam turned her nurturing motherhood into ‘political motherhood’ – “a process of unfolding consciousness, as women progressively move into the public sphere” (Werbner 1999, 221), valorising the maternal values of caring and compassion anchored in democratic justice. In Anglo-America where such large-scale social movements first emerged in the nineteenth century and later in the Near East and Asia, women’s difference, uniqueness, and complementarity were stressed in reconceptualizing citizenship. Their feminine qualities were upheld as sources of their superiority and for the legitimization of their space in the public sphere (Werbner 1999). Like motherist movements in Latin America, Imam’s own struggle following the loss of her son Rumi during the Liberation War challenges women’s role as a domestic caregiver, and emphasizes “the centrality of values associated with motherhood for shaping the wider order of the political community” (Werbner 1999, 231). In the case of ‘political motherhood’ in Bangladesh, Nayanika Mookherjee (2008) contends that the process of gendering the nation makes the public sphere available only to certain kinds of women

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such as Imam, who graduate from the domestic to the political, while the nation consigns to silence the raped women, the birangonas. This is evident in the way Sheikh Mujib repeatedly calls these women “mothers,” a symbolization process in which women are desexualized and placed in the confines of the domestic space. Moreover, such a process of “gendering in Bangladesh operate[s] as a trope for hegemonic middleclass (both female and male) sensibilities (discourses and practices). It makes available women’s bodies as representative icons of nationhood within debates on nationalism through the use of the rhetoric and imagery of the ‘mother nation’” (Mookherjee 2008, 38). Literary productions around the Liberation War of Bangladesh do not explicitly advocate ‘political motherhood’ in the public sphere; rather, they anticipate such a process in their writing. Although Imam emerges as the epitome of middle-class political mobilization in the early 1990s, her diary entry in 1971 confines itself to issues of domesticity and nurturing her husband and two children. She momentarily steps into the public sphere when her son Rumi and husband, along with several other freedom-fighter friends of her son, are taken into custody by the Pakistani police. Nilima Ibrahim’s oral narratives demonstrate the impossibility of motherhood for birangonas outside the prescribed gender role for mothers in the domestic space. Anam’s novels draw on the trope of a nurturing and caring mother with a contingent political awareness, derived more from the inclination of her children. In Selina Hossain’s Hangor Nodi Grenade [A Shark, A River, A Grenade] (2003), the middle-class aesthetic of literary production appropriates a rural woman into the project of nation building by representing her as a caring and sacrificing mother, who hands over her disabled son, Raees, to the Pakistani army in order to save two freedom fighters. Anisul Hoque’s Maa [Mother] (2003), modelled on the true story of Safia Begum, the martyr Azad’s mother, depicts a courageous mother in the domestic space who nurtures her son and hides guerrillas in her house after her son joins the war as a freedom fighter. Although these literary works anticipate ‘political motherhood,’ they subsume women’s militant desires within a palatable middle-class aestheticizing impulse of imagining the mother as a nurturing and caring being confined to domesticity. Imam’s role in mobilizing people in 1992 for organizing a mock trial of war criminals draws on the trope of a self-sacrificing wronged mother seeking justice for the disappearance of her son during the war. In this, Imam has successfully transitioned “to a combative mother, at the helm of affairs and providing inspiration and new hopes to the nation …” (Mookherjee 2008, 46). Literary productions around the Bangladesh Liberation War thus move from depicting an erasure of motherhood of

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birangonas to conceptualizing a nurturing mother and then anticipating a ‘political motherhood,’ conflating the nation and motherhood in the process.

Note 1

All translations from Nilima Ibrahim’s oral narrative and Jahanara Imama’s diary are mine unless otherwise noted.

Bibliography Anam, Tahmima. The Good Muslim. New York: Harper Perennial, 2012. ———. A Golden Age. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009 [2007]. Chambers, Claire. “Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim: Bangladeshi Islam, Secularism, and the Tablighi Jamaat.” In Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, edited by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert, 142–53. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Eastmond, Marita. “Introduction: Reconciliation, Reconstruction, and Everyday Life in War-torn Societies.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57 (2010): 3–16. Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2000. Farrukh, Sarah. “Book Review: The Good Muslim.” Patheos: Muslimah Media Watch, May 17, 2012, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/mmw/2012/05/bookreview-the-good-muslim. Hakim, Muhammad A. “The Use of Islam as a Political Legitimization Tool: the Bangladesh Experience, 1972–1990.” Asian Journal of Political Science 6, no. 2 (1998): 98–117. Hoque, Anisul. Maa. Dhaka: Shomoy Prakashan, 2003. Hossain, Selina. Hangor Nodi Grenade. Ananya, 2010 [2003]. Ibrahim, Nilima. Ami Birangona Bolchhi. Dhaka: Jagriti Prakashani, 2013 [1994– 95]. Imama, Jahanara. Ekattorer Dinguli. Dhaka: Sandhani Prakashani, 2003 [1986]. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “History and the Birangona.” Himal South Asian, November 9, 2015, http://m.himalmag.com/history-and-the-birangona-bangladesh. —. “Gendered Embodiments: Mapping the Body-politic of the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh.” Feminist Review 88 (2008): 36–53. —. “‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 2 (2006): 433–50. Murthy, Laxmi. “The Birangana and the Birth of Bangladesh.” Himal South Asian, March 20, 2012, https://himalmag.com/the-birangana-and-the-birth-ofbangladesh/?currentPage=all.

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Sim, Lorraine. “Modernist Women’s Memoir, War and Recovering the Ordinary: H. D.’s The Gift.” Women’s Studies 38, no. 1 (2009): 63–83. —. “‘[A] Background to our Daily Existence”: War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge’s A Pacifist’s War.” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 4 (2008): 1–17. Werbner, Pnina. “Political Motherhood and the Feminisation of Citizenship: Women's Activism and the Transformation of the Public Sphere.” In Women, Citizenship and Difference, edited by Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner, 221–45. London: Zed Books, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1988.

SINGLE MOTHERHOOD: A DECENTRALIZED STATUS IN SEARCH OF A CENTRE ANURADHA KUNDA

íåĘþđ ĂąĂēþđĉ ĺćĘĠĉđ íĉđ åĘDZ ïĉĘĊå ëĒĊöđĘąÿ ëĉ ćþĂ, ĆñąđĂ Ăđ ï˙Ă, äăĒĂ äăĒĂ ćđ ĎĘĠ ąčĘþ ăđĉĘą1 ăđàôùđ čđǘē Ƶćđý ÿđïĘą, Ĉđĉđ ąĊĘą ĺĈ, Ďđ ëĉ ĺăĘùå ĺąĘĞĘõ, ëĉ ĺăù ĺÿĘïå ĺĎđĘĠĘô ëå ąđǮđùđ1 äćĉđ ĺĀĘðĒõ1 Ēïˍ ĺþđćđĉ ĺõĘĊĉđ? ùĔ ĊĔ, Ēï ąĔĊ,Ĕ ĈĒĀ äö ąđąđ ĎĠ, þđĉ čđǘē ƵćđĂ ĺïđÿđĠ ? ąđǮđùđ ƵïĖ þăĘǘ ùĔ ĊĔĒĉ, ĺčùđĉ čđǘē ĺï ĺĀĘą ? þđĉ ĺąĝDž õđĞđ ? [Look at the daughters of Nabaneeta, If they wish, like Elizabeth, God forbids, they can become mothers at any time. The society will bear witness. Yes, we have seen that the child has been borne by her, given birth by her. But if Tulu or Bulu, our sons become fathers now? Where is the proof? Who will bear the witness, that Tulu has fathered the child? Except his wife?]1

Nabaneeta Dev Sen, in her story ‘Elizabethan System,’ introduces Elizabeth who has become a mother, or more specifically has chosen to become a single mother by taking sperm from a sperm bank. In her characteristic way, Dev Sen refers to this incident from a comic but practical point of view: “Girls do not have to undergo the hazard of keeping a husband to have babies anymore.” Despite the comic tone, the story hints at the concept of single motherhood, elaborating its advantages until the end when she prefers to return to the system of traditional marriage and motherhood. The reference to ‘single motherhood’ leaves its mark, with the growing emergence of independent, liberated women, asking for ‘motherhood’ not only as a social condition but also as the biological right of the woman. The biological right is associated with emotional and social myths that groom and govern the men and women in any society. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the fulfilment of a woman's psychological destiny in maternity as her natural ‘calling,’ saying that the

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woman’s whole organic structure is adapted for the preparation of the species.2 But she also talked about the reproductive function, not merely as a biological chance, as it had come under the voluntary control of man. de Beauvoir talks about contraception, abortion, and motherhood, and the considerations for and against them, in the chapter entitled “The Mother” in The Second Sex: “the child is no longer priceless treasure, to give birth is no longer a sacred function,”3 and in spite of this a woman has to pay for the actions of a man in ‘pain and blood.’ She writes that contraception and legal abortion would permit a woman to undertake her maternities in freedom. As things are, women’s fecundity is decided part voluntarily, and part by chance. Since artificial insemination has not yet come into common use, it may happen that a woman desires maternity without getting her wish – because she lacks contact with men, or because her husband is sterile, or because she is herself unable to conceive. On the other hand, “a woman often finds herself compelled socially and psychologically to reproduce against her conscious will.”4 Rereading and referring to de Beauvoir remains significant, as her work contains prophetic visions and insight. She connects between the experience of pregnancy and motherhood with the woman’s “true attitude” and asserts how the “avowed decisions and sentiments” of a woman do not correspond with her deeper desires. Now “the deeper desires” of a woman are something alien in a man's world, weird and absurd. Who else but a woman can feel these “deeper details”? Maternity is usually forced upon a woman, as a result of which she may be happy or unhappy. In 1949 Beauvoir was writing about a mother who “may be” overwhelmed by the marital burdens suddenly forced upon her and overtly in despair, and yet find in her baby the realization of her secret dreams. On the other hand, a young married woman who welcomes her pregnancy with joy and pride may inwardly fear and dislike it under the influence of obsessions fantasies, and memories of infancy that she dislikes recognizing openly.5 These assumptions, psychologically convincing and physiologically true analyses of motherhood, come not from the patriarchal but an objective point of view. Beauvoir elaborates several phases of a woman's attitude towards maternity. To the little girl it is a miracle and a game, the doll representing a future baby to possess and domineer over: “to the adolescent girl maternity seems a threat to the integrity of her precious person, sometimes savagely repudiated.”6

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The patriarchy, from its dominating aspect, has always tried to make pregnancy and motherhood synonymous with womanhood. The objective, critical, and emotional analysis of de Beauvoir denies patriarchal control over pregnancy and motherhood, giving the concept of the single mother. We can relate this to what Adrienne Rich said in Of Woman Born: female biology … has far more radical implications than we have yet come to appreciate, patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource more than a destiny. In order to live a fully human life, we require not only control of our bodies. We must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.7

The act of accepting motherhood as a resonance and not as destiny changes the patriarchal control, thought, and domination, and gives a new dimension to it. A mature independent woman may want to have a child belonging wholly to herself. I have known one whose eyes lit up at the sight of a fine male, not with sexual desire but because she judged him a good begetter. Such are materially minded amazons who are enthusiastic about the miraculous possibilities of artificial insemination. If a woman of this kind is married to the father of her child, she denies him any rights in their offspring, and endeavours to develop an exclusive association between herself and her offspring (like Paul’s mother in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers). But in most cases, the woman needs masculine support in accepting her new responsibilities. Motherhood, traditionally and mythically, has been accepted as man’s authority over woman. This is globally true, and continues to be so. I would like to refer to an anecdote on motherhood by the eminent Bengali writer Yashodhara Roy Chaudhury, where she rejects the traditional glorification of motherhood, the sacrificial motherhood, and plainly shows the trauma of the young, married woman, undergoing the trauma of childbirth and post-childbirth issues. Yashodhara Roy Chaudhury says: “Yes motherhood has its pleasures. I am not denying the pleasures. A child gives infinite pleasure, but there are more questions, more words.” She tells of the pain of childbirth, from ultrasonography to shaving the pubic hair, where a woman is left alone

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with no understanding from the in-laws. They, however, give her a new status as a mother of a child to be born into their family that finally turns into a burden as she becomes solely responsible for the childcare. The cruelty of the society is revealed in the pleasure they derive because she knows nothing about new-born babies. After her struggle with her child and career and vigilance from her in-laws, she finally gets her transfer. The older women who fasten their patriarchal belts come up with a solution that she must leave her child as the child carries the father’s surname and belongs to the family. They gossip that, as she is an officer, she has to attend office on Saturdays, has to run to Delhi, will have tours, will take official training in America, leaving her two-years-old baby (such a careerist!) She must be a bad mother. 8 The above story shows a motherhood in distress, as a victim of the patriarchy. It is schemed, planned, and programmed by the desires of the patriarchy. The mother who conceives and bears all the pre and postpregnancy trauma and finally gives birth to the baby has to struggle to raise the child in her own way because of the various non -cooperating agents of the patriarchy. In the excerpt above, the traditional glorification has been turned down as a myth and a new concept of motherhood, frank, independent, and original, has been introduced. de Beauvoir did not speak about ‘single motherhood’ straightforwardly, but her work contains the seeds: “pregnancy is above all a drama that is acted out within the woman herself. She feeds it as at once an enrichment and injury.”9 Yes, it is so, and it has been accepted, after years of struggle, that motherhood is not compulsion – it is choice and is never synonymous with womanhood, and that too cannot be formulated. If motherhood becomes choice it will outdate and negate the patriarchal concept of the woman as a womb. Then a woman will be free from being a womb and can assert her biological, social, and emotional rights and privileges of being a woman. Traditionally, motherhood was and is a product of marriage, an offshoot of copulation and a means to promote the family lineage. Freed from these conditions, ‘single motherhood’ is an autonomous state. Single motherhood can be categorized under the following headings: (1) Widowed single mother (2) Divorced single mother

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(3) Unmarried single mother by choice The first category was a common one in pre and post-independence India. A vast age difference between husbands and wives left women as widows with her children dependent on the joint family system or the maternal uncle’s family. The widow, an eternal parasite, remained a subject of pity, and her motherhood could be pitied too. There are exceptional cases where widows carried out their duties and liabilities of motherhood strongly. But that was and is possible when the mother is employed and has a strong personality, economic independence, and favourable social conditions. The divorced single mother is a ‘stigma’ to the family, and ‘divorce’ itself is highly ‘derogatory’ in social sectors. The third category of women, who are ‘single’ and ‘mothers’ by choice, holds my interest in this paper. The choice of motherhood can be fulfilled through a relationship with a man, by adoption, and by surrogacy. Let us think about motherhood in a single state as a choice in literature. I would like to take up the viewpoint of Margaret Atwood, whose extensive analytical works on oppression, ecofeminism, and motherhood have opened a new vista in literature. In Surfacing, the nameless protagonist, cheated and humiliated, discovers her feminine self by outstanding power politics and the traditional practice of male superiority. She rejects male domination by rejecting civilization and becomes a creative non-victim by opting to go back to nature and embracing single motherhood. She defines her world by her own feelings and judgments, and makes her own feminine principles, because the new woman is struggling with her imperfections to establish her identity. The novel starts with an abortion and ends with childbirth. Both the events are connected with female emotion and the female biological world. The nameless narrator found her art teacher unique, worshipped him, keeping scraps of his handwriting like relics, and like any other woman took marriage as her destiny, as the patriarchy has taught women to think over the years. The married art teacher seduced her. She took it as love. He insisted she terminate her pregnancy because he did not want to disrupt his life. Betrayed by the man, she suffered. Atwood reveals a penetrating awareness of the traumatic experiences of abortion in the life of a woman. It is a “planted death” in her. The guilt complex transforms to a firm decision to conceive a baby, to prove that the process of childbirth is a woman’s privilege. She has every right to it. The abortion is like a section of her own life, sliced off from her like a Siamese twin, her own flesh cancelled. The abortion is done

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according to the wishes of the ‘man.’ The same man destroys her creativity as an artist by misguiding her. She becomes a paralysed artist as her growth is hindered by male chauvinism. She makes a journey into the past, into her origins, and tries to explore her identity as a woman: If you are not too sure where you are or if you are sure but youdo not like it, there is a tendency both in psychotherapy and in literature, to retrace your history to see how you got there,” says Atwood.10

The narrator realizes that motherhood would lead her to self-realization, but she does not need to get married for that. She is no longer in a victim position, but has become a creative non-victim. Motherhood makes her feel confident about her feminine power, both biological and social. The abortion is thus expiated. Single motherhood becomes a free state – free from the patriarchal psychological and social traps. For her, getting married would be a kind of death once betrayed by a selfish married man who metaphorically stands for patriarchy and colonialism. Atwood’s protagonist breaks the stereotype: This time I will do it myself … the baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood retiring to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a God. 11

The abortion, which was an offshoot of patriarchal rationality, is compensated by her pregnancy, by which the mother-child bonding indicates a new feminist world that challenges the patriarchal norms. Single motherhood is liberating for the narrator. She employs a different discourse as she becomes a single mother by choice; she rejects the values of maledominated civilization. In Atwood’s The Edible Women, Ainsley is against marriage, but not against motherhood. She thinks motherhood is the way to satisfy one’s deepest femininity. She simply wants a strong, handsome, intelligent, biological father for her child. Ainsley, a feminist, a tester of defective electric toothbrushes in a company, decides to be an unwed mother. Her decision is the rejection of marriage as an exploitative relationship. In the novel, Clara, a mother of three, is an unhappy victim of biology. Atwood finds ‘motherhood’ to be a means to become a fully liberated individual. The Handmaid’s Tale shows how single motherhood may be exploited in a regressive world. The handmaids with ‘viable ovaries’ become the child bearers to the commanders with infertile wives. The single motherhood of the handmaids is pathetically abused. Her body is a

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reproductive vassal. Malashri Lal sees The Handmaid’s Tale “as a warning against essential biologism which for women must create the most terrible disjunction between body and spirit … against the tendency to see all human endeavours as economic production, thereby causing a corresponding neglect of Earth based spirituality.”12 Childbirth, being essentially a women’s experience, can be happily celebrated. The new woman who can be a single mother by choice is almost an activist, but what about an average woman in a male-dominated society, what about the powerless, exploitable, consumable woman? I would like to refer to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Ammu is a single mother with her twins, Estha and Rahel. Ammu was not allowed to pursue higher education after finishing her school as “Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expose for a girl.”13 Ammu becomes the victim of her husband’s drunken violence as she refuses to ‘look after’ Mr Hollick, her husband’s employer. This also results in post-drunken badgering. With two young children, Ammu returns to her parents’ home in Ayemenen. Pappachi does not believe her story because he believes that an Englishman, any Englishman, would not covet another man’s wife: Ammu loved her children (of course) but their wide eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who did not really love them, exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them – just an education, a protection.14

Roy’s sensitive narrative continues to tell the tale of a helpless single mother, trying to maintain her dignity and the status of her children in her parental home where she is insulted by their maid Kochu Maria, and held responsible for everything the children do: She felt somehow humiliated by this public revolt in her area of jurisdiction. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo British Behaviour competition? 15

Roy portrays Ammu and her distress with utmost care: A single mother, like a single woman, is always unsafe. From this unsafe zone, a single mother Ammu does not talk positive to the children. “It just goes to show,” Ammu said, “that you can’t trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, best friend. Nobody.”16

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A single mother is nobody’s liability. Her social status remains questionable and her love for her children suffers from insecurity, mood fluctuations, and fear. Ammu has a dream to secure a job and rent a little room for the three of them to stay in together. Any single mother would dream of this. Ammu cannot fulfil hers. She commits suicide, and at her cremation Rahel misses: her hair, her skin, her smile, her voice reading Kipling to her children before putting them to bed, her goodnight kiss, her way of holding their faces steady with one hand – she was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them double.17

In this single concentrated line Roy has crystallized the essence of being a single mother. She has the double duty to perform, physically, emotionally, economically, and socially. She has to do the duties of a father as well, failing which she is marked as incompetent. The duties of a mother are taken for granted. Social blaming is active in case of any deviation. She has to live with a sense of guilt because of a ‘broken marriage,’ which has resulted in the ‘bad bringing up’ of the children; she is rebuked for not having adjusted to her husband, for bringing ‘ill fate’ to the ‘poor, fatherless babies’ who are cornered as social outcastes. In most cases, motherhood is so inevitably and intimately connected with marriage that single motherhood remains absolutely problematic, and may be deemed a ‘curse.’ Ammu, as a divorcee, has no right to her husband’s properly, or to her father’s property. The Paradise Pickles company belongs to Chacko. She is jobless. Her dignity is not enough to save her children from the cruel demands of a patriarchal society. As a single mother, Margaret Kochamma has a privileged position. Being European, having a European mindset and being economically independent, she has more credibility and confidence as a single mother than Ammu. She comes to India after the demise of her husband to spend some quality time with her ex-husband Chacko, who has since become a friend to her. Margaret Atwood’s novel is a theoretical attempt in the Canadian context, while Roy’s novel is a realistic exposition in the Indian context. Atwood’s protagonist can choose to be a fighter and assert her rights to be a single mother. Roy’s protagonist cannot – she has to commit suicide at the age of thirty-one. She had been an individual, bold enough to fall in love with Velutha, whom the society knew as an ‘untouchable.’ But to be a single mother, jobless, without property, and dependent on her brother, falling in love with a Dalit and having an independent mind represent a difficult

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combination in Indian society. She hangs herself. The helplessness of a single mother is narrated in its minutiae by Roy. From fiction to reality, the issue of single motherhood remains either a matter of choice or a matter of forced decision, an imposition. One is a single mother because of husband’s demise, the other because of divorce; these are the two most common cases of single motherhood. Both the cases involve bitter and troubled sequences making a livelihood difficult, even if the woman has a job. The space in which to fight for a respectable existence is hardly found by a single mother. Actually, ‘respect’ is a word which is not meant for single women in society. All respectability depends on her marital status. Even the Indian goddesses are not single mothers. “Being the children of a single mom,” says Navya, who studied law in Hyderabad and works in Deloitte Consultants: we feel independent, confident and a feeling that we don’t need a man to come and lift us up if something goes wrong in life, hurting when mom has no one to share her happiness, unlike her other female counterparts, a courage to answer any damn person throwing a random question at us, ripping people off when they try to point at mom or us, being an extremely protective child for the family, and a person who can read anything between the lines that comes from the so called well-wisher.18

But then, they seem scared to fall in love with random people, as they learned from their past. They miss the essence of a complete family, a carefree childhood. They understand the world and the people where every male tries to behave as a teacher and rule on what to do and what not to do. Navya says that they never depended on relatives, who never offered help. They had huge identity crises, where everyone could walk up to them and advise or sometimes taunt them. But they had the freedom to express themselves to their mother; the relatives never understood and they never cared. As they grew up, they understood the world, the people, and themselves. In reality, widows, divorced, or spinsters are burdens on their families. Every legal document requires the details of the father. As the elder girl is married now and has a beautiful extended family, she has a peaceful present. Navya says:

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Single Motherhood: A Decentralized Status in Search of a Centre Dad is an alcoholic and mom had to go through domestic violence in her 15 years of married life, when she has to choose between life and death, she choose life with us! I’m a proud daughter of a SINGLE INDIAN.19

Anita Mishra, a thirty-one-year-old working woman, faced trouble everywhere. “Where’s the father/husband?” is an extremely common question, from school admission to places like supermarkets. On knowing the truth, government officials change their mannerisms. From behenji/bhabiji, it is now Anitaji. And their behaviour exhibits mannerisms likened to a predator surveying its prey. I have no man in my life, true, but that does not mean that I have no support or that I’m easy prey.

“There are many single mothers who are happily bringing up their children and excelling in doing so,” she says. 20 People pity a single mother and her children. The older generation, and even the woman’s family, blames her, calling her a woman of no morals and threatening to take the children away, saying she is incapable of handling them because of her single status. NGOS and upcoming organizations for single mothers do not help men to cope with problems, but then it is proved that it is the status of single motherhood that needs help. Being single is a stigma in lower class, the middle class, and the upper middle class. Single motherhood on the one hand has challenges and cultural fantasies, and on the other glorifies ‘motherhood.’ Single mothers in India are not compelled to disclose the father’s identity. The Supreme Court has ruled that an unwed mother can be the sole legal guardian of her child and refuse to divulge the identity of the child’s father. But how many can do this in reality? Society is harsher and stronger than the Supreme Court. Only the women who are independent and financially very well settled have dared to break tradition and opted to become single mothers. Years ago, actress Neena Gupta became a single mother and created history by mothering Mombasa. At present, a great number of women are undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and asking for independent motherhood. The documentary filmmaker Anindita Sarbadhikary undertook IVF and bore a son, Aruh. Fortunately, she found a very warm and congenial welcome for him. It is her celebrity status that helps her overcome the problems usually faced by average women. Anindita can proudly assert her ‘single’ motherhood status:

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We live only once and I wanted to make the most of my life. I wanted to be a mother, but there was no man in my life. I knew I could meet someone and get married at 50. But motherhood would be out of question by then. So I decided to juggle the chronology a bit and be a mother first. The best part was that the country’s law allowed me to do so.21

Anindita says that her forty-five years in Europe brought her into contact with lot of single mothers, sowing the seed of an idea to become one herself. She thought about conceiving when she was thirty-five, and it took her two-and-a-half years to get there. She was scared of anonymous donors and her only priority was a high IQ. How many women in India can achieve this? Only people with high economic stability and family support can accept the concept of IVF in the case of a single unwed woman. Single parenting after widowhood or after divorce is very different from single parenting without marriage. Widowhood, until now, in spite of all harassments and troubles, has earned a kind of respectability in society, as being somebody’s ‘widow’ is a respectable social status and the children do not have to go through embarrassing social enquiries. Being single and divorced is still a questionable and debatable status for a woman, and is usually seen as immoral, irresponsible, or daring. Single parenting while being unwed is still unthinkable. When Sushmita Sen decided to adopt her girls, she had the Miss Universe crown on her head, a very sound film career, and a huge celebrity status, standing on which she could announce that she did not need a man in her life. Sen became Miss World at the age of eighteen, and from the age of twenty-two tried to become a mother through the process of adoption. It was difficult. She had to go to court for her first daughter at the age of twenty-four. It took her a while to get the custody of her baby. Adopting the second child was a bigger court battle than the first. The Indian rules of adoption say that one cannot adopt a daughter after a daughter. But Sushmita was interested in adopting daughters only, and fought for ten long years. She encourages her daughters firmly, inculcates values in them like believing in oneself, believing that age is just a number, and to be courageous enough to pursue their dreams. The ‘star’ status is not an ‘additional’ advantage, as the most vital condition for being a single mother is being ‘bold’ enough to flout independence to be a ‘mother’ and maintain a separate love life.

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Sushmita chose to take over the responsibilities of motherhood, along with her acting career. Her words are prophetic: “Love your child unconditionally, as a Mother, it should never matter to you if your child comes out of your womb or your heart.”22 She manages her time to spend moments with her daughters, and does not ignore their special moments and school functions. Behind all those ‘bold and beautiful’ acts the money factor and the stardom jointly hold up a huge umbrella to protect her kids from social abuse. It was stardom and money that helped the “Bengali Greta Garbo” Suchitra Sen bring up her daughter Moon Moon Sen singlehandedly. She bore it well, managing the career of a superstar and doing everything possible to be an overprotective mother to make her daughter stay away from the film industry. If, for Sushmita Sen, it is simply a matter of breaking norms from which she never shied away, for Mrs. Sen it was a challenge, a separation, a heart-breaking situation about which she always refused to talk. The actress, who lived the life of ‘a maid within the walls,’ tried her best to give the best possible education and extra help for her darling daughter, but finally had to succumb to the demands of her ward, to the decision of Moon Moon to marry Bharat Dev Barman and join the film industry. We can’t help thinking that had it been joint parenting, the result might not have been the same. Aparna Sen, the intellectual diva of the Bengali film industry, had been a single parent to her younger daughter Kankana for a long time. As Aparna is endowed with high intellectual ideas and a straightforward attitude, she made the point clear that, for children, it is so much better to stay with a happy parent rather than unhappy parents. Being a very strong, independent mother, Aparna took her daughter to film festivals and film sets. Kankana was six when her parents separated, but she was mature enough to appreciate the single parenting of her gorgeous and busy mother. Celebrity women can manage to bring up children singlehandedly, but at the end of the day, when their kids grow up, they might ask for a ‘normal’ family, including a marriage and a husband, and they might want to have kids from secured marriages. The actor Ravina Tandon is another Bollywood single mother who adopted two girls before marriage. She is a proud single mom of eleven and eight-year-old kids. After her failed marriage to Sanjay Kapoor, Karishma Kapoor is now a single mother to her kids. So is Amrita Singh to Sara and Ibrahim and Puja

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Bedi to her son and daughter Alia and Omar. Sarika remains a single mother to her daughter. Kankana, after her divorce from Ranvir, moved into single parenting of her son Haroon. Neelima Azim, another celebrity single mother, says that she felt secure only when her son Shahid grew up and took care of the entire family. Evidently, hers was not a case of willing single parenting, and there comes the question of how many cases of single parenting are done in absolute happiness and willingness. In the case of film stars and models, the high-profile status is a safeguard for both the child and the mother as they are not exposed to ‘ordinary’ social abuse and can spend money to get the best for their children. Single motherhood does not become an obstacle in pursuing a career or leading an eventful life. Money buys a lot of things for the kids, including expensive education, trips abroad, and a career. In spite of all the facilities, single motherhood remains a difficult status for stars. Neena Gupta’s daughter says firmly that she believes in marriage. Neena, now sixty, was much ahead of her times when she decided to be a single mother. It was a choice, but she knows it is very difficult to bring up children alone. The child, she feels, suffers because of the whims of the mother. She admits that she did it impulsively. Her father objected to her pregnancy at first but eventually stood by her decision. Now she is alive for Masaba. She was in a relationship with Vivian Richards and then realized she had not lived a normal woman’s life. Neena says that Masaba was a good child, and she told her the truth about her father. “I told her how her father is not a family man and how he was like this and this. In the beginning, she would feel bad that Vivian was not in touch with her till the age of about 20.”23

Regarding marriage and motherhood, Neena experienced disasters and now has a clear view: I had this very pseudo-intellectual thing that I am so committed, the man is so committed. “Then why shadi?” But after jilted relationships, she realized the “importance of marriage.” When Masaba was in class VII someone called her a bastard. She did not know what it meant. Someone said that it meant that you don’t have a father. She said “well, I have a father; it is just that he is not around.

To her, Vivian is an icon, a celebrated cricketer, Masaba accepts Caribbean culture and Vivian’s decision of not marrying Neena. But then she says:

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Single Motherhood: A Decentralized Status in Search of a Centre I am strangely orthodox, for instance, I would do my Diwali Puja that mom wouldn’t care about. I believe in the institution of marriage and having kids at a certain age and do believe in not living in.

Probably, a fatherless existence does not satisfy the demands of a kid, however powerful and confident the mother is. When director Mahesh Bhatt speaks of his childhood, of his mother’s single parenting and the stigma of not having a father, it shows his restlessness and insecurity, which are also reflected in his films. His films portray single parenting and the traumas related to it, and there is hardly any film in which he manages to evade this obsession, if it may be called so. Social harassments are embarrassing for kids, and they continue to suffer from insecurity, anxiety, and anger. The single mother is doubly pressured as she is too busy to perform the role of both a father and a mother to cope with social enquiries and disturbances. When the kids, raised by single mothers, grow up they ask for ‘regular families,’ with a man as the father of the children. The decisions of the generation next of the single mothers to marry and then have children is a dampener to the concept of single motherhood by choice. The painter Eleena Banik had her daughter Amaravati by assisted reproduction technology (ART), a concept gaining popularity in the West, with help from a doctor in Mumbai. Eleena says that she believes that women should be able to choose how they want to become a mother. She wrote an article for a Kolkata-based newspaper that if a woman wants she could choose to bear a child without getting married after going through artificial insemination. She wanted to have a child but did not want to get married because she could not find the right person. Eleena has taken a bold, progressive step but it has to be admitted that an influential social status and strong family support helped her to bring up the baby in her very own way. The most important factor that worked for Eleena was of course her affluence. Eleena speaks of convincing her mother: I told her I had a reasonably good bank balance. I also told her that it was my dream to have a child of my own. Finally, seeing how desperate I was to experience motherhood, feel the baby’s movement in my stomach, hold the baby after birth … she realised I could handle pregnancy and raising a child.

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Even then the doctor did not agree with her decision. She once disguised herself as a married woman, and would wear red and white bangles as symbols of a married Bengali woman. Though the law does not prohibit single procedures, the Indian Council of Medical Research states that no ART clinic should refuse to offer its service to single women, and many doctors refuse to treat single women. Intrauterine insemination (IUI) is a relatively uncomplicated process. The fast moving sperm are separated from more sluggish or non-moving sperm in a laboratory procedure called washing, and are then placed into the womb around the time of ovulation. The whole procedure takes a few minutes. It is less expensive and painful than IVF. In IVF, the egg is fertilized by the donor sperm outside the body in a test tube, and then the fertilized egg, called the zygote, is implanted inside the uterus. It is evident that in India unwed single mothers come from highly privileged sections of society. They are socially and economically independent enough to blow away the dictates of society. Doctors usually do not support an unwed single women’s decision to carry a child. Most of them ask for IVF because of some personal disaster, as a way of self-consolation, or it may be that they feel that the biological clock is ticking and to have a baby of her own is the ideal way to get rid of all isolation, irritation, boredom, and insecurity. The society views that very few single mothers ask for a baby just for the sake of enjoying her biological and emotional rights. Single widowed mothers enjoy social acceptability, though the level of humiliation and exploitation remains same like that of others. Only a high income level and strong social status can save the situation. The entire status of single motherhood leaves us face to face with a very basic question – is ‘motherhood’ the only state or the ultimate state to fulfil a woman’s identity? The glorified myth of motherhood is a patriarchal structure that has been over-hyped through the ages. Can it be said that by opting to become single mothers, women are depriving the ideas of a father’s love, care, and responsibility, freeing men of parental duties? An adopted child may be a social as well as emotional concern, but a biological child is a protest against marriage. Not finding the right man is a justified cause for not getting married, but having a biological child

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through medical help is a social revolution, the outcome of which is futile since the next generation is not ready to accept ‘single motherhood.’ They have cleared the hurdles of existence. Single motherhood, by all means, remains a choice, through not finding any other alternative. The future may be otherwise when the ‘generation next’ are not a patriarchal phenomenon and the children of single mothers will opt for single parenting. At present, no linear progress can be seen and it is still a debatable issue, vacillating between rejection and acceptance.

Notes 1. Nabaneeta DevSen, The Elizabethan System. “Sita Theke Suru” Nirbachito Rachona Sankalon (Kolkata: Ghosh and Mitra, 1997). 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: H. M. Picador, 1949), 501. 3. Ibid., 509. 4. Ibid., 540. 5. Ibid., 546. 6. Ibid., 551. 7. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 62. 8. Roy Choudhury, Yashodhara. Stories at Wordpress (Yashodhara, 1965). 9. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 495. 10. Margaret Atwood, Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 112. 11. Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (London: Virago, 1969), 156. 12. M. Lal, “Inheriting Nature: Ecofeminism in Canadian Literature,” in Postmodernism & Feminism in the Canadian Context, edited by Khurshed Khan Shrin (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1995), 318. 13. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New Delhi: India Ink, 1997), 38. 14. Ibid., 43. 15. Ibid., 145. 16. Ibid., 83. 17. Ibid., 163. 18. Quora, “What is it like to be a single mom’s child in India?” https://www.Quora.com-11march. 19. Ibid. 20. “An Interview With A Single Mother: How She Survives In The Indian Society,” in Youth ki Awaz, Aishvarya S. Raghavn, 03 (2012) 21. Mukherjee Amrita, “India’s Single IVF Moms. Mukherjee Amrita” (Friday, February 10, 2015). 22. Sen Sushmita, “Mothers – Healers From The God,” momspresso.com. 23. Neena Gupta, “I Want to Tell All Women That if You Want to Live in India and in Society, you Have to Marry,” Times of India (May 9, 2015). 24. Eleena Banik, “India’s Single IVF moms,” Times of India (February10, 2015).

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Tutun Mukherjee retired as professor of comparative literature, University of Hyderabad, India, after thirty-three years of service. She was also joint professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies and the Department of Theatre Arts. Her specialization is literary criticism and theory and her research interests include translation, women’s writing, theatre, and film studies. She has written extensively on these subjects. Her most recent publications include “How Fares the Well? A Study of the Interstices of the Welfare State: Bharati Sarabhai’s The Well of the People” (1943), “Mahasweta Devi’s Jal/Water” (1976), “Vinodini’s Daaham/ Thirst” (2005) and “Sites of Desire: Chandrapore, Mayapore, Jummapur: Race, Sex and Law in Colonial India.” Dr Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar, and author based in Kolkata. She has won two national awards for best writing on cinema – best film critic in 1991 and best book on cinema in 2002. She won the Bengal Film Journalists Association’s best critic award in 1998, the Bharat Nirman Award for excellence in journalism in 2004, a research fellowship from the National Film Archive of India in 2005–6 and a senior research fellowship from the PSBT Delhi in 2006–7. She has authored twenty-two books on cinema and gender and has been a member of juries for several film festivals in India and abroad. She holds a master’s degree in economics and education, a PhD in history (Indian cinema) and a senior research post-doctoral fellowship from the ICSSR. In 2009–10 she won a special award for consistent writing on women’s issues at the UNFPA – Laadli Media Awards (Eastern region), was bestowed with the Kalyan Kumar Mitra Award for excellence in film scholarship and contribution as a film critic in 2010, and the Lifetime Achievement SAMMAN by the Rotary Club of Calcutta-Metro City in July 2012. Daya Dissanayake is an award-winning bilingual Sri Lankan novelist, poet, and blogger. His work spans nine novels in English, six novels in Sinhala, and a collection of poems and numerous articles in newspapers, journals, and magazines. He is the author of the first e-novel in Asia, The Saadhu Testament (1998), and the first e-novel in Sinhala, Vessan Novu Wedun (2003). He is the only Sri Lankan writer to receive the Sri Lankan

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Contributors

State Literary Award for the best English novel three times, and was awarded the SAARC Literary Award in 2013. Dr Zinia Mitra teaches English at the University of North Bengal. Her travelogues and articles have been published in The Statesman. Her reviews, articles, and translations have been published in books and journals. Her books include: Indian Poetry in English; Critical Essays, Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra; Imagery and Experiential Identity and Twentieth Century British Literature; and Reconstructing Literary Sensibility. Her online articles include “A Science Fiction in a Gothic Scaffold: a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (Rupkatha Journal), “Master of Science and Non-Sense” (Parabaas), “Why does the Negro speak of Rivers” (Teesta Review), “Contemporary Indian Theatre: Theatricality and Artistic Crossovers” (Asiatic IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature). She has completed a research project on Motherhood under CWS, University of North Bengal, India, and is engaged in a project on Feminism. Dr Mosarrap Hossain Khan is Assistant Professor of English at Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India. He completed his doctorate at the Department of English, New York University, USA. His areas of research include South Asian Literature and Culture, Post-colonial Theory, Religion and Secularism, and Theories of Everyday Life. He is a founding-editor at Café Dissensus. Dr Anuradha Kunda teaches at Malda College. She is the coordinator of postgraduate studies. Her PhD Thesis was on T. S. Eliot. She is a Bengali short story writer and a poet. Her writings include “Bishoy Bangla Nari” (Bengali Essays on Feminism), “Manobaas” (Bengali Anthology), “Bhalobasha Beche Thake” (Bengali Anthology), and “Bnashir Naam Tanai” (Short Stories for Children). She is the founding director of Phoenix, the experimental theatre group, and member of the Paschimbanga Natya Akademy. She was awarded the Diba Ratrir Kabya Purashkar for her work on Orhan Pamuk.

INDEX abortion 22, 87, 98, 101, 102 adoption 8, 9, 101, 107 Ami Birangona Bolchhi 85, 87 Anam, Tahmima 8, 85, 90, 92, 94 archetype 2, 5, 8, 13, 24, 27 Atwood, Margaret 9, 19, 24, 101, 104, 112 Avigyana Sakuntalam 4 Bagchi, Jasodhara 5, 6 barren 72 Bengal 5, 8, 16, 113 Bio(logical)-determinism 2, 4, 5, 8, 14, 22, 33, 35, 39, 49, 51, 59, 63, 65-68, 71, 77-80, 97-98, 101-102, 111 birangana/birangona 8, 85-88, 94 body 7, 9, 15, 20, 49, 71, 72, 102, 103, 111 boy(s) 9, 25, 34, 35, 64, 66, 69, 79, 88, 91 Breast Stories 25 breast(s) 20, 29, 30, 77 breastfeed(ing) 1, 20, 22, 78 Buddha 8, 43-54 Buddhist 43-56 Butler, Judith 24, 25, 62, 81 Capitalist/m 7, 20, 69, 74, 76 Chattopadhay, Sarat Chandra 4 childbirth 2, 3, 22, 59, 99, 101 childcare 2, 67, 72, 79, 80, 81, 100 children 2-4, 7, 9, 16, 17, 19-23, 38, 39, 45, 46, 48, 51-53, 59 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71-75, 77-82, 86, 87, 90, 91-93 101, 103, -111, 114. Chodorow, Nancy 59, 67, 79, 80 Christian 51 custody 90, 93, 107 customs 2, 67, 69, 70 de Beauvoir, Simon 8, 60, 81, 98, 112

Dev Sen, Nabaneeta 97 Devi 27, 29, Devi, Mahasweta 3, 15, 25, 33, 37, 113 Devi, Maitreyee 36 Devi, Maya 49, 50, 51 Dhamma 43, 44, 46-47, 52-54 Dieckmann, Katherine 3 Dinnerstein, Dorothy 59, 79 divorce(d) 21-22, 60, 100-101, 104105, 107, 109 Electra complex 8, 77 Engels, Friedrich 59, 72-76, 79, 8283 epic 5, 52 Erma Bombeck 4, 14, 25 family 2, 6, 9, 15-23, 32, 35, 37-39, 47, 51, 59, 60-61, 63, 67, 69, 70, 72, -76, 82, 87, 90-91, 100-101, 105-110 fathers/father(ed)1-2, 15, 18, 19, 44, 46, 48-49, 52, 63, 69, 73, 77, 79-80, 85-86, 97, 99, 102-106, 109, -111 female 1, 6, 8, 24, 27, 31, 40, 44-45, 47, 51-52, 54, 59, 62-64, 66, 6873, 75, 78-79, 81, 93, 99, 101, 105 feminism 25, 60, 62, 68, 74, 76, 83, 112 feminist (s)3, 4, 6, 19, 22, 59, 61-63, 68, 74-75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 94, 99, 102 fertility 3, 22, 31, 50 Firestone Shulamith 61, 76, 78, 81, 83 folklore 7, 40 Freud Sigmund 8, 76 Fridan, Betty 22, 25, 60, 81 Gandhi, Mahatma 5, 9

116 girl(s) 9, 19, 38-39, 41, 64, 69, 79, 92, 98, 105, 108 Goddess 2, 13, 14, 27 -31, 33-35, 40, 41, 50, 52-53, 56, 105 Hartsock, Nancy 75, 83 Hindu 6, 28-30, 32, 35, 40-41, 52, 60 Horney, Karen 77 human (ity) 1, 8, 9, 14, 28, 32, 35, 37, 43, 44, 46, 53, 54, 61-64, 66-73, 75, 79, 81-82, 99, 103 Imam, Jahanara 8, 85, 87-88, 92, 94 Indian 4, 5, 6-7, 14, 21, 27-30, 32, 34, 36-37, 40-41, 46, 59, 60, 104-107, 111-114 infertility 7 Iswarchandra Vidyasagar 4 IVF 3, 106-107, 111-112 joint family 101, 108 Kiri Amma 52-53 Lacanian 62, 80 Lauri Umanst 4 Lerner Gerda 74 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 8, 70-71, 74 Mahabharata 4 Maitreyi Krishnaraj 6 Manu 72 marriage 6, 19, 2122, 30, 31, 36, 38, 40-41, 65, 69, 72, 75, 80, 97, 101-102, 104, 108-110 Marxism 8, 63, 72-76 Mayo, Katherine 4-6 menstrual cycle 7 Millet Kate 78 monogamy 68, 72 -74 mother(s) 1-9, 13, 25, 29-30, 32-41, 63-64, 72-73, 75, 79-81, 83, 85, 87-90, 92-94, 97-112 Mother India 4-6, 21, 32-35, 38 Mother of 1084 15, 25 motherhood 2-9, 14-16, 19-25, 32, 34-37, 39, 43-44, 46-47, 50, 5354, 59-63, 66, 69, 80-82, 65-88,

Index 92-95, 98-102, 104-107, 109112, 114 Muslim 8, 85, 90-91, 94, 114 Myth(s) 4-8, 11, 14, 24, 27 -33, 40, 41, 97, 99, 100, 111. mythology 27-31, 40 O’Brien Mary 61 Oedipus/Oedipal complex 8, 76, 78 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 3, 14, 22, 25, 99, 112 Pattini Meniyo 52, 53, 56 patriarchy 1-2, 16, 24, 49, 60, 66, 68, 73-74, 78, 82, 99-102 polygamy 74 pregnancy 2, 3, 16-17, 22, 50, 98 101, 109 -110 prenatal 2 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 85, 87, 9293 Ramayana 4 reproduction 7, 24, 61, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 80-83, 110 reproductive 5, 19, 60, 62, 64, 68, 71, 73-75, 98, 103 Rich, Adrienne 1, 3, 14, 19, 22, 25, 62, 68, 81- 82, 99, 112 Roy, Arundhuti 103-105, 112 Roy, Choudhuri Yasodhara 44 Rubin, Gayle 68 Shakti 27, 31 Sharon Hays 4 Spivak, Gaytri Chakravarti 76, 83 Tagore, Rabindranath 4 The Breast Giver 3 The Feminine Mystic 25, 60, 81 The Liberation War 90, 92-93 Walker, Alice 16-17 Widow(hood)15, 39, 90, 107 wife 18, 20, 21, 30, 37, 60, 70, 82, 86 Wolf, Naomi 4