Canadian Journal of Health History

Introduction

By the early twentieth century, anxieties about high infant mortality as a critical public health problem became visible in print media across British India and beyond. The project of uplifting the "ignorant" Indian mother together with "clean midwifery" versus "dirty midwifery" debates were central to both colonial and nationalist "civilising missions."¹ "Scientific motherhood" advice was popularly promoted as "mothercraft," an ideology of child care and a set of practices that emphasized discipline and precision under medical supervision.² Together with "modern" midwifery that aimed to improve childbirth conditions, these reforms were considered by colonial and nationalist medical practitioners as indispensable to the health and wellbeing of community, nation, and empire.

"Scientific" motherhood advice was particularly central to the early-twentieth-century global baby week movement. Having originated [End Page 363] in America, the phenomena of baby weeks and baby contests spread across Britain and its empire. These were predicated on the eugenic (or "good in birth") rationale to "improve the biological stock of nations."³ The educationist and historian Annette K. Vance Dorey highlights that these American contests were variously called "better baby contests, baby health contests, eugenic baby contests, scientific baby contests, human stock shows, and hygienic baby contests." She argues that "[a]lthough headlines celebrated '100-percent perfect babies,' the overall aim was to minimize preventable infant deaths and foster healthier children through maternal responsibility."⁴ Concerns about citizenship and national strength were also front of mind. Historian Janet Golden asks an important question here about eugenics and population "quality": "Better Baby contests … Better babies. What kind of parents would not want their infants to claim the title? … Calling infants 'future citizens' raised, for some, the question of whether they would grow up to be contributors to society, or a drain on the nation's strength and wealth."⁵ In the context of colonial India, mainly Bengal, this article demonstrates how these exhibitions amplified and reflected local conditions and currents of pathologizing, medicalizing, and/or reifying customary midwifery, pregnancy, confinement, birthing, and breastfeeding beliefs and practices to reduce high infant morbidity and mortality rates.

This analysis builds on existing scholarship that centres on the role of women and motherhood in colonial India. Historian Partha Chatterjee highlights how, in colonial Bengal, nationalist discourse was predicated on the idea of the educated "new woman," who was traditional yet modern, guardian of the "inner sanctum" of the home – with bourgeois virtues of discipline, orderliness, thrift, cleanliness, accounting, and hygiene.⁶ Unlike Chatterjee, however, historians such as Tanika Sarkar, Mrinalini Sinha, and Ishita Pande note the close interconnectedness of the public and private spheres by highlighting colonial and nationalist dialogue and resistance in debates about puberty, bodily and mental maturity, sexuality, child marriage, early motherhood, religion, culture, medicine, law, and age of consent reform in colonial India, mainly Bengal (1891–1929).⁷ The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty specifically highlights that Hindu Bengali middle-class reformers often pushed forward a "civilizing nationalism" emphasizing the central tenet of "modernity of tradition," aspiring to educate the wife and mother as the "modern Lakshmi" (Lakshmi or the goddess of wealth and prosperity, also [End Page 364] referred to as Lakkhi) – the opposite of the "imaginary ultra-modern" woman (like the European woman or memsahib) who posed a threat to the Bengali domestic order.⁸

With attention to public health exhibitions in colonial Bengal in particular, this article will focus on how Indian mothers were targeted with both middle-class "ideals" of "scientific" motherhood and local cultural metaphors. Rare visual and textual sources, such as reports of child welfare and baby and health week exhibitions, offer a critical perspective on the study of transnational child health histories, showing how ideologies and practices circulated widely and were adapted locally. Drawing on exhibition reports and various other materials, the first section of this paper analyzes baby week exhibitions and contests to demonstrate the specific ways that public health education was promoted in colonial India. Aimed directly at mothers, these exhibitions sought to inculcate the middle-class values on which the "scientific" mothercraft movement was predicated. The next sections of the paper examine child feeding, hygiene, and midwifery advice and practices. Mothercraft ideas and practices were circulating widely in colonial India, as can be seen in letters (1929) from the British mothercraft expert Marjorie A. Nott, based in Punjab, who "specialized in Truby King methods of infant feeding."⁹ I also analyze in detail the child healthcare advice given by Brahmo and nationalist Bengali daktar Sundari Mohan Das a little earlier at the Health and Child Welfare exhibition in 1920 in colonial Calcutta.¹⁰ I show how Das's writings drew on his medical expertise, on local Hindu cultural metaphors, and on the strict childcare regimen promoted by the famous New Zealand doctor Frederic Truby King.¹¹ Child care by the clock, and in particular infant feeding at regular intervals rather than on demand, was one of the central tenets of mothercraft and was visible at these exhibitions, as were glimpses of the broader "clean" versus "dirty" midwifery debates about whether to replace or train the traditional hereditary indigenous midwife, the dai.

In this analysis of mothering and midwifery advice and practices in colonial India, I build on the historian Ishita Pande's Foucauldian approach, which pushes beyond Saidian notions of knowledge/power in West versus East to demonstrate that "it is possible to identify instances of 'resistance' and 'dialogue' within the very tactics of self-constitution, rather than in physical revolts against the state's health policies." In particular, "conversations between practitioners of divergent medical systems" are crucial to this methodology, [End Page 365]

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Figure 1.

Baby-Week Campaigns

Source: U. S. Department of Labor Children's Bureau (Julia C. Lathrop, Chief), Baby-Week Campaigns (Revised Edition) Miscellaneous Series No. 5, Bureau Publication No. 15(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), n. p. https://www.mchlibrary.org/history/chbu/20696–1917.pdf. With kind permission from the Maternal and Child Health Library, Georgetown University

grounded in the historiography of colonial medicine.¹² This means that medicalized discourses promoted by the colonial government concomitantly produced "the tactics of self-regulation and self-knowledge that were used by sections of the native society."¹³ This paper highlights that engagement with Western medicine did not solely objectify the colonized but also allowed their agency and identity formation – as they variously combined medicine with their purpose of nation-building, in materials ranging from advice manuals and periodicals to public health exhibitions.¹⁴

Babies on Display

In 1917, an illustration in the US Children's Bureau report Baby-Week Campaigns (Figure 1) showed a procession of flag-bearing babies who ventriloquized a variety of adult demands: "Give Us Pure Milk," "Give Us Fathers Who Think," "Give Us Fresh Air," "We Want Plenty of Pure Water," "We Must Have Regular Habits," "We Don't Want Flies," "Give Us Protective Laws," and "We Need Love," among others.¹⁵ Two years later, a Bengali periodical began one of its issues with an uncannily similar full-page illustration of babies, each carrying a black flag voicing a demand. These can be translated from Bengali as follows: "Give Educated Mothers," "Give Mother's Milk," "Give Clean Air and Pure Water," "Will Not Eat Dirty Food Which Had Flies Sitting on It," "We Do Not Want Patent Food or Artificial Milk," "For our protection where is the ruler's laws, where are the country's efforts," "We are frail, love us," and so on.¹⁶ The similarities and differences in these two drawings are illustrative of the different contexts in which they were produced. For instance, [End Page 366] regular infant feeding by the clock was often central to "scientific motherhood" guidelines in America, Britain, New Zealand, and India. However, the American cartoon specifically highlighted "Give Us Pure Milk" and "Give Us Fathers Who Think," which seems indicative of the predominance of baby foods and routine bottle feeding in the United States.¹⁷ In contrast, the babies' demands in the Bengali illustration, whose title translates as "In India Four Babies Die Every Minute," specify "Give Mother's Milk" and "Give Educated Mothers" as an antidote for high infant mortality rates in a colonial setting such as India. Here, the popular Bengali health periodical Swasthya Samachar (or "Health News") was spreading the message of educating Indian mothers about "proper" nursing of infants as a central tenet of "scientific" child healthcare in India.

Like the illustration in Swasthya Samachar, analysis of baby and health week exhibitions and baby shows in colonial Bengal offers a critical lens into child health histories and the larger politics that surrounded them. This section sheds light on the "scientific" motherhood advice offered to mothers, fathers, and guardians of babies at these baby health exhibitions and shows not only that it was a part of colonial "civilizing missions" but also that it constituted a concomitant nationalist citizenship project. Through various measures such as magic lantern lectures and competitive baby shows, local and colonial organizers of baby and health weeks aimed to reduce high infant mortality rates and improve public health in British India by educating mothers about middle-class ideals of "scientific" mothercraft childcare. These were, however, also variously complicated by racialized, communalized, classed, and caste-ridden negative stereotypes about cleanliness, personal hygiene, dirt, and disease.

Although primarily inspired by the British National Baby Week and originally launched by the Vicereine of India, Lady Reading, in 1924, the All-India Baby Week movement was ultimately a product of both colonial and nationalist interventions and local exchanges, however unequal in a colonial setting, with the express aim of curbing high infant mortality rates. Child welfare exhibitions and "scientific" child healthcare advice were introduced on a colonial model and then were often appropriated and repurposed by the colonized middle class for the purposes of anti-colonial community and nation-building. For example, the report of the Health Exhibition and Baby Show in Quapara in Raozan, Chittagong district, argued that "child mortality is a positive menace to the Bengali nation. A [End Page 367] nation without healthy people is but a dying nation." The report attributed this to "the ignorance which prevails on the matters of maternity and child welfare."¹⁸ Child welfare exhibitions and their baby shows thus played a crucial role in spreading public awareness about maternal and child welfare as the "proper" way to create the Bengali citizen and educated mother. The historian Supriya Guha argues that these endeavours also connected communal and nationalist issues with the question of reproductive health in colonial Bengal.¹⁹ For example, the renowned Bengali medical practitioner Hasan Suhrawardy (MD, F. R. C. S. I, L. M; District Medical Officer, Lillooah), in his 1920 Calcutta Exhibition lecture "The Care of the Expectant Mother and Newborn Infant," on one hand, variously voiced anxieties concerning the progress of Hindus versus Muslims, while, on the other, he deemed "propaganda for the protection of our children and regeneration of our country … a sacred duty for every thoughtful Indian. It is the best Swadeshi and Nationalist movement."²⁰

Through such discourse, reformers were voicing the tenets of what the historian Rima Apple terms "scientific motherhood." As she defines it in the American context, "scientific motherhood is the insistence that women require expert scientific and medical advice to raise their children healthfully."²¹ The ideology of scientific motherhood was predicated on exalting "science" and devaluing maternal instincts and traditional knowledge passed down across generations. This phenomenon grew exponentially in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²² Often referred to as "mothercraft" in British and colonial contexts, "scientific" childcare advice, primarily involving regularity and precision by the clock, was crucial to the early twentieth century global baby week movement, when public health officials as well as people from various backgrounds would devote specific weeks to the promotion of infant health through leaflets, contests, exhibits, fairs, and other public events. In the context of colonial India, baby and health weeks spanning from one or two days to more than a week often comprised competitive baby shows, baby food stalls, Ladies' or Purdah Day, and health advice displays with "magic lantern" lectures, model exhibits, posters, film and screenings, as well as demonstrations on "scientific" midwifery, maternal and infant welfare, health and hygiene, and fresh air and ventilation, to name just a few offerings.²³

In colonial Bengal, "scientific" motherhood advice had its own unique features. As the historian Samita Sen argues, in early-twentieth-century [End Page 368] colonial Bengal, the "new mothercraft was being defined by the medical profession," which involved not only colonial but also indigenous medical practitioners – "doctors, nurses, trained midwives and trained health visitors"; the "standards" of hygiene and discipline in childcare were "derived from the middle-class context."²⁴ This middle-class context is crucial here, since an appeal to transnational mothercraft ideals had nationalist implications, bringing together modernity, medicine, motherhood, and nation-building. Chakrabarty argues that "[s]ince the colonial relationship was one that denied the colonised the status of the citizen," prescriptive texts by the so-called Hindu Bengali bhadralok (those belonging to the "respectable" middle classes) designed for "'modernizing' the domestic cannot be discussed in separation from nationalism."²⁵ I build on Chakrabarty's argument here to point out that modernizing and nationalizing impulses were often visible together in Bengali maternal and child welfare advice offered at baby and health week exhibitions and baby shows. As the anthropologist Cecilia Van Hollen argues in her analysis of the National Health and Baby Week celebrations in the Madras Presidency in 1928, which were organized simultaneously in multiple districts on a pan-Indian scale, the main aim of the '"mothercraft" programs in the West and in the colonies was to get women to view their babies as "citizens." ' However, in a colonial context, the irony was that "for India to become eligible for nation status," the Indian mother had to view her baby as a "citizen" before being "granted citizens' rights."²⁶ While functioning within a broader oppressive colonial setting, Indians could appropriate the medical framework within their own quest for modernity, self-determination, and national sovereignty.

Educating Indian mothers was central to the child welfare and baby and health week exhibitions. The historian Maneesha Lal highlights how, in colonial North India, both Western and indigenous medicine aimed to educate the "ignorant" Indian mother, as she was considered to be an embodiment of a "house of illness."²⁷ At the competitive baby shows held during baby and health week exhibitions, both mothers and babies were therefore under scrutiny. A microcosm of untrustworthy mothers at a baby show could become a frame of reference for judging the macrocosm of a colony as not yet ready for citizenship. For example, Lady Reading, who had established the All-India Baby Week movement, commented at a Delhi baby show prize-giving event that women who faced "permanent scarcity" often gave away their tickets for best baby [End Page 369] prizes to their close friends with babies "who came to collect a prize a second time." Implying that India had a shortage of fit mothers, Lady Reading cynically commented, '"And these are the people" that "we declare unfit for self-government."²⁸ Baby show prize babies and their mothers, therefore, could be indicative of the success of the "civilizing" reforms in the colony or how far the colonized were "lagging behind" the West based on the idea of, as the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls it, "denial of coevalness."²⁹ Nationalist voices were also heard in newspapers such as the Amrita Bazar Patrika, which criticized baby shows as an "insult to Indian motherhood" because they failed to address problems such as malnutrition or impure milk supply.³⁰ However, as Ambalika Guha highlights, the nationalist press also gradually began to recognize the immense potential of these child welfare exhibitions as an effective means of propaganda.³¹ Uplift of the "ignorant" Indian mother was a part of both colonial and nationalist "rescue" missions.

Indeed, scientific motherhood advice played a crucial role in nationalist discourses that medicalized mothering, and this advice explicitly targeted women as key agents of modernization and citizenship. The main message in the exhibited maternal and child welfare propaganda was that there was a "need of education among Indian women" since "a nation rises no higher than its mothers."³² Thus, in 1935, the famous nationalist Bengali daktar Sundari Mohan Das of Calcutta, whom I will introduce more fully in the next section, delivered a lecture with lantern slides on "General Hygiene, Maternity and Child Welfare."³³ That same year, at the Serampore Exhibition, Miss Lila Sen and Miss Sadhana Debi emphasized this connection between women, maternity, and nation in their lectures on "Maternity and Motherhood" and "The Place of Female in the Formation of a Nation," respectively.³⁴ The large-scale Serampore Health and Child Welfare Exhibition was organized under the joint patronage of the Bengal Health Department and the Bengal Branch of the Indian Red Cross Society and was officially opened on 9 March 1935 by Lt. Col. A. D. Stewart, Director of the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta. Such collaborations were not uncommon. As the historian Atsuko Naono argues in the context of health welfare weeks in colonial Burma, which was a part of British India until 1937, these exhibitions often resulted from the local intervention of colonial officials, provincial governments, and organizations such as the Indian Red Cross Society. This Society had a predominantly indigenous membership: 96% of [End Page 370] 80,000 members were Indians by the late 1920s.³⁵ Naono emphasizes in particular the "close knitting of personnel" between colonial medical officers and the Burmese Red Cross in "[p]opular health education," which "obscured the notion of colonial public health."³⁶ In colonial India, organizers included quasi-governmental organizations such as The Lady Chelmsford All-India League for Maternity and Child Welfare alongside local baby and health welfare week committees, medical practitioners, district health officers, municipal corporations, public health and publicity departments, popular mahila samiti or women's societies and their members, such as the Basirhat Mahila Samiti and the regional branches of the Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial Association, and significant organizations like the Indian Red Cross Society.³⁷ By looking at the membership of such societies and those of the baby and health week organizing committees, alongside their reports, historians can locate the various layers of colonial and indigenous participation in the specific local settings in which public health education initiatives such as infant and child welfare exhibitions took place; this complicates the notion of colonial public health based on the colonizer–colonized binary and instead acknowledges Indian agency at the provincial, municipal, and local levels.³⁸

Examining a particular baby show helps shed light on the mechanics of these events, as well as some of the specific standards to which mothers and infants were held. For example, at the first Delhi Baby Week in 1924, the entrance cards to the main Delhi Baby Show, held on a "free purdah day," were obtained through a detailed "preliminary judging of babies."³⁹ As the official Delhi Baby Week 1924 report explained, these were done "to prevent sick and infectious babies being brought to the Show," while "others not up to a certain standard of cleanliness and any obviously sickly or undersized infants were here refused entry."⁴⁰ It was anticipated that many might enter the competition at the last moment, so "a table was arranged in the Exhibition where entries were allowed during the days immediately preceding the competition."⁴¹ Arrangements had to go beyond this to avoid disappointing "strictly purdah women" who could not come before and had eventually arrived at the Show – "110 exceptionally fine babies were thus entered."⁴² The report highlighted that "[i]t was decided to limit the entries to 500 … parents showed so much enthusiasm that the Committee afterwards allowed 610 entries."⁴³ [End Page 371]

Each baby who entered the show was given an entrance card, which was a detailed, colour-coordinated "Competitor's Card," according to the class to which the baby belonged.⁴⁴ The official report emphasized stark distinctions between babies of "educated" and "uneducated" mothers from "rich" and "poor" backgrounds, noting that "[t]he entries were originally divided into four classes … a marked difference, however, was found to exist between the babies of educated Indian mothers and those of their uneducated sisters, that it proved necessary to form an extra class to prevent the former winning all the prizes."⁴⁵ The report also pointed out that the marked difference between "educated" and "uneducated" mothers was not always determined by the difference between "rich" and "poor" alone.⁴⁶ It further highlighted the importance of factors such as "better condition" of babies attending the baby welfare centres.⁴⁷ The Delhi Baby Week 1924 "Baby Show Prizes. Special Prizes" table tabulated the prize babies in the following order: European and Anglo-Indian Babies, Indian Babies (of Uneducated Mothers), Indian Babies (of Educated Mothers), Babies of Depressed Classes, and Babies from Baby Welfare Centres.⁴⁸ Each of the five classes also had three subdivisions according to age: babies under six months, six to twelve months, and twelve to eighteen months.⁴⁹ The report also happens to mention that babies had initially entered the competition in the following categories: English Babies (42), Muhammedan Babies (7), Hindu Babies (253), Indian Christian (54), Depressed Classes (156), and Babies from Welcome Centres (98) – 610 in total.⁵⁰ The Baby Show itself took place in an enclosure outside the east wall of the Pardah garden, composed of colour-coordinated tents according to the classes into which babies were categorized on their entrance cards. There were five tents – one allocated for each class – and in each tent, there were two women doctors, each with an assistant and equipped with a weighing machine and examination forms, who judged the babies.⁵¹ The report also mentioned that it was remarkable that out of the six first prizes offered to babies of educated and uneducated Indian mothers, three went to Muhammedan babies even though only seven of them were competing against over 300 others.⁵² The detailed criteria for the examination of babies at the baby shows were not always explicitly stated in the baby week reports. However, a few reports mention that examinations were most often carried out by a panel of doctors who judged the "healthiest" babies. For instance, the doctors primarily allotted marks for such categories as weight, height, quality of bones [End Page 372] and teeth, quality of facial features, respiration, general appearance, skin and cleanliness, and vaccination.⁵³

What were the broader implications of such categorizations of babies in the colonial context of India? The historian Mytheli Sreenivas' central argument about the baby and health weeks in colonial India and beyond is that "[a]s part of public health campaigns, they modeled a reproductive politics" based on eugenics – as "population 'quality'" was an important driver of national sovereignty and socio-economic progress.⁵⁴ Importantly, population quality was not static, and both colonial and local officials were deeply interested in improving it through modern health interventions. Sreenivas highlights, in the context of colonial Madras, that the municipal government was interested in using baby weeks as a way to highlight its involvement in "pre- and postnatal care for women and their babies."⁵⁵ Referring to the 1930 Madras Baby Week, she highlights that as the municipal government wanted "to commemorate its initiatives in maternal and infant welfare"; this seems to explain the baby competitions, where babies were categorized in detail, often according to race, religion, caste, class, and age. A few of these were "Best Musalman Baby," "Best Non-Brahmin (Hindu) Baby," "Best Brahmin Baby," "Best Indian Christian Baby," and "Best European Baby."⁵⁶ This implies that these exhibitions were represented as an effective medium for public health education across social hierarchies with the main goal of strengthening India's citizenry.

As the historian Susan Bayly succinctly puts it, theories about race and caste in the colonial ethnography of India could also appeal to a broad spectrum of nationalist thought when they served to "'prove' that India possessed a deep, authentic unity" and was not just an "atomised, caste-fettered society, unequipped for nationhood." "Race," explains the historian David Arnold, was a "'nebulous and self-contradictory concept', which was frequently 'internalized and reworked' by the very people who were subjects of European racial discourse."⁵⁷ Similarly, while seeking an answer to the question "How did the natives of Bengal come to adopt the colonizer's 'tool of othering' as a tactic of self-diagnosis and a desire for self-government?" Pande points to the "creation of racialized selves and subjects." She argues that racialized and medicalized "disciplines and norms of the body," which aimed at "a cure for native pathologies" in order to "extend colonial power," could also concomitantly function as "self-regulating regimes" for the "the modern subject [End Page 373]

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Figure 2.

"Prize Winners, Balurghat, 1935"

Source: Bengal Health Welfare Week 1935 (Calcutta: Indian Red Cross Society, n. d.), n. p. With kind permission from the Bengal Branch of the Indian Red Cross Society, Kolkata

of colonialism," who could launch the "quest for self-discipline and self-government."⁵⁸

While baby shows were promoted as an opportunity for public health interventions such as vaccination, weighing, and the encouragement of cleanliness, mothers and babies who were refused entry were discriminated against on the basis of these colonial middle-class ideals of health. At the Balurghat (Dinajpur) baby show in 1935, for example, "there were 375 entrants but owing to non-vaccination of majority of the youngsters only 97 were finally entered in the competition …Nine medals were distributed to the best three babies of each of the following three classes, up to 1 year, up to 2 years and up to 3 years. The District Health Officer, the Medical Officer, Balurghat and Dr. S. N. Sinha, M. B. worked as judges" (Figure 2).⁵⁹ While non-vaccinated babies were not allowed into this particular baby competition, in the mining settlement of Asansol in the district of Burdwan, which was divided into eight areas for the purpose of ensuring maximum coverage by the Health and Baby Week Celebration (1932–33), for example, "[v]igorous vaccination" ' campaigns often preceded the baby show. At this baby show, alongside vaccination of babies and maternal and child welfare propaganda offered to mothers and guardians of the babies, particular efforts were made "to explain to each mother the details of her baby's health as found in examination" and "the tip went round that cleanliness would be the gate pass" (emphasis added), motivating mothers to implement hygienic [End Page 374] childcare appropriately.⁶⁰ One of the main goals of the baby and health welfare week campaign was also to establish and/or promote child welfare centres "where Mothers can get daily advice."⁶¹ For example, the Ushagram baby show coincided with the opening of the Maternity and Infant Welfare Centre, and mothers were taken round on a tour.⁶² Counterintuitively, when babies were examined for the local baby shows organized across the various areas in Asansol 1935–36, class factors did not seem to be a guarantor of prize babies in most cases. "[M]iddle and labour class babies" were taken in separate groups but the "latter, in many instances, turned out to be healthier than the middle-class babies."⁶³ This suggested, again, that these health interventions could be effective across social hierarchies in colonial India.⁶⁴

Mothering by the Clock

Another feature of the advice given in the exhibitions was the modern clock. Clocks, discipline, and precision were central to both colonial and nationalist child healthcare advice in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British India. This section locates the impact that the New Zealand doctor and influential mothercraft expert Frederic Truby King had on particular childcare experts in colonial India: British mothercraft expert Marjorie A. Nott, and, most importantly, nationalist Bengali medical practitioner Sundari Mohan Das. Nott's and Das's childcare writings reveal the intersection of medical "expert" knowledge with colonial and nationalist ideas, as well as local cultural contexts of mothering and midwifery beliefs and practices.

While mothercraft, particularly mothering by the clock, was promoted by many contemporary medical practitioners, Truby King was its leading advocate. In his Feeding and Care of Baby, first published in 1913, Truby King began the chapter "Feeding by the Clock" with diagrams of "Clock-Faces," alerting his readers that "[t]he leading authorities of the day—English, Foreign, and American—all agree that the first thing to establish in life is regularity of habits" (emphasis added).⁶⁵ Following the success of the "New Zealand exhibit" at the first British National Baby Week exhibitions in 1917, Truby King had secured his position on the Baby Week Council and thereafter, in 1918, he promoted mothercraft training by playing a key role in establishing the Mothercraft Training Society (Babies of the Empire) infant welfare centre at Earl's Court, London (which later moved to Cromwell House in Highgate, London in 1925).⁶⁶ [End Page 375] "Extracts from Letters" from India to the Mothercraft Training Society (M. T. S.) magazine are discussed below.

Marjorie A. Nott seems to have trained as a mothercraft nurse at the Mothercraft Training Society (Cromwell House, London), and was granted certificate number 288. Little is known about her life, but in 1929, she was working in Ludhiana, Punjab, where she undertook mothercraft and midwifery duties alongside lecturing to medical students about materia medica and conducting Sunday school and Bible study circles.⁶⁷ Nott was most likely working with the renowned medical practitioner Dame Dr. Edith Mary Brown at the Women's Christian Medical College and Memorial Hospital, a zenana or purdah women's hospital.⁶⁸ Brown belonged to the Zenana Baptist Mission and was the founder of the North India School of Medicine for Christian Women (later Women's Christian Medical College). The missionary and author Christine I. Tinling, who wrote about this institution in 1935, described Nott as having "specialized in Truby King methods of infant feeding." With the gift of "genius for baby culture," in Tinling's estimation, Nott looked after the "motherless mites" who were brought to the hospital (often by their fathers), the "fatherless ones" whose mothers were not able to care for them, and babies "born diseased."⁶⁹

In her letter published in the Mothercraft Training Society M. T. S. Half-Yearly Magazine (Figure 3) in 1929, Nott began with a reference to her recent visit to England, including a few months' stay at the Mothercraft Training Society at Cromwell House: "Somehow after England and a few months at Cromwell House the dirt and the dust and the unhygienic conditions [in India] strike one more than ever, and I must say goes more than ever against the grain. But still I love it!"⁷⁰ While she seems to have enjoyed her work, she also explicitly acknowledged that "I am trying hard to run the ward very like Cromwell House, but of course there are difficulties."⁷¹ In this context, she specifically claimed that it was difficult to implement mothercraft methods in a colonial setting like Ludhiana due to problems ranging from lack of clean water supply (so that she had to boil water) to being surrounded by swarms of flies.⁷² She was hopeful about training her assistants "absolutely on Truby King lines." Her underlying assumption was, however, that "they are trying hard to be careful and obedient" but "[l]ike all Indian girls they need constant supervision" (emphasis added).⁷³ British and Indian medical practitioners alike often reserved the most contempt for the usually lower caste and/or class Hindu or Muslim untrained [End Page 376]

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Figure 3.

Mothercraft Training Society, M. T. S. Half-Yearly Magazine

Source: Records of the Mothercraft Training Society; with kind permission from Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, Highgate, London, United Kingdom

hereditary midwife, the dai. Nott complained about a "native midwife" who had botched a midwifery case that she had attended, with a fourteen-year-old girl who was "badly torn" and her baby "badly asphyxiated."⁷⁴

Nott claimed that "The doctor I am now working under is very keen on Truby King methods and we are enjoying working together."⁷⁵ Unlike in Canada in the 1930s where, as the historian Cynthia R. Comacchio argues, the "[m]othercraft controversy" entailed [End Page 377] a clash between nurses trained in "[m]othercraft methods originated by Frederick Truby King" and doctors who did not want to follow the dictates of "foreign methods,"⁷⁶ in colonial India, we have evidence of several British as well as Indian doctors embracing clocked childcare in alignment with Truby King methods. It is relevant here to note that Truby King methods were not just directed at Indian mothers: as someone mentioned in a letter to the M. T. S. magazine in 1929, these methods of nursing infants were also promoted through "mothercraft talks" to the "British community in India," mainly mothers, including a few who were doctors' wives and seemed most appreciative of the mothercraft guidelines.⁷⁷

Nott also wrote in detail about some of her patients, such as a three-month-old baby boy from a wealthy family who had fallen ill with dysentery and malaria.⁷⁸ Being wealthy, he had a private hospital room, and he was put in a hammock at the centre of the room that, she chided, was "never allowed to cease swinging violently" while the family sat around it. Nott also blamed his mother, who suffered from anaemia and had not breastfed him beyond eight days, as well as Glaxo, which proved unsuitable for this "weak" baby.⁷⁹ At the time, Glaxo was widely advertised as an imported baby food and galactagogue promoting lactation, and it played a crucial role at the Delhi Baby Week in 1924, where, in fact, as the report explains, "A Silver Cup [was] given by 'Glaxo' for the Best Glaxo fed Baby in the Show."⁸⁰ Barbara N. Ramusack points out, in the context of baby and health week exhibitions in colonial Madras, that there was also considerable opposition, especially by members of the Council of the Madras Corporation, to the "advertising displays of artificial milk products by international firms such as Glaxo and Nestle's."⁸¹ Here we see how, as Golden argues, scientized mothers were often left to navigate a "shaky marriage" between consumer culture and public health.⁸² In her letter, Nott mentioned a few medical and dietary remedies that were tried by Brown and herself, and she lamented that the parents had put the baby back on "full strength Glaxo" when they believed his health was improving, which led to a relapse. Nott also felt compelled to mention that the baby's mother had sacrificed a goat and "gave round to all the sweepers and beggars" when he was recovering, and that the family had put "all sorts of signs" on the baby's head and blamed Nott's "evil eye" when his condition deteriorated. Nott also persuaded the family to hire a wet nurse, and of the two possible options she selected the one who was "cleanest," with the "healthiest-looking baby" and the [End Page 378]

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Figure 4.

"Advertisement, Glass Slides for Magic Lantern Alas! The Flies Killed the Child 1920s Glass Slides on Health and Hygiene"

Source: Advertisements, book covers and illustrations from the collection of Chitrabani and Indranath Majumdar, Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archives, CSSSC, BZ_0010. With permission from Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Archives, CSSSC, Calcutta

"best supply" of milk.⁸³ Both British and Indian (mainly Bengali) medical practitioners recommended a detailed bodily examination of the usually lower-class and/or –caste wet nurse (also called the dai) and her child before hiring her.⁸⁴ Here we see what seems like an Indian family negotiating various mothering and child healthcare practices, including "scientific" ones, in a hospital setting. Nott, by contrast, operating within a colonial medical framing, complained it was sometimes "so difficult" for her to treat the child amid overcrowding and "all giving their advice and carrying out as much of it as they can. The baby is kept in perpetual motion and if it sleeps it is woken up to be sure it is not dead. Then they plead for sleeping draughts and medicine" (emphasis added).⁸⁵

Finally, as mentioned earlier, in her 1929 letter Nott also considered it difficult to implement the methods she had learnt at the Mothercraft Training Society (London) in a colonial setting such as Punjab. For instance, she complained that "[f]lies swarm everywhere and all the time one is feeding a baby one has to beat them off. I must buy a Flit Spray and to clear off a few, but their number is legion."⁸⁶ A little earlier, in 1925, Director of the Bombay Bacteriological Laboratory (Parel) Lieutenant-Colonel F. P. Mackie's (I. M. S.) presidential address to the Medical Research Section of the Indian Science Congress in Benares explained how diseases were spread by the common house fly (see also Figure 4).⁸⁷ By the [End Page 379] early twentieth century, flies had become crucial to understanding of food contamination and disease transmission across transnational borders. The fly exhibit was one of the central themes in maternity and infant welfare at the Central Hall Westminster Exhibition in London, United Kingdom, while the National League for Physical Education and Improvement offered a prize "for the best essay written by any boy attending an Elementary School on 'Why I should kill that fly.'"⁸⁸ The famous Bengali medical man Suhrawardy also highlighted the importance of eliminating "germs of disease"⁸⁹ to improve the future health of the nation in the context of colonial Bengal – in alignment with the main tenets of the worldwide mothercraft and infant welfare movement.

The promotion of Truby King's methods across British India was quite varied. In 1920, a decade and a half before his aforementioned 1935 Serampore Exhibition lecture, the famous Brahmo and nationalist daktar Sundari Mohan Das (1857–1950), who was also a noted child healthcare advocate, delivered a magic lantern lecture on the "Ravages of Putana" at the Health and Child Welfare exhibition in colonial Calcutta. Das had obtained his medical degree (MB) from the Calcutta Medical College in 1882.⁹⁰ He had a private practice in Sylhet and then Calcutta.⁹¹ He joined the Medical Department of the Calcutta Corporation in 1890 and was one of the founding members of the National Medical College in Calcutta.⁹² Until he joined the municipal corporation in 1890, his wife Hemangini Das, a trained midwife, accompanied him on childbirth cases, and thereafter, she began to advertise her services and listed her address in the newspaper as "C/O Dr. Sundari Mohan Das, MB."⁹³ He was active in the Indian nationalist movement and became a member of the Bengal Congress.⁹⁴ In his childcare writings, he specifically constructed the "ideal" goddess-like nursing mother (who would, however, nurse her baby according to the clock) in the service of the future Indian nation.

In an elaborate metaphor in his Calcutta exhibition lecture, Das invoked the Hindu mythological demoness Putana (Figure 5) who had "the power" of changing her appearance.⁹⁵ In his description, "Putana, according to the Ayurveda, is a group of infantile diseases which prove rapidly fatal."⁹⁶ Putana "metamorphosed into a young beautiful woman" and approached baby Krishna to "put him to her breast smeared with poison," but, as Das explained, Krishna "sucked the milk with a tremendous force and with it sucked the life out of the demoness."⁹⁷ Das believed Putana was an apt metaphor for [End Page 380]

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Figure 5.

Krishna Suckling the Ogress, Putana, 18th century. Wood, 22× 8 3/4 in. (55.9 × 22.2 cm)

Source: With kind permission from the Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Dr. Bertram H. Schaffner, 1999. 99. 6. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/127486

the Indian mother who either refused to nurse her baby or, if she nursed, did not do so "properly" – that is, according to the clock.⁹⁸ Even the midwife was identified as a Putana if "her dirty hands and instruments" killed mothers with "various microbes," which Das showed on one of his slides – "Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Coli communis and Gonococcus" – along with "their mode of dissemination and some method of asepsis explained."⁹⁹ The doctor further highlighted that even if the mother did not die from infection, her [End Page 381] "milk is suppressed" and her babies would suffer and die from various "sequelae of bad feeding."¹⁰⁰

Das evidently vernacularized scientific motherhood ideals with the help of his medical knowledge and expertise combined with local cultural metaphors. In his famous maternal and childcare manual, Saral Dhatri Sikkha, which went through multiple editions by the 1940s, Das acknowledged that he was influenced by Truby King, alongside many authors of canonical Western medical and Ayurvedic texts. Together with his reference to Putana in his 1920 Calcutta Exhibition lecture, which he further associated with the Indian mother's tendency of "always breastfeeding," Das' writings on childcare, particularly Saral Dhatri Sikkha, invoked the bhadramahila, deified as the "ideal" Indian mother figure, Ma Lakkhi' (or the goddess Lakshmi – the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity), the opposite of what historian Meredith Borthwick labels the "Bengali stereotype" of the "non-breastfeeding memsahib."¹⁰¹ Influenced by Truby King's "Clock Faces," Das' clocks for "strong" and "weak" babies were designed for the "ideal" mothering of infants through "timely feeds."¹⁰² Through engagement with Western medicine and local Hindu cultural metaphors in the context of public health exhibitions and childrearing guides, Das created spaces for agency and the identity formation of a particular kind of "ideal" Indian mother.

"Clean" versus "Dirty" Midwifery Debate

Mothercraft experts like Nott and Das were also heavily engaged in contemporary debates about "clean midwifery"¹⁰³ versus "dirty midwifery,"¹⁰⁴ phrases used in the medical literature at the time by British and indigenous medical practitioners in colonial India. The main question was whether hereditary dais, who usually passed their skills from mother to daughter, could be medically trained or whether they had to be excluded in favour of a "better class" of midwives. The widely prevalent upper-caste and/or middle-class contempt towards the dai, who was usually from a lower-class and/or caste background (for example "Chamarni, Dosad, or Hari women"), is often visible in early twentieth-century Bengali midwifery advice.¹⁰⁵ There were also hierarchies among dais, as they had assistants called "narkattas" or "cord-cutters" to do the job, deemed "inferior," of cutting the cord.¹⁰⁶ In her critical analysis of the caste-based disdain in representations of Dalits (particularly of [End Page 382] Chamar dais, in the United Provinces in colonial North India¹⁰⁷), the historian Charu Gupta argues that "[s]ystems of surveillance" were put in place by medical practitioners and institutions to gain control over "Dalit female reproductive technologies."¹⁰⁸ Dais from Dalit (meaning "the oppressed," with empowering militant connotations, rather than the earlier "untouchable") background often faced middle-class and upper-caste disdain due to their association with what were considered "defiling" livelihoods and contact with ritually "impure"/"unclean" substances.¹⁰⁹ Nott's aforementioned 1929 letter fits into this widespread contempt for "ignorant" mothering and midwifery practices, together with the dark lying-in rooms that Borthwick describes as the "physical embodiment of the impurity" most often connected with childbirth.¹¹⁰ Nott told the story of how "some of our nurses went to a case the other day where the hand had prolapsed. The native Dais had put a charcoal fire under the hand and burnt off the fingers with the hope that the baby on feeling the burning would draw the hand in. Poor women of India! The ignorance is dreadful."¹¹¹ In their eagerness to convert India from "dirty" to "clean" midwifery, many colonial and local medical practitioners considered untrained dais to be the main obstacle in the way of the doctors, trained midwives, health visitors, and nurses that they wished instead to see providing maternal and child welfare services in colonial India.

Child welfare, baby, and health week exhibitions also offered an enormous amount of "scientific" midwifery advice. In February 1920, displaying the commonplace prejudice of colonial doctors, a certain Dr. A. Lankester opined in a lecture at the Maternity and Child Welfare Exhibition in Delhi that the dais' intelligence was very low, so they were unable to appreciate the value of what they were taught and tended to revert to their old ways. Lankester recommended replacing dais with a "better class" of women.¹¹² A few years later, the first Delhi Baby Week in 1924 included a model exhibit called "Chamber of Horrors,"¹¹³ displaying objects that the dais had supposedly used in "actual cases" – from old knives and a grasscutter's sickle for cutting the umbilical cord to materials used to prepare concoctions called "Guttae."¹¹⁴ Historian Sujata Mukherjee argues that colonial and indigenous medical practitioners often blamed the high infant mortality rates on the dais' practice of cutting the umbilical cord with dirty tools and applying cow dung ashes, which often resulted in tetanus neonatorum.¹¹⁵ Das's 1920 lecture at [End Page 383] the Calcutta Exhibition had in fact emphasized the significance of sterilizing the midwife's hands and boiling scissors and ligatures for cutting and dressing the baby's cord.¹¹⁶ At the same exhibition, the famous Bengali medical practitioner Suhrawardy, discussed above, mentioned the "distinctly injurious"¹¹⁷ ghutti prepared by dais – usually a "draught of liquid decoctions of cassia pulp and other purgatives" given to infants to clean their bowels prior to initiating breastfeeding.¹¹⁸ It was also referred to as gutli in the pro-imperialist American journalist Katherine Mayo's infamous book Mother India (1927) – which, as the historian Mrinalini Sinha argues, drew attention to Indians' unfitness for self-government, primarily due to the horrors of child marriage associated with "the sexual organization of Hindu society," along with other problems such as the havoc caused in childbirth by the "allegedly filthy, louse infested, unscientific dai."¹¹⁹

Were all dais considered problematic by the medical profession, since they were deemed "unscientific" and incapable of being trained? Or, if trained, were they believed to revert soon to their old ways? The historian Sean Lang argues, in the context of colonial Madras, that it was her low caste and class background that often determined "her perceived level of competence" – as not all dais were "incompetent," despite the stereotype.¹²⁰ Across colonial India, only a handful of medical practitioners saw the dai in a positive light.¹²¹ Sometimes local dais themselves were brought into the exhibitions, specifically for training and for public demonstrations of being properly "trained in scientific methods" (emphasis added).¹²² Occasionally dais were awarded prizes, particularly for successful deliveries.¹²³ These child health exhibitions also screened films about "scientific" midwifery. Bioscope films such as "'Deb Dutt' – Maternity and Child Welfare" were shown at the Bengal baby and health weeks – for example, at the travelling health exhibition in Malda, Bengal in 1931:

This is the story of a girl named Gouri and her husband. Gouri was born and brought up and married in due time. An insanitary lying-in room was fixed up for her delivery when she became pregnant and an untrained dai (midwife) called, and Gouri delivered in an unscientific way. The child was attacked with tetanus and died. After this Gouri's husband met one of his friends who advised him to go and see the Baby Week and Health Exhibition where he would learn about the scientific method of [End Page 384] delivery … sanitary arrangements for delivery, the appointment of a trained midwife and about the food, clothing etc., to be used during pregnancy. As a result a sanitary lying-in room is prepared for the birth of the second child and a trained dai is appointed. The baby is saved this time, and grows up to be a healthy child. Gouri's husband sends a cheque of Rs. 500, to the Bengal Baby Week and Health Exhibition in gratitude (emphasis added).¹²⁴

This health film highlighted various interrelated issues – the problem of ignorance, the unsanitary lying-in rooms for confinement of parturient women at childbirth, and the dangers of "unscientific" delivery of babies by untrained traditional dais versus the "superiority" of the "scientific method of delivery" by the "trained dai." Most importantly, the film exalted the child welfare exhibition as the best demonstration of "expert" maternal and child healthcare knowledge and tools necessary for both mothers and fathers.

Conclusions

This article has argued that particularly at the child welfare, baby, and health week exhibitions and the attendant baby shows, Western medical discursive exchanges were motivated by colonial "civilizing missions," but they also spurred forms of anti-colonial nation-building. Baby contests, scheduled feeding, and "clean midwifery" were posited by colonial and some local health practitioners alike as primary remedies for public health problems; they can also be located in the larger post-First World War global context of the mothercraft movement, as well as the rising Indian nationalist enthusiasm for self-government. One of the strongest examples is the child healthcare advice of the nationalist Bengali daktar Das, who blended medical expertise and local cultural metaphors. In a colonial setting such as India, engagement with Western medicine not only objectified the colonized but also created spaces for their self-representation.