"Childbirth, Childcare, and Working Class Mothers of Colonial Bombay."

Using archival records and unofficial historical documents, this paper examines how the discourse of medicalized childbirth and hygienic childcare affected the working class women of Bombay, a primary center of cotton textile industry in colonial India. In early twentieth century, alarmed by the consistently high rates of infant mortality, municipal and provincial governments of Bombay were forced to consider remedial measures. Since the late nineteenth century, public health experts had been insisting that the unhygienic childbirth and childcare practices of Bombay’s working class people were responsible for the cases of stillbirths and infant deaths. Consequently, remedial measures primarily focused on the maternal bodies and child rearing practices of working class mothers. The Municipality was determined to eradicate 'backward' methods of childbirth and child rearing that were supposedly favored by the 'ignorant' working classes. Receiving enthusiastic assistance from millowners and voluntary groups, the Municipality created maternity homes, infant welfare centers and appointed ‘scientifically’ trained midwives and health visitors in working class localities. Simultaneously, voluntary groups organized highly publicized 'baby-shows' in working class neighborhoods to showcase the 'ideals' of child care. My paper shows that while such measures partially enabled working class women to access basic medical facilities and possibly introduced them to scientific principles of hygeine, they also fostered new forms of urban governmentality, creating greater space for elite interventions into the lives of urban subalterns.