Title:
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Maternal mortality and the state in British India, c. 1840-c. 1920
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This thesis investigates the role of the British colonial state in India in moves
to combat maternal mortality and to spread western methods of midwifery
among the Indian population. The first part of the thesis concentrates on the
Madras Presidency, where the provincial government took a pioneering role in
the field; later chapters consider developments in Bombay. The role of the
Crown is considered in detail as is the important part played by the Countess
of Dufferin's Fund, a voluntary organisation which was closely identified with
state maternity and female medical provision.
Research was mainly archival, although some use was made of accounts of
work by anthropologists and midwives working with Indian traditional birth
attendants, or dais. Central to the research were the written records of the
Government of India and of the provincial governments of Madras and
Bombay held in the British Library, and the records of the General
Department of the Government of Bombay held in the Maharashtra State
Archives in Mumbai. I was granted privileged access to the Royal Archives at
Windsor and to the records of Interserve, the Church of England Missionary
Society; I was also the first researcher in this field to consult the Dufferin
Fund papers in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.
This thesis offers an important corrective to the standard historiography of
women's health in British India, which has generally dismissed the role and
even the interest of the state in the issue. This thesis argues that the
government lying-in hospital in Madras formed a significant forum for social
encounter between Indians and British and that it served as the epicentre of a
major initiative by the Madras government to spread western medical practice
and ideas throughout the presidency. It also highlights how rivalry between
the different presidencies of British India lent maternity provision
considerable significance as a field of political manoeuvre. It further argues
that in the latter years of the nineteenth century the British authorities sought
to use concern about Indian maternity conditions and women's health to
neutralise and undermine both the Indian nationalist movement and the
burgeoning movement for female emancipation.
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