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The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History pp 241–262Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘She Gets the Taunts and Bears the Blame’: Infertility in Contemporary India

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Abstract

This chapter provides a preliminary survey of infertility and its social context in present-day India. It aims to demonstrate and foreground the historical aspects of this issue, which are essential in order to understand how and why the Indian fertility industry has developed in the ways it has done, and why infertility remains in many respects a taboo subject. Drawing on English-language Indian newspapers, government reports, film, and literature, Grey shows how present-day attitudes and practices have their roots in policies and ideas originally generated during the late twentieth century. He explores the demographic context and population policies of India; reproductive medicine, adoption, and surrogacy; the social and cultural context of infertility; and religion. The chapter reveals how the profound stigmatization of infertility in contemporary India disproportionately affects women, regardless of faith, caste, region, or class background.

I am deeply indebted to Gayle Davis, Sarah Hodges, and Tracey Loughran for their helpful suggestions on how best to improve this chapter, and to Rebecca Williams for granting me special access to her doctoral thesis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sarah Hodges, ‘“It all changed after Apollo”: Healthcare Myths and their Making in Contemporary India’, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 10 (2013), p. 248.

  2. 2.

    Nor is this to suggest that the process has been simplistic, uncontested, or uninterrupted: see especially Sarah Hodges, ‘Umbilical Cord Blood Banking and its Interruptions: Notes from Chennai, India’, Economy & Society, 42 (2013).

  3. 3.

    Sarah Hodges, ‘Toward a History of Reproduction in Modern India’, in S. Hodges (ed.), Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies (Delhi, 2006).

  4. 4.

    The historiography of these broad areas is vast, but some key examples include David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2000); Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (New York, 2010); Mridula Ramanna, Health Care in Bombay Presidency 1896–1930 (New Delhi, 2012); David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago, IL, 2013); Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868 (Basingstoke, 2014).

  5. 5.

    Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 57–104; Geraldine Forbes, Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography (Delhi, 2005), pp. 79–142.

  6. 6.

    Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science: The Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India (New York, 2009), p. 1.

  7. 7.

    Ashok Parthararathi, Technology at the Core: Science and Technology with Indira Gandhi (New Delhi, 2007); Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004 (Abingdon, 2012), pp. 21–45, 32–4; David Arnold, ‘Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India’, Isis, 104 (2013), pp. 360–70.

  8. 8.

    Hodges, ‘“It all changed after Apollo”’.

  9. 9.

    Notable exceptions are Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraint: Birth Control in India 1877–1947 (Chicago, IL, 2008); Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (Aldershot, 2008); Sarah Hodges, ‘South Asia’s Eugenic Pasts’, in Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford, 2010); and Sarah Hodges (ed.), Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies (Delhi, 2006).

  10. 10.

    Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Cambridge, 1994); Martin Richards, ‘A British History of Collaborative Reproduction and the Rise of the Genetic Connection’, in Tabitha Freeman, Susanna Graham, Fatemeh Ebtehaj and Martin Richards (eds), Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins and Identities (Cambridge, 2014).

  11. 11.

    Aditya Bharadwaj, ‘Conception Politics: Medical Egos, Media Spotlights, and the Contest over Test-Tube Firsts in India’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

  12. 12.

    Key examples of this work include Bharadwaj and Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science; Maya Unnithan, ‘Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) in a Globalising India: Ethics, Medicalisation and Agency’, Asian Bioethics Review, 2 (2010); Maya Unnithan, ‘Learning from Infertility: Gender, Health Inequities and Faith Healers in Women’s Experiences of Disrupted Reproduction in Rajasthan’, South Asian History and Culture, 1 (2010); Holly Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad: Infertility and the Meanings of Children in North India’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Virginia, 2011; Kalpana Ram, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern (Honolulu, HI, 2013), pp. 106–131; Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (New York, 2014); France Winddance Twine, Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market, 2nd edn (New York, 2015), pp. 54–61; Sharmila Rudrappa, Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (New York, 2015); and Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta, (eds), Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life (Lanham, MD, 2014).

  13. 13.

    In Britain, infertility also began to be more widely (and sympathetically) discussed by the press during the 1980s: see for example Thomson Prentice, ‘Stress of Infertility “Like that of Cancer”’, The Times, 15 May 1984, p. 3. This increased level of reporting may also have been influenced by the fact that in this decade or so the UK made several major political and policy decisions relating to this subject, including the establishment of the Warnock Committee in 1982, the outlawing of commercial surrogacy in 1985, and the establishment of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in 1991. See for example ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology’, Parliamentary Papers, 1984, Cmnd. 9134, pp. 1–111.

  14. 14.

    As of 2007, the paper had a circulation rate of 13.6 million readers per day: see Usha M. Rodrigues, ‘Print Media in the Era of Globalisation’, in Maya Ranganathan and Usha M. Rodrigues (eds), Indian Media in a Globalised World (New Delhi, 2010), p. 53. A search of the ProQuest Times of India archive database (which covers 1838–2005) for all articles relating to ‘infertility’ since August 1947 found 102 results for 1980–89 – a stark increase from previous decades; 255 reports for the years 1990–99, and 327 from 2000–05. However, searches using this term are potentially problematic, as especially before 1990, ‘infertility’ was as or more likely to be used in articles reporting on agricultural developments (such as crop failure) as those concerned with the plight of hypothetical or actual humans unable to conceive.

  15. 15.

    Ramya Abhinand, ‘Am I Only My Womb? The Stigma Of Infertility’, Women’s Web: For Women Who Do: http://www.womensweb.in/2015/05/stigma-of-infertility/. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  16. 16.

    Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be The Mother Of A Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India (New Delhi, 1991).

  17. 17.

    Bumiller, May You Be The Mother Of A Hundred Sons, p. 10.

  18. 18.

    Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube and Renna Dube, Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural History (Albany, NY, 2005); Daniel J.R. Grey, ‘“Who’s really wicked and immoral, women or men?”: Uneasy Classifications, Hindu Gender Roles and Infanticide in Late Nineteenth-Century India’, in Vivien Miller and James Campbell (eds), Transnational Penal Cultures: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance (New York, 2014).

  19. 19.

    Barbara Miller, The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India, 2nd edn (Delhi, 1997); Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Questionable Motives, Flimsy Alibis: Reinvestigating the Murder of Female Infants in Colonial Punjab’, in Avril A. Powell and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (eds), Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (New Delhi, 2005); Maya Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Female Selective Abortion – Beyond “Culture”: Family Making and Gender Inequality in a Globalising India’, Culture, Health and Sexuality, 12 (2010); and Tulsi Patel (ed.), Sex-Selective Abortion in India: Gender, Society, and New Reproductive Technologies (New Delhi, 2007).

  20. 20.

    Sarah Hodges, ‘Governmentality, Population and Reproductive Family in Modern India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39 (2004); Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 213–230; Annika Berg, ‘A Suitable Country: The Relationship between Sweden’s Interwar Population Policy and Family Planning in Postindependence India’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 33 (2010); Rahul Nair, ‘The Construction of a “Population Problem” in Colonial India, 1919–1947’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39 (2011); Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis, MN, 2014).

  21. 21.

    Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge, 2001).

  22. 22.

    Sripati Chandrasekhar, Demographic Disarmament for India: A Plea for Family Planning (Bombay, 1952), p. 7.

  23. 23.

    See broader context in Tyrene White, China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005 (London, 2006).

  24. 24.

    The full text of all 12 of the five-year plans relating to population control and family planning issued by the government of India since 1950 have been digitized and are freely available online at Planning Commission, Government of India, ‘5 Year Plans’: http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/default.html. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  25. 25.

    Rebecca Williams, ‘Revisiting the Khanna Study: Population and Development in India, 1953–1960’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2013.

  26. 26.

    Shah Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report I (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 17–32.

  27. 27.

    ‘Voluntary Family Planning: Still As Important As Ever’, Times of India, 15 April 1977, p. 8; ‘Probe into “Nasbandi Excesses” in Delhi’, Times of India, 31 August 1977, p. 3; ‘Sterilisation: TN teachers were “Bullied”’, Times of India, 9 March 1978, p. 15; Shah Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report II (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 118–19; Lalita Panicker, ‘Emergency’s Shadow on Family Planning’, Times of India, 22 June 1995, p. 12.

  28. 28.

    Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (London, 2002); Connelly, Fatal Misconception, pp. 317–26; Rebecca Jane Williams, ‘Storming the Citadels of Poverty: Family Planning under the Emergency in India, 1975–1977’, Journal of Asian Studies, 73 (2014).

  29. 29.

    Shah Commission of Inquiry, Third and Final Report (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 153–207.

  30. 30.

    Williams, ‘Storming the Citadels’, p. 474.

  31. 31.

    Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 142 and p. 144.

  32. 32.

    This question of coercion remains very much up for debate: Leela Visaria, ‘From Contraceptive Targets to Informed Choice: The Indian Experience’, in Radhika Ramasubban and Shireen J. Jeejeebhoy (eds), Women’s Reproductive Health in India (Jaipur, 2000); Rachel Simon-Kumar, ‘Marketing’ Reproduction? Ideology and Population Policy in India (New Delhi, 2006); Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery, Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility, and Women’s Status in India (New Delhi, 2006); Berg, ‘A Suitable Country’; Betsy Hartmann and Mohan Rao, ‘India’s Population Programme: Obstacles and Opportunities’, Economic and Political Weekly, 50 (2015).

  33. 33.

    Government of India Planning Commission, Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–2017) Faster, More Inclusive and Sustainable Growth, Vol. I (New Delhi, 2013), p. 4.

  34. 34.

    Shruti Pandey, Abhijit Das, Shravanti Reddy and Binamrata Rani (eds), Coercion Versus Empowerment: Perspectives from the People’s Tribunal on India’s Coercive Population Policies and Two-Child Norm (New Delhi, 2006).

  35. 35.

    Alok Ranjan Chaurasia and S.C. Gulati, India: The State of Population 2007 (New Delhi, 2008), p. xviii.

  36. 36.

    Census of India 2001, Population Profiles (India, States & Union Territories) (New Delhi, 2004), p. 1.

  37. 37.

    Chaurasia and Gulati, India, p. xvi.

  38. 38.

    Unnithan, ‘Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies’, p. 3.

  39. 39.

    Rakhi Chakrabarty, ‘Govt. Scheme to Boost Population of Parsis’, Times of India, 24 September 2013: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Govt-scheme-to-boost-population-of-Parsis/articleshow/22956209.cms; Linda Pressly, ‘How India Makes Parsi Babies’, BBC News, 15 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine–33519145. Both accessed 6 December 2016.

  40. 40.

    On gender politics in contemporary India see Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC, 2003); Carolyn Heitmeyer and Maya Unnithan, ‘Bodily Rights and Collective Claims: The Work of Legal Activists in Interpreting Reproductive and Maternal Rights in India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21 (2015); Sharmila Lodhia, ‘From “Living Corpse” to India’s Daughter: Exploring the Social, Political and Legal Landscape of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 50 (2015).

  41. 41.

    Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’, pp. 3–4. On the implications of motherhood for middle-class women see Henrike Donner, Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalization and Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India (Aldershot, 2008).

  42. 42.

    Reiko Ohnuma, Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Oxford, 2012).

  43. 43.

    Sukumari Bhattacharji, ‘Motherhood in Ancient India’, in Maithreyi Krishnaraj (ed.), Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? (Abingdon, 2010), p. 47.

  44. 44.

    See for example Papreen Nahar et al., ‘Living with Infertility: Experiences among Urban Slum Populations in Bangladesh’, Reproductive Health Matters, 8 (2000); Lorraine Culley and Nicky Hudson, ‘“For Him, It’s Got to Be Your Own Son”: Adoption and Infertility in British South Asian Communities’, in Marilyn Cranshaw and Rachel Balen (eds), Adopting after Infertility: Messages from Practice, Research and Personal Experience (London, 2010); Katherine R. Hampshire, Mwenza T. Bell and Bob Simpson, ‘“Everybody is moving on”: Infertility, Relationality and the Aesthetics of Family among British-Pakistani Muslims’, Social Science & Medicine, 74 (2012); Nicky Hudson and Lorraine Culley, ‘Infertility, Gamete Donation and Relatedness in British South Asian Communities’ Kinship’, in Tabitha Freeman, Susanna Graham, Fatemeh Ebtehaj and Martin Richards (eds), Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins and Identities (Cambridge, 2014).

  45. 45.

    Hudson and Culley, ‘Infertility, Gamete Donation and Relatedness’, p. 235.

  46. 46.

    Alison Shaw, ‘British Pakistani Elderly Without Children: An Invisible Minority’, in Philip Kreager and Elizabeth Schröder-Butterfill (eds), Ageing without Children: European and Asian Perspectives (Oxford, 2004).

  47. 47.

    Aditya Bharadwaj, ‘Why Adoption is Not an Option in India: The Visibility of Infertility, the Secrecy of Donor Insemination, and Other Cultural Complexities’, Social Science & Medicine, 56 (2003); Culley and Hudson, ‘“For Him, It’s Got to Be Your Own Son”; Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’, pp. 228–75.

  48. 48.

    S.D.S. Greval, Lyon’s Medical Jurisprudence for India, 10th edn (Calcutta: Thacker, 1943), p. 412.

  49. 49.

    Bharadwaj and Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science, 62.

  50. 50.

    Sandhya Srinivasan, ‘Endless Quest of Childless Women’, Times of India, 10 August 1999, p. 12.

  51. 51.

    Kalpana Jaln, ‘Ethics Code for Medical Research Using Human Beings as Subjects is Ready’, Times of India, 3 June 2000, p. 7.

  52. 52.

    Pande, Wombs in Labor; Winddance Twine, Outsourcing the Womb; Holly Donahue Singh, ‘The World’s Back Womb? Commercial Surrogacy and Infertility Inequalities in India’, American Anthropologist, 114 (2013).

  53. 53.

    Examples include Malathy Iyer, ‘Infertility Cures Draw Med Tourists to City’, Times of India, 4 March 2005, p. 2; Ketan Tanna, ‘A Mumbai Mother for Chinese Couple’s Child’, Times of India, 29 September 2005, p. 5.

  54. 54.

    Ram, Fertile Disorder, p. 124; Suneeta Mittal et al, ‘Sociodemographic Profile of Infertile Couples Requesting Assisted Reproduction in a Low-Resource Setting in India’, International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, 110 (2010).

  55. 55.

    Susan Clare, Namaste Baby: A Journey to Surrogacy in India (Kibworth Beauchamp, 2013).

  56. 56.

    Pande, Wombs in Labor, p. 20.

  57. 57.

    Aniruddha Malpani, ‘Are We Exploiting the Infertile Couple?’, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 8 (2000), p. 24.

  58. 58.

    Chitra Unnithan, ‘Ad Blitz behind 54% of IVF Procedures: Study’, Times of India, 6 June 2015: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Ad-blitz-behind-54-of-IVF-procedures-Study/articleshow/47566003.cms. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  59. 59.

    Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’, p. 108.

  60. 60.

    Sunitha Rao, ‘Con Job in Child’s Name’, Times of India, 6 April 2015: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/Con-job-in-childs-name/articleshow/46817438.cms. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  61. 61.

    Anil Malhotra, ‘More Questions than Answers over Rent-A-Womb Market’, The Hindu, 24 July 2010: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/more-questions-than-answers-over-rentawomb-market/article531996.ece. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  62. 62.

    ‘Baby Manji Yamada Vs. Union of India & ANR. [2008] INSC 1656 (29 September 2008)’, Advocate Khoj Law Library: Supreme Court Judgments: http://www.advocatekhoj.com/library/judgments/index.php?go=2008/september/183.php; ‘Finally, Baby Manji Flies to Papa in Japan Today’, Times of India, 31 October 2008: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/Finally-baby-Manji-flies-to-papa-in-Japan-today/articleshow/3659352.cms. Both accessed 6 December 2016.

  63. 63.

    ‘Surrogate Babies Born in India are Indians’, India Today, 13 November 2009: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/’Surrogate+babies+born+in+India+are+Indians’/1/70679.html. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  64. 64.

    ‘Australian Couple Abandons Surrogate Baby in India’, Times of India, 9 October 2014: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Australian-couple-abandons-surrogate-baby-in-India/articleshow/44747623.cms; Liam Quinn, ‘Australian Couple Who Abandoned Baby Boy Knew Law was Being Broken’, Daily Mail, 13 April 2015: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3036978/Australian-couple-abandoned-newborn-boy-surrogate-mother-engaged-India-twins-Australian-government-did-KNEW-doing-illegal.html. Both accessed 6 December 2016.

  65. 65.

    Winddance Twine, Outsourcing the Womb, pp. 55–6.

  66. 66.

    Stephen Legg and Srila Roy, ‘Neoliberalism, Postcolonialism and Hetero-Sovereignties: Emergent Sexual Formations in Contemporary India’, Interventions, 15 (2013).

  67. 67.

    Vandana Shukla, ‘Unregulated Surrogacy: Law Yet to Deliver’, The Tribune, 24 June 2015: http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/unregulated-surrogacy-law-yet-to-deliver/97741.html. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  68. 68.

    ‘India Bans Foreigners from Hiring Surrogate Mothers’, The Guardian, 28 October 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/28/india-bans-foreigners-from-hiring-surrogate-mothers. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  69. 69.

    Philip Sherwell, ‘India Surrogacy Ban Dismays British Couples’, The Telegraph, 18 November 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/12001903/India-surrogacy-ban-dismays-British-couples.html. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  70. 70.

    ‘No Commercial Surrogacy, Only for Needy Indian Couples, Govt Tells SC’, Indian Express, 25 December 2015: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/govt-to-make-commercial-surrogacy-illegal-panel-to-decide-on-cases-of-infertile-couples/. Accessed 6 December 2016. Ironically, when I first read this article, it was automatically accompanied by pop-up advertising that urged the reader to ‘Find a surrogate mother. Fully screened moms, fast matching. Become a parent. Free consultation!’

  71. 71.

    United Nations, The Mysore Population Study: A Co-operative Project of the United Nations and the Government of India (New York, 1961), p. 139.

  72. 72.

    John B. Wyon and John B. Gordon, The Khanna Study: Population Problems in the Rural Punjab (Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 164. Despite the fact that the Khanna Study has often been perceived as a ‘failed experiment’ in family limitation, it continues to explicitly or implicitly influence broader discussions of population policy to the present day. See Williams, ‘Revisiting the Khanna Study’.

  73. 73.

    ‘Infertile Couples Looked Down Upon’, Times of India, 2 September 1991, p. 3.

  74. 74.

    Malathy Iyer, ‘Infertility, A Cause in Search of a Celebrity’, Times of India, 20 August 2001, p. 3.

  75. 75.

    Catherine Kohler Riessman, ‘Stigma and Everyday Resistance Practices: Childless Women in South India’, Gender & Society, 14 (2000); Catherine Kohler Riessman, ‘Positioning Gender Identity in Narratives of Infertility: South Indian Women’s Lives in Context’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Marcia C. Inhorn and Aditya Bharadwaj, ‘Reproductively Disabled Lives: Infertility, Stigma, and Suffering in Egypt and India’, in Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds White (eds), Disability in Local and Global Worlds (Berkeley, CA, 2007); Bhamini Mehta and Shagufa Kapadia, ‘Experiences of Childlessness in an Indian Context: A Gender Perspective’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 15 (2008); Bharadwaj and Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science, pp. 76–8; Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’. The situation is very similar in Bangladesh: see Papreen Nahar and Sjeek van der Geest, ‘How Women in Bangladesh Confront the Stigma of Childlessness: Agency, Resilience, and Resistance’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 28 (2014).

  76. 76.

    Anindita Majumdar, ‘The Rhetoric of the Womb: The Representation of Surrogacy in India’s Popular Mass Media’, in Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta (eds), Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life (Lanham, MD, 2014), p. 207.

  77. 77.

    Vinita Lavania, Childless Couples: Social Consequences of Sterility and Infertility (Jaipur, 2006), p. 31.

  78. 78.

    On changing representations of voluntary childlessness in the postwar USA, see Laurie Chauncey and Susan A. Dumais, ‘Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage and Family Textbooks, 1950–2000’, Journal of Family History, 34 (2009).

  79. 79.

    Monica Khanna Jhalani, Deconstructing Motherhood: Indian Cultural Narratives and Ideology, 1970s Onwards (New Delhi, 2010), pp. 101–52.

  80. 80.

    See key discussion of this story and its context in Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’, pp. 116–22.

  81. 81.

    Swarag Se Sunder (dir. Kovelamudi Bapaiah, 1986). See especially discussion of this film in Khanna Jhalani, Deconstructing Motherhood, pp. 105–9.

  82. 82.

    Thalli Prema (dir. Srikanth, 1968).

  83. 83.

    Khanna Jhalani, Deconstructing Motherhood, pp. 101–52.

  84. 84.

    Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (dir. Abbas-Mustan, 2001). On the perceived links between sex work and surrogacy in India see Amrita Pande, ‘Not an “Angel”, Not a “Whore”: Surrogates as “Dirty” Workers in India’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 16 (2009); and Amrita Pande, ‘“At Least I Am Not Sleeping with Anyone”: Resisting the Stigma of Commercial Surrogacy’, Feminist Studies, 36 (2010).

  85. 85.

    Meera Syal, The House of Hidden Mothers (London, 2015).

  86. 86.

    Marcia C. Inhorn, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ, 2012).

  87. 87.

    Inhorn and Bharadwaj, ‘Reproductively Disabled Lives’.

  88. 88.

    Cynthia K. Shinabarger Reed, ‘Intimate Partner Violence and Infertility in Zambia’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Texas Women’s University, 2010.

  89. 89.

    Abdul Qadir, ‘Barren Woman Kept in Chains to Punish Infertility in Gaya Village’, Times of India, 27 June 2015: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Barren-woman-kept-in-chains-to-punish-infertility-in-Gaya-village/articleshow/47843302.cms. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  90. 90.

    Note, however, the very distinctive nature of Indian secularism: Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950 (Ranikhet, 2007); Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 (Basingstoke, 2011).

  91. 91.

    See variously Christopher J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Indian Society, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford, 2008); Yulia Egorova and Shahid Perwez, The Jews of Andhra Pradesh: Contesting Caste and Religion in South India (Oxford, 2013); Tanweer Fazal, ‘Nation-State’ and Minority Rights in India: Comparative Perspectives on Muslim and Sikh Identities (New York, 2015).

  92. 92.

    Rina Verma Williams, Postcolonial Politics and Personal Laws: Colonial Legal Legacies and the Indian State (New Delhi, 2006), pp. 96–190.

  93. 93.

    Aditya Bharadwaj, ‘Sacred Conceptions: Clinical Theodicies, Uncertain Science, and Technologies of Procreation in India’, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, 30 (2006); Khanna Jhalani, Deconstructing Motherhood, pp. 128–9; Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’.

  94. 94.

    Abhinand, ‘Am I Only My Womb?’. On the context and negotiations involved in ‘love matches’ see Perveez Mody, The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (Abingdon, 2008).

  95. 95.

    Amy Leigh Allocco, ‘Snakes, Goddesses, and Anthills: Modern Challenges and Women’s Ritual Responses in Contemporary South India’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Emory University, 2009.

  96. 96.

    Allocco, ‘Snakes, Goddesses, and Anthills’; Amy Leigh Allocco, ‘Fear, Reverence, and Ambivalence: Divine Snakes in Contemporary South India’, Religions of South Asia, 7 (2013).

  97. 97.

    Paul B. Courtright, Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (Oxford, 1985), p. 5; and Rachel Dwyer, ‘Vighnaharta Shree Siddhivinayak: Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings in Mumbai’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35 (2015).

  98. 98.

    John D. Smith, The Mahābhārata (London, 2009), pp. 42–51, and Swasti Bhattacharyya, Magical Progeny, Modern Technology: A Hindu Bioethics of Assisted Reproductive Technology (Albany, NY, 2006), pp. 29–48.

  99. 99.

    Soraya Tremayne and Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘Introduction: Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne (eds), Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (Oxford, 2012), p. 3.

  100. 100.

    Marcia C. Inhorn, Pasquale Patrizio, and Gamal I. Serour, ‘Third-Party Reproductive Assistance around the Mediterranean: Comparing Sunni Egypt, Catholic Italy, and Multisectarian Lebanon’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne (eds), Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (Oxford, 2012).

  101. 101.

    S. Cromwell Crawford, Hindu Bioethics for the Twenty-First Century (Albany, NY, 2003), pp. 117–24; Bhattacharyya, Magical Progeny, Modern Technology.

  102. 102.

    Inhorn and Bharadwaj, ‘Reproductively Disabled Lives’, p. 94.

  103. 103.

    Potential allopathic medical interventions can be seen in Sulbha Arora, Rubina Merchant and Gautam N. Allahbadia (eds), Reproductive Medicine: Challenges, Solutions and Breakthroughs (New Delhi, 2014).

  104. 104.

    For examples of Pentecostal Christians in contemporary India praying for infertility to be cured see Chad M. Bauman, Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India (Oxford, 2015), pp. 112–14.

  105. 105.

    Daniel J. Cohen, ‘Ghost Exorcism, Memory and Healing in Hinduism’, in Ivette Vargas-O’Bryan and Zhou Xun (eds), Disease, Religion and Healing in Asia: Collaborations and Collisions (New York, 2015); Unnithan, ‘Learning from Infertility’; Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’, pp. 217–19.

  106. 106.

    Donahue Singh, ‘Aulad’.

  107. 107.

    Nergish Sunavala, ‘Devotees of All Faiths Go for Counselling at Mumbai Church’, Times of India, 14 June 2015: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Devotees-of-all-faiths-go-for-counselling-at-Mumbai-church/articleshow/47660716.cms. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  108. 108.

    Examples of the potential willingness to engage with healing practices from other religions can be seen in Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India (Bloomington, IN, 2006); and Fabrizio M. Ferrari, ‘Devotion and Affliction in the Time of Cholera: Ritual Healing, Identity and Resistance among Bengali Muslims’, in Ivette Vargas-O’Bryan and Zhou Xun (eds), Disease, Religion and Healing in Asia: Collaborations and Collisions (New York, 2015).

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  110. 110.

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    1. Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK

      Daniel J.R. Grey

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      Gayle Davis

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      Tracey Loughran

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    Grey, D.J. (2017). ‘She Gets the Taunts and Bears the Blame’: Infertility in Contemporary India. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_13

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