Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

4 The Vanishing Peasant Mother: Reimagining Mother India for the 1950s

133 It has been a truism to state that in the early decades of planning in independent India . . . women were only looked at as components of social welfare programmes and not of development. . . . Why was this so and how was it that after women’s very visible presence and participation in the national struggle for freedom . . . women as women were so ignored? —Nirmala Buch, “State Welfare Policy and Women, 1950–1975” To many the years after Independence seemed the site of a severe setback for feminists. . . . In the fifties and sixties, therefore, there was a lull in feminist campaigning. —Radha Kumar, The History of Doing Despite the formal equality granted to women by the Indian Constitution and the continued visibility of elite nationalist feminists in politics, the decades following Indian independence have been labeled the “‘silent period’ of the women’s movement.”1 The mainstream women’s organizations (such as the All-India Women’s Conference) became institutionalized into primarily welfarist bureaucracies in the service of the Congress government, while more radical feminists turned their energies to other organizations and causes.2 This “lull” is variously attributed to the traumatic aftermath of partition, disappointment at the dilution of the Hindu Civil Code, and faith in the new nation to right the wrongs of gender inequality.3 Given the somewhat diffuse nature of feminism in the 1950s and 1960s, accounts of Indian feminism typically pass over these decades, moving swiftly from independence to the next flashpoint—the 1974 Committee on the 4 THE VANISHING PEASANT MOTHER Reimagining Mother India for the 1950s 134 the vanishing peasant mother Status of Women in India’s groundbreaking report, Towards Equality. I return to feminism and figurations of women in 1950s India, however, to suggest that understanding how women figure in Indian modernity in the post-independence era is crucial to the story of eugenic feminism I am telling. If eugenic feminism is partially enacted through a rhetorical logic whereby all women are measured against an ideal eugenic woman and deemed fit or unfit, then the 1950s are vital because it is in this decade that new national mythologies are being forged and new symbolic roles for women imagined. While up to this point I have focused on an elite Indian feminism (as, for instance, embodied in the figure of Sarojini Naidu), in this chapter I argue that in place of the liberated “new woman” at the forefront of feminist modernity the peasant mother suddenly takes center stage as the symbol of the nation. This is not to suggest that the peasant mother is the new figure for nationalist feminism; my point instead is that in the years after independence nationalist feminist energies get co-opted by the state, and thus a new eugenic woman (who is concertedly not feminist) is forwarded as the national ideal. Like the subaltern figures in Naidu’s poetry, moreover, the peasant mother comes into focus precisely because she is a figure in the process of vanishing away. In order to tell the story of the post-independence eugenic woman I turn to a variety of seemingly divergent sources. Although the cultural worksIsurveyinthesecondpartofthischapter—KamalaMarkandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve and Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India—prominently feature and celebrate peasant mothers working the land, they do so against the backdrop of an Indian developmental modernity that is attempting to render women’s agricultural labor obsolete. This connection is not accidental, as these works abet developmental policies by narrating women’s removal from the land as part of the heroic march of a masculine national modernity. That is, both Nectar and Mother India describe women’s agricultural labor as belonging to a feudal past that the modernizing nation will destroy. To chart the means by which this eugenic logic works, therefore, I turn to several development planning documents in addition to the cultural texts. The first is a little-known (and almost immediately forgotten ) report of the National Planning Committee, Women’s Role in Planned Economy (WRPE).4 Written in 1938 by a subcommittee of prominent Indian feminists (including Sarojini Naidu), it stands as the lone feminist planning document of its time. Nonetheless, it contains the vanishing peasant mother 135 a eugenic feminist impulse in the way it figures the subaltern women of the nation to be developed. By bifurcating the “Women” of the title into subjects to be developed and those to do...