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Abstract

In India, the feminist theorization of motherhood is a relatively new concern that has emerged in the last decade. Indian feminists such as Jasodhara Bagchi and Maithreyi Krishnaraj have repeatedly lambasted the societal obsession with biological motherhood, which chimes with dominant social mores around “sacrosanct” marriage. However, despite the rise of scholarly interest in maternal matters over the last decade, the issue of non-biological mothering is one area that has received little scrutiny (in the social sciences) and almost no critical attention (in literary studies). My article addresses this lacuna, aiming to explore the maternal beyond biology by focusing on the portrayals of non-biological mothering by two ostensibly “childless” women in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day (1980) and one in Nandita Bagchi’s short story “Bilkisu Becomes a Mother” (1999). Amid many forms of non-biological mothering, I choose to concentrate on the literary ramifications of two modes — informal mothering by female kin and delegated caring labour by nannies — which lie outside the dominant paradigm of motherhood. My concern here is to exploit the subversive potential of literary texts in order to disrupt the popular polarities of mother and non-mother. I argue that these works of fictions create an eclectic definition of motherhood while suggesting that a latent tension of acceding to conventional feminine roles nonetheless exists in the texts.

Keywords

ambivalence feminism inclusive Indian women’s writing motherhood non-biological

Introduction

Maternity has long been and continues to be a divisive issue for feminism, and feminists have taken diverse approaches to grapple with the “nature and meaning of motherhood” (Rich, 1986: 11). In India, the feminist theorization of motherhood is a relatively new concern that has emerged in the last decade. I should immediately clarify that here I refer to motherhood in material rather than metaphorical terms. The question of the motherland, which is integral to the dominant motherhood ideology in India, has garnered wide critical attention (see Ramaswamy, 2010; Ray, 2000) but is not my central concern in this article. Indian feminists such as Jasodhara Bagchi (2017: 89) and Maithreyi Krishnaraj (2010: 30) have repeatedly lambasted the societal obsession with biological motherhood, which chimes with dominant social mores around “sacrosanct” marriage. However, despite the rise of scholarly interest in maternal themes over the last decade, the issue of non-biological mothering is one area that has received little scrutiny (in the social sciences) and almost no critical attention (in literary studies).¹ My article addresses this lacuna, aiming to explore the maternal beyond biology by focusing on the portrayals of non-biological mothering by two ostensibly “childless” women in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day (1980) and one in Nandita Bagchi’s short story “Bilkisu Becomes a Mother” (1999). Non-biological motherhood, as it is generally understood, refers to the modes of mothering that do not involve the stage of pregnancy and gestation (Nandy, 2017: 51). It therefore underscores the affective carework one undertakes for a dependent child that one has not physically borne. Amid many forms of non-biological mothering, I choose to concentrate on the literary ramifications of two modes — informal mothering by female kin and delegated caring labour by nannies — which lie outside the dominant paradigm of motherhood. My concern here is to exploit the subversive potential of literary texts in order to disrupt the popular polarities of mother and non-mother. I argue that these works of fictions create an eclectic definition of motherhood while suggesting that a latent tension around acceding to conventional feminine roles nonetheless exists in the texts.

Pronatalism and Indian society

Writing on the construction of sex and the gender hierarchy, Judith Butler declares: “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside” (2010: 3). Butler’s insight might well be used to illuminate the social construction of the maternal subject, which entails a similar process of “exclusion and abjection” of the supposedly aberrant female body that does not comply with biological destiny. Concomitant with the reverence for biological motherhood and its common interpretation as the “axis of gender identity”, female childlessness is considered taboo in many societies (Riessman, 2002: 165). In India, the prevalent preference for biological children relegates childlessness into “barrenness” to such an extent that religious rituals are often performed in the hope of producing biological offspring (Bhatnagar et al., 2005; Krishnaraj, 2010). This leads to giving birth being considered the “normative quintessence of ‘real’ motherhood” (Nandy, 2015: 129). Other modes of non-biological mothering are denigrated as inauthentic, and voluntary childlessness (or, more positively, the choice to be childfree) is viewed as aberrant and self-serving (BBC, 2013). Consequently, adoption, perhaps the most common form of non-procreative parenting, tends to be covered by a “shroud of secrecy” in Indian society (Bhargava, 2005: 11). In India, unlike in many Western countries, there have been scant studies on adoption, owing to a relative social rejection of and unease about the issue (Nandy, 2015: 130).

Interestingly, Hindu mythology — especially its most revered epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — offers several versions of parenthood other than the biological one. The highest Hindu deity Lord Krishna is the biological child of Devaki but is brought up by his foster mother Jashoda. “Bhajans”, a specific genre of Indian devotional or religious song, are recited to celebrate the mother–child relationship of Krishna and Jashoda. Another significant mythical figure, Karna, is brought up by his adoptive parents, Adhirath and Radha. Similarly, Sita, the epitome of ideal womanhood, was given another name, Janaki, by her adoptive father Janak. Yet, paradoxically enough, despite many such instances from the venerated epics and sacred religious texts, the version of motherhood that is validated in Indian society is biological. Put differently, these narratives of non-biological parenting are hardly incorporated into the dominant model of motherhood, which conspicuously upholds an essentialist understanding of motherhood that in turn contributes heavily to perceptions around gender identities.

Maithreyi Krishnaraj criticizes the biology fetish of new reproductive technologies. These technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and intrauterine insemination (IUI) could otherwise be subversive and empowering, owing to their potential to challenge kinship based on procreation and could herald “freedom of choice” (Krishnaraj, 2010: 39; Pande, 2009: 120). Conversely, the science of surrogacy has been used to reinforce the hegemony of procreative motherhood and “close tie[s] of gender identity and motherhood” that have augmented the social taboo of childlessness (Nandy, 2015: 130).²

There are other forms of non-biological mothering based on monetary transaction that are particularly visible in the Indian context through the work of “ayahs”, or domestic nannies. In urban India women from lower classes and castes are appointed as maids and nannies to look after the children of affluent families. Since this relationship is premised on a financial contract, any emotional attachment between the child and the ayah is generally discouraged (Krishnaraj, 2010: 23). At the other end of the spectrum, the children of a married ayah are often left behind in villages without their birth mother, and in most cases are brought up by their female kinsfolk (who act as their non-biological mothers). Discussing the exploitative and hierarchical nature of such kinds of maternal pacts as those that exist in commercial gestational surrogacy and paid domestic caring, Anu Aneja and Shubhangi Vaidya (2016: 149) define them as “tropes” infused in culture through capitalism. What this pronatalist context demonstrates is a non-recognition of various mothering modes that do not fall within the purview of the master narrative, and the continual exploitation as well as idealization of the maternal body.

Reimagining motherhood in non-essentialist ways

Since the domain of motherhood and especially the maternal body have functioned as “transient carrier vessel[s] of patriarchy” (Aneja and Vaidya, 2016: 150), a radical reimagining is called for. For this, I turn to feminist philosophers who conceive of motherhood in non-essentialist ways. Mielle Chandler, for instance, defines motherhood as follows:

It is my position that “mother” is best understood as a verb, as something one does, a practice which creates one’s identity as intertwined, interconnected and in-relation. Mothering is not a singular practice, and mother is not best understood as a monolithic identity. (1998: 273)

Chandler’s argument that “mother” is best understood as a verb emphasizes the work and agency that motherhood entails. Through this accentuation, she challenges the passive definitions of motherhood which are prevalent in most cultures, while arguing against the essentialist definition premised on birth and gestation. Additionally, her perceptive attention to the diversity and inclusivity of mothering experiences resists a unified concept of motherhood. While conceiving motherhood in terms of action, Chandler “imports” Judith Butler’s argument about “enacting” and “becoming” a gender into her thesis on mothering practices. Citing Butler, she adds: “[t]o be a woman is to consistently re-enact femininity. […] To be a mother is to enact mothering. It is a multifaceted and everchanging yet painfully repetitive performance” (1998: 273). Chandler thus theorizes motherhood as an identity emerging from repeated and varied performance in relation to the child.

In a similar way, feminist ethicists have also contributed to reimagining a type of mothering that does not prioritize biology, birth, and gestation; notable among them is Sara Ruddick and her idea of maternal thinking. Ruddick follows the praxis-oriented historical materialist view that claims: “all thinking arises from and is shaped by the practices in which people engage” (1995/1989: 9). Ruddick is arguing that it is our practices that give rise to distinct ways of knowing. Therefore, it is the practice of mothering (not the event of birth) which has the aim of preserving and nourishing the child, and which gradually develops an anti-militant understanding that bespeaks a “politics of peace”. Ruddick, in her configuration of maternal thinking, carefully includes men, since she claims men too can mother (1995/1989: 40). Nonetheless, Ruddick’s views have been subjected to criticism on the grounds of ethnocentrism (Bailey, 1995: 162; DiQuinzio, 1993: 20), while Chandler’s theory, however empowering and inclusive, might become prescriptive if rigidly applied to those who, for various reasons, are unable to engage in mother-work. Despite such potential risks, these theorists’ ideas provide us with conceptual tools for rethinking motherhood in ways that contest biological determinism. The reverberations of these ideas will be felt in my chosen texts’ delineation of mothering. More importantly, the cue that I take from their theories is an emphasis on relationality and interdependence in reconfiguring the maternal model.

Although the texts that I discuss here are not about adoption but informal non-biological mothering, it is useful to scrutinize some theoretical considerations of adoptive motherhood for what they tell us about non-procreative maternity. A significant theoretical reflection on adoption comes from Shelley M. Park, who designates the adoptive maternal body “as a queer paradigm for thinking motherhood” because of the way it is constructed as abnormal. Park draws on an important idea from racial theorists such as Frantz Fanon that “bodies that inhabit the periphery of the larger social body develop a double consciousness” (Park, 2013: 202). Park’s ultimate aim is to capitalize on this double consciousness effectively and strategically so as to understand motherhood from a new perspective. This singular position at the boundary of “real” motherhood, I submit, is also relevant to other forms of non-biological mothering, since they are not often socially recognized and are sometimes disapproved of and opposed. For example, there is a proverb in some parts of Bengal that can loosely be translated as “the one who loves more than the mother is actually a witch”. This proverb bears witness to the repressive idea of gender identity on the basis of procreation and the perceived absolute value of biological motherhood.

Maternal non-mothers in Clear Light of Day

A landmark text in Anglophone Indian literature, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980) has received widespread and sustained critical attention in the subcontinent and abroad. Much has been written about its representation of the “new woman”, partition, and other topics (Ray, 2000; Roy, 2010). My concern, however, is to focus on the representation of non-biological mothers in the novel, a topic that has been only briefly touched upon (by critics such as Helen Kanitkar (1992) and Radha Chakravarty (2008)) and left relatively unexplored.

The novel is about the Das family which, like the recently independent, partitioned India, is somewhat unmoored amidst dramatic current events. The narrative begins in post-Independence India with all the siblings grown up. It is also structured by memories through which the two sisters Bim and Tara reminisce about their younger days, trying to reconcile the grudges and sorrows of their pasts with the present. In those earlier days, a lack of parental affection and warmth induced the children (the youngest of whom, Baba, has an intellectual disability) to form their own worlds amongst themselves. The children, however, found a mother figure in Mira-masi, a distant, widowed relative who was brought into their household to look after the children. Eventually the children grow up and find their own places in life, except for the eldest sister Bim, a history teacher at a women’s college, who stays in the old house taking care of Baba and old, alcoholic, eccentric Mira-masi. It is around the vacational return home of the younger, married sister Tara that the novel is constructed. After a sequence of introspection and retrospection, the novel ends on a positive note with Bim developing a calm acceptance of her siblings’ individual choices, and in a larger way finding solace in love and understanding.

Through the very different characters of Bim and Mira-masi the idea of mothering is problematized, questioned, and reformulated in the text. Aunt Mira is a poor destitute widow who is primarily projected as a victim, given her unfortunate lot and series of humiliations experienced at her in-laws’ house. The narrator compares her to “a discarded household appliance” who has a “scarecrow-like appearance” (2007/1980: 111).³ The metaphors of lifelessness and a used domestic object serve to convey how little value her family members deem her to have. Yet, when she starts looking after the children both she and they find a fulfilment of which they have been in desperate need. The author draws a sharp contrast between the indifferent biological mother and a concerned Mira-masi in the following passages. Discovering that the milkman dilutes the cow’s milk by adding tap water, an angry Mira-masi finally gathers courage to report it to Mrs Das:

“It is more blue than white”, Aunt Mira’s voice cracked into splinters and indignation, “and there’s no cream at all. […] They [the children] get no nourishment. It can’t go on”. […] “Then what do you suggest?” She [Mrs Das] asked sourly as if to put a stop to the distasteful conversation and get on with the inserting of ear-rings into the waiting ear-lobes. (169–70)

This genuine concern of Mira-masi and the mother’s uninterest have a dramatic effect in the novel, inviting the reader to question the motherhood of the biological mother, with the “milk” alluding to nourishment, both physical and psychological. Being a childless woman, Mira-masi cannot produce her own milk, but is able to substitute that with her care and affection. The word “sourly” used to describe Mrs Das’s tone of voice carries an underlying suggestion of milk going sour, denoting a dwindling of care and a lack of empathy on the part of the biological mother, the one who once had the ability to produce breast milk.

Briefly addressing the issue of motherhood in the novel, Radha Chakravarty writes: “As surrogate mothers Mira Masi [sic] and Bim extend the idea of nurturing beyond the conventional association of maternity with marriage; this role however is not willingly chosen, but thrust upon them by circumstances” (2008: 79). However, it is evident in the text that Mira-masi’s role, though not initially chosen by her, gives her immense satisfaction. The following passage eloquently demonstrates this sense of fulfilment:

They grew around her knees, stubby and strong, some as high as her waist, some rising to her shoulders. She felt their limbs, brown and knobby with muscle, hot with the life force. They crowded about her so that they formed a ring, a protective railing about her. Now no one could approach, no threat, no menace […] [T]ouching them, dressing them, lifting them, drawing them to her, she felt how their life streams met and flowed into each other. She fed them with her own nutrients, she reared them in her own shade, she was the support on which they leaned as they grew. (176)

In this passage, the connection between Mira-masi and the children is rendered through images of nature that connote a primal proximity between and oneness of mother and child. In other words, the metaphor of the tree giving shade and feeding with nutrients intensifies the intergenerational connection and evokes the pre-oedipal bond. Perhaps the most crucial aspect that this pastoral imagery illuminates by suggesting a kind of organic oneness with mother nature, is the naturalness of the supposedly unnatural (non-biological) mother–child relationships. On another level, this relationship is very much enmeshed in physicality — the contentment and pleasure of bodily contact with the children. The words “touching”, “dressing”, and “lifting” convey the bodily bond that exists between the mother and her child. As Mira-masi “feels” the “life force” of the children, the diction indicates the physical aspect of childrearing which is often a major reason for choosing biological motherhood and downgrading other forms of motherhood to an inferior category. Arguing in favour of adoptive motherhood, Park asserts: “all forms of parenthood include bodily experience” (2006: 206). Margaret Homans similarly makes a strong case for the importance of physical contact between the adoptive mother and the child:

[T]here [is the] same pleasure of plump baby flesh […] we experience the same joys and responsibilities for bathing, feeding, singing lullabies, reciting stories to one’s child. As the mothers of infants, toddlers, or teens, we too are familiar with the tears, screams, laughter, and smiles that “enter one’s bones”. (2002: 266)

Homans’ point about this bodily contact is encapsulated in Mira-masi’s childcare activities described in the above quotation. The phrase “life stream” to express identities flowing into each other echoes Homans’ observation that the child enters “one’s bones”. On another level, Mira-masi’s becoming a mother through her mother-work and affect in relation to the children in a way validates Chandler’s argument of maternal identity emerging through practice.

Mira-masi’s descent into mental illness and her nightmare about the drowned cow that she insisted on buying to give the children pure milk exemplify the “problematic of motherhood” explored in the text (Manners, 1999: 162). On the one hand, given the extent of intensive mothering Mira-masi does for the four children, the motif of the mother cow underscores the continual flow of nurturance and nourishment on her part. On the other hand, the drowning of the cow in the well and Mira-masi’s nightmare about it are suggestive of the draining nature of such dedication and devotion. Mira-masi’s lonely life as a destitute widow certainly leads to the purpose and meaning she finds in her mother-work. However, through another lens, her exploitation cannot simply be overlooked, for she has always devoted herself to the needs of others without having any autonomous existence. My contention is that Desai’s portrayal of mothering resists a naive idealization of all-consuming mother-work by means of deploying such a provocative motif that disturbs and disrupts any easy interpretation.

Another maternal figure that Desai presents is her indomitable protagonist Bim, whose tenderness of character is subtly apparent despite her outward abrasiveness. The other sister Tara — apparently the soft and shy one — pragmatically chooses an upwardly mobile life by marrying Bakul, a foreign diplomat, and through moving to the United States escapes the confines of the old house. Raja, who once was very close to his sister Bim, proves to be no less a realist. He gets married into a Nawab family and, as their son-in-law, moves to the princely state of Hyderabad, leaving Bim and Baba behind. Once a promising student, Bim decides to stay behind to take care of Baba and Mira-masi.

Arguing that Bim is the most stable and strong of all Desai’s women protagonists, Ranu Uniyal writes: “Bim escapes the heterosexual plot, that is, she turns down marriage and maternity but looks after the everlasting baby in Baba. She is not a biological mother but is a strong maternal figure in terms of responsibility, caring and commitment” (1992: 280). Uniyal’s concern is to read the novel as a search for a “landscape of affirmation” as she analyses the relationship between selfhood, temporality, and space. Motherhood not being within the purview of her enquiry, she only mentions Bim’s maternal qualities in passing. However, what I take as the tenor of Uniyal’s argument is that Bim is situated outside heteronormativity. Bim’s position as one not complying with conventional ideas of femininity is important as it makes her into what Park calls the “queer maternal body” (2006: 201).

Bim’s being unmarried and therefore childless is underlined by the narrator in the passage in which she says to Tara about her fondness for her pet dog, Badshah: “I know what you’re thinking […] You’re thinking how old spinsters go ga-ga over their pets because they haven’t children. Children are the real thing, you think” (16). This juxtaposition of two sisters aligning with different ways of life is necessary for the plot as it provocatively brings out issues of gender norms and expectations, and women’s decisions as to whether to conform to them. Tara is a mother of two girls now, a life she has chosen freely. Bim has also elected to be a “spinster” and is putting all her efforts into looking after her brother who needs care and assistance. While one is a mother, the other is a spinster, and both these terms carry social inscription within them. Bim’s conscious decision not to comply with what is deemed socially desirable is, in a way, resistance to the compulsory heteronormativity of Indian society. However, Desai’s characterization is far from straightforward, as Bim’s attachment to the domestic realm evokes a conventionally feminine side to her character. Helen Kanitkar writes, “gradually Bim becomes more and more identified with the house” (1992: 195).⁴ Bim is an educated, so-called Westernized, working woman. But her decision to cling to the old house and keep it unchanged gives the impression that she chooses the inner domain over the outer.

The relationship between Bim and Baba is one delineated with care and sensitivity by the author, in that we witness an array of emotions being played out within this relationship. Critics such as Adriana Elena Stoican (2015: 111) and Elizabeth Jackson (2010: 74) observe that Bim’s decision to singlehandedly take care of Baba is born out of concern and affection rather than authority. I suggest that Desai infuses this “compassion and care” with a certain degree of contradiction and ambiguity. Bim’s mothering is evident from the beginning of the novel — be it the casual, everyday care work of making breakfast for Baba or her motherly perseverance in encouraging him to go to the office, an effort likely to be futile. It is Baba’s presence in her life that saves Bim from acute loneliness, as she emphatically says to Tara, recollecting the earlier days when her siblings had departed — “I still had Baba” (70).

The intimate relation between Baba and Bim, and Baba’s ultimate dependence on his elder sister is evoked in a passage in which Tara unintentionally hurts Baba by asking whether he wants to go to the office. As Baba does not know what to answer he is puzzled and disturbed. The moment that Tara says that he does not need to answer because she can ask Bim, Baba seems to come back to himself: “she had said the right thing at last. […] It made Baba raise his head and smile, sweetly and gently, […] in agreement. Yes, Bim, he seemed to say, Bim will decide. Bim can, Bim will. Go to Bim. Tara could not help smiling back to his look of relief, his happy dependence” (27). The affirmative tone and repetitive sentence structure through which the narrator expresses Baba’s emotions vividly conveys a sense of Baba’s absolute reliance on Bim. To complete the picture of mutual love and dependence, I reach for another passage which exemplifies Bim’s maternal affection towards Baba:

[S]he felt an immense, almost irresistible yearning to lie down beside him on the bed, stretch out limb to limb, silent and immobile together. She felt that they must be the same length that his slightness would fit in beside her size, that his concavities would mould together with her convexities. Together they would form a whole that would be perfect and pure. (259)

Again, Desai uses bodily contact and tactility to demonstrate the essence of the relationship. Bim’s desire for the siblings to merge into one resonates with the image of an expectant mother carrying a baby in her womb. Though they are genetically connected as brother and sister, this yearning, as the passage suggests, carries overtones of a mother’s longing to be united with her child.

However, Desai maintains a notable ambivalence in portraying her two mother figures: like Mira-masi, Bim’s mothering role is not free from ambiguities. As previously discussed, for Mira-masi, the role involves work not initially chosen by herself, though wholeheartedly done. This labour is also rigorous as she undertakes intensive mothering for four children. In the case of Bim’s mothering, Desai has avoided the issue of self-effacement which is often expected of Indian woman, by making Bim a self-sufficient and independent woman. Bim turns down any possibility of romantic relationship with her admirer, Dr Biswas. Her annoyance with an ordinary, domesticated existence is evident in the scene in which she meets his mother, Mrs Biswas. Later, when Dr Biswas tells Bim “now I understand why you do not wish to marry […] [Y]ou have sacrificed your own life” (211), Bim gets irritated for being “misunderstood” and “misread” (211). Robert Boyers considers this frustration reflective of a “determination not to feel victimized by anything” (2005: 51), while Ketu H. Katrak insists on Bim’s supposed “martyrdom” beneath her seeming agency (2006: 135). Both critics’ views are useful to uncover a duality residing at the heart of the novel’s maternal (and feminist) question. Despite being in control of her life as an autonomous individual Bim cannot help harbouring a deep sense of loneliness as she struggles to come to terms with the way two of her siblings (Tara and Raja) have deserted her. Desai movingly depicts this inner struggle when Bim attempts to blackmail Baba emotionally, asking him whether he would prefer to go to Hyderabad to live with Raja. Seeing Baba’s innocent face contorted in sudden shock and pain, she immediately feels guilt-stricken, realizing that she has only been venting her pent-up frustration on Baba. This kind of self-immersion in duties and consequent suffocation and guilt are familiar maternal concerns that Desai figures forth through this motherly sister.

Bim’s predicament, more broadly, carries resonances of the dilemma of individuation and connectedness if we consider feminism’s uneasy relationship with motherhood, especially the apparent conflicting views on motherhood by earlier second wave feminists (such as Simone de Beauvoir (1997/1949) and Betty Friedan (2001/1969)) and later feminists, particularly feminist ethicists (such as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Sara Ruddick (1989/1995) who advocate for autonomy and interdependence, respectively. In a local context, the ambivalence is also reflective of the woman question in postcolonial India in which the idea of new woman underwent a radical reformulation. Desai’s representation teases out this dialectic and more importantly chooses the figure of a non-biological mother to enact the tensions and negotiations. The non-biological mothering performed by two childless women in the novel in many ways reinforces Chandler’s and Ruddick’s conceptualizations of mothering as practice in relation to a dependent child. Desai’s novel, however, does not project any simple formulation; rather, it maintains uncertainties and ambiguities, or what Patrice DiQuinzio (1993) terms the “impossibility” of motherhood, by representing two sharply contrasted figures who in curious ways overlap with one other.

Mother work and care in “Bilkisu Becomes a Mother”

Having argued for an alternative, non-procreative model of mothering in Desai’s novel, what I seek now is an understanding of the complexities and possibilities of delegated (paid) “caring labour” (Ruddick, 1995/1989: 47) as represented in contemporary Bengali author Nandita Bagchi’s short story “Bilkisu Becomes a Mother” (originally given the Bengali title “Bilkisur Ma Howa” and here I am using my own translation). The story follows the life of a Bengali couple (Dalia and Bratin) living and working in Nigeria. Dalia has previously had two stillborn babies and is pregnant again, so the couple wants to ensure the safe arrival of their much-desired child by any means possible. After their son is born they employ a local Kanuri woman, Bilkisu, as a nanny to look after the baby since Dalia is mostly busy with her job as a college lecturer. The childless Bilkisu immerses herself in the care of the little boy who as a result becomes attached to Bilkisu, creating a sense of insecurity in his parents’ minds. The mother in particular is visibly anxious as she grows restlessly possessive about her son and envious of Bilkisu. The story takes a climactic turn when Bilkisu saves the boy from a dangerous snake in Dalia’s presence as the latter rushes to the spot after hearing Bilkisu screaming. In a desperate attempt to save her beloved “Bomboi”, Bilkisu fiercely twists the snake’s head in her own fist and gets bitten by it. The story ends with Bilkisu being admitted into hospital and Dalia crying hysterically as she confronts the question she cannot help asking herself as to why she herself could not kill the snake.

The story ends with a question springing from a maternal consciousness that doubts its own validity. This query itself gives rise to several other questions — what demarcates the border between the mother and the caregiver in their shared mothering labour? What does it mean to perform mother-work as a profession and then transgress the profession’s boundaries to enter the territory of love? In the course of the story, the mother-work relentlessly performed by Bilkisu and intermittently shared by Dalia figures prominently. This sharing of mothering labour between the biological mother and employed caregiver occupies a curious place in a contemporary middle-class, nuclear family which, sometimes, complicates the division between the mother and non-mother engaged in the same labour. This juxtaposition is the crux of the story, further accentuated by a diasporic setting.

“Working mother” and “mother-worker”

The shared responsibility of caregiving between the mother and paid caregiver is not new, but has gained prominence in contemporary global society owing to the increased participation of women in the public world and their concomitant reliance on care-workers to look after children (Tronto, 2002: 36). The relationship between the mother and the caregiver, however, has long tended to be an uneasy one. In colonial India, ayahs were appointed as surrogate mothers or sometimes as wet nurses to look after the Empire’s future. Sharon Jacob writes, “that same maternal body hired to perform the duty of a surrogate becomes the site for constant suspicion, anxiety, and control — given the ayah’s high degree of access to the infant — its body and its growing psychological sensibilities” (2015: 2; emphasis in original). Due to their over-dependence on ayahs, the British memsahib often brought them to England during their seasonal visits or permanent returns back home, without according them any security or even a return passage to India (Visram, 1986: 24). With the decline of empire and colonization, the hierarchy of colonizer/colonized has to some extent been replaced by the new hierarchy of employer and employed in a capitalist world. This is certainly the case for ayahs in contemporary urban India, where working-class care-workers are often exploited by upper-class employers (Aneja and Vaidya, 2016: 137). In order to analyse this text, I therefore need to elucidate briefly the potential and problematics of delegated mother-work, since these factors are constitutive of this narrative.

Sociologist Cameron Macdonald’s observations on this issue are particularly illuminating. Writing on the subversive potential of paid caregiving work, she argues:

Although separate from motherhood as a social role or identity, mother-work represents a large component of what it means to be a mother and to experience mothering. Therefore, the practice of delegating mother-work in the relationship with a paid caregiver might fundamentally challenge our understanding of what it means to mother. (1998: 26, emphasis in original)

What Macdonald points out here is that mother-work, when performed as a profession and by virtue of its nature, contests the prevalent meaning of motherhood. In other words, traditional mothering tasks such as feeding, tending, caring, or the “whole bundle of psychological and social tasks” supposed to be carried out by mothers, are transferred to someone else (Rothman, 2000/1989: 24). However, Macdonald’s analysis reveals that there is a relative devaluation of the works performed by paid caregivers, since motherhood as an institution “offers no legitimate place” for caregivers, who are often considered a “necessary evil” (Macdonald, 1998: 27). The caregiver generally functions as a medium through which the mother’s child-rearing practices are transmitted. Therefore, she is, on paper at least, an extension of the mother without having a well-defined relationship with the child (Souralová, 2015: 5).

The repercussions of this anxiety can be discerned in Bagchi’s short story, which dramatizes the issue by creating what Macdonald terms a “shadow mother” who is racially and culturally different. Macdonald uses this term to denote the sense of lack that the woman in the position of a “mother-worker” often experiences, for she is present only as a “shadow” of the “real” mother. In the story, we witness the baby gradually becoming dependent on Bilkisu: “the baby acts strangely. He is Dalia’s much longed-for child, but he seems to ignore his own mother. All his communication is with Bilkisu, […] his eyes brighten up whenever he sees Bilkisu” (Bagchi, 1999: 292).⁵ While Dalia, as a mother, is puzzled to witness a bond growing between her son and Bilkisu, what is immediately apparent in her reaction is racial prejudice, as we see her wondering what beauty her son finds in Bilkisu’s “dark skin, flat nose, and thick lips” (292). This racist attitude tacitly and ironically re-enacts the superiority of the colonial memsahibs over the native ayahs of the British Raj, albeit in a changed time and place.

Significantly, Dalia’s frustrations emerge out of her perceived identity as a mother who struggles to negotiate her position in the face of an imagined competitor. The following passage vividly expresses the struggle:

How will Dalia save her son, her much-desired possession? As if Bilkisu has trapped him in an illusion. When he grew up a little, Dalia would send him to some boarding school back home, but what to do now? Should she resign from her job? But it is difficult to ignore such an amount of money, five times more than what is offered back at home. (292)

To describe Dalia’s sense of possessiveness Bagchi uses the Bengali word “dhon”, which literally translates as wealth. Although this word is sometimes used as an affectionate mode of address, its literal meaning concerns ownership of some precious possession. The word “illusion” is also notable as it conveys connotations of falseness. Bagchi uses the Bengali compound word “mayajal” that contains two words within it — “maya” and “jal” — which mean illusion and trap, respectively.⁶ Dalia, being the “original” or “real” mother, wants to save her child from a trap which she perceives to have been set by Bilkisu, whose care-work does not endow her with any authority. Bagchi’s portrayal, however, is subtle enough to suggest the emotional complexities: she does not present the biological mother as a flat, unidimensional character who is simply unkind and authoritative. Rather, mentioning Dalia’s previous maternal loss and grief, the author makes this possessiveness somewhat understandable, encouraging the readers to see her in a sympathetic light. Nonetheless, deep within the seeming normalcy, what may exist is an internalized notion of superiority for physically bearing one’s own child. Writing on the social discourse of biological motherhood, Marilyn Strathern observes: “in popular parlance the ‘real’ motherhood has its foundation both in biology and in the social recognition of biology, so the real mother always has either nature or society on her side” (2003: 290). My contention is that maternal subjectivity is not independent of social discourses: its inherent authority and supposed realness are socially conditioned. The text thus essentially stages a conflict between undervalued care-work and idealized biological authority. In so doing, it charts the contours of a maternal consciousness that is grappling with the collapse of its very identity caused by the mothering of an “other” mother.

Language plays a significant role in the text’s representation of the maternal. As such, the baby boy, much to his mother’s annoyance and astonishment, starts speaking Hausa. This leads Dalia to berate Bilkisu for not obeying her repeated instructions to speak English with the boy. When the parents consult their Pakistani paediatrician friend, Dr Khalil, with their concerns that they are not proving able to teach their son Bengali, English, or Hindi, Dr Khalil explains the issue in the following terms:

He cannot be a multilingual person at this stage. And an exposure to two or three languages is not good for him at his tender age. It will confuse him. He can learn his mother tongue later. Do we not learn foreign languages after we grow up? look at us — how we have become expert in Hausa in a short span of time, but your mother tongue is Bengali and mine is Urdu. For now, you can say, Hausa is your son’s mother tongue. (293)

Recent research on children’s language acquisition refutes Dr Khalil’s opinion about the boy’s likely confusion, showing that “learning a second language in childhood, either by simultaneous acquisition or in the context of bilingual education, is associated with positive cognitive gains” (Diaz and Klinger, 1991: 167). However, what is notable in Dr Khalil’s explanation is a sense of reversal: the mother tongue is becoming a foreign language and a foreign language turns into the mother tongue, a reversal that itself serves as a trope through which to complicate the authority of “real motherhood”. Regarding the process of language acquisition Andrea O’Reilly writes:

mothers play a key role in language acquisition as the mother–child dyad is universally recognized as the primary locus of language acquisition. This relationship is recognized through the term motherese, which refers to infant-directed communication, although the term caregiverese is now gaining prominence. (2010: 65)

This singular mother–child dyad that is the primary site for language acquisition is ruptured in Bagchi’s text by the intrusion of the other mother and her language.

While the story portrays the mother’s emotional turmoil as she tries to negotiate her maternal identity and her shared mothering labour, it simultaneously creates occasions on which this issue is addressed and explained from a distance. During a visit to Kolkata on vacation, the couple notice that the boy is missing his nanny as he keeps crying and calling her name. They even consider that he may have been subjected to some malevolent magic of the Kanuri tribes. When Bratin discusses this with their doctor friend, Pratik, he condemns Bratin for being unnecessarily unkind:

Why are you talking of such regressive, superstitious beliefs? How would that innocent woman cast a magic spell on the baby? Had you left the boy to Masima,⁷ he would have had a similar kind of attachment with her. You two are mostly busy with your jobs, it is just normal that the baby would be mentally dependent on the nanny. Bilkisu is his sole companion. I would suggest you go back as soon as possible or the baby might suffer from trauma. (294)

This passage not only illustrates how desperate the biological parents are, but also echoes the findings of relational psychoanalysis that long separation between child and the caregiver “could lead to adverse effects on both parties” (van der Merwe and Gericke, 1997: 320). As the friend mentions Bratin’s mother who could have been the baby’s carer had they not migrated to another country, this conjures up the issue of shared mother-work in middle-class Indian and in particular Bengali households, in which women often share the responsibilities of childcare with other family members — grandmothers and aunts being the usual substitute caregivers — who informally engage themselves in the work alongside the mother (Kapoor, 2006: 143). Generally, in the middle-class milieu, a family only seeks outside help with childcare when there is no family support available as the “non-familial caregivers are seen as alternative caregivers and not as substitute caregivers” (2006: 145). In a joint family, the mother is seldom the “sole caregiver”, although her position is securely central. What is significant here is that despite the practice of shared mothering in a traditional Bengali or Indian family, the intrusion of the racial “other” is not easily accepted.

The familial connections that are prioritized in Bengali society are also an extension of the biological, genetic link with the child. Through the figure of the so-called “infertile” woman, Bilkisu, the biological equation is problematized while care and its attendant emotions are valorized. In other words, this text, by creating a diasporic scenario, situates the supposedly racially inferior mother-worker against the birth mother. In so doing, it underscores the way the racially other mother slips through racial and cultural boundaries by means of her care-work, to such an extent that she poses a threat to the absoluteness of biological motherhood. Crucially, this seeming rupture of the singular mother–child dyad can be read as resisting what Shelley M. Park terms “monomaternalism” (2013: 40). Defining this term, Park writes: “I refer to the ideological assumption that a child can have only one real mother as the assumption of monomaternalism. The ideology of monomaternalism stems from a combination of beliefs about the socially normative and biologically imperative” (Park, 2010: 3). Dalia’s inherent sense of superiority and authority both emanate from these normative beliefs that are threatened by the mutual dependence of Bilkisu and the child, and by Bilkisu’s influence becoming most central to the child’s psychological and linguistic development.

That said, a feminist reading of this text would discern a potential tension in Bilkisu’s “becoming” a mother through sacrifice, for such a sacrificial quality alludes to conventional, patriarchal expectations around motherhood. The biological mother, at the end of the story, weighs up her own maternal identity according to the parameters of sacrifice versus selfishness. Bagchi’s representations emphasize care and nurturance over procreation; however, in formulating this alternative mothering model, the uneasy question of altruistic, sacrificial motherhood remains unresolved.

Conclusion

Reflecting on feminism’s ambivalence apropos of motherhood, Elaine Tuttle Hansen incisively comments, “the feminist critique of motherhood necessarily set out to do something that also appeared to be — and often was, practically speaking — contradictory. Its bipartite goal was to attack pronatalism and revalue the function and status of mothers” (1997: 235). Hansen adds that although these goals are not “mutually exclusive”, they are often “difficult to reconcile” (1997: 235). We have seen that a similar air of tension exists in these two texts in different ways. As such, the novel and the short story illuminatingly divulge the “productive and problematic” aspects of a non-biological mothering model. The women protagonists’ singular position at the interstitial space of motherhood and non-motherhood is potent enough to challenge the biological paradigm. However, their mother-work, at times, can be read as complying with a conventional feminine norm. Thus the textual (non)mothers occupy a tension-ridden space of subversion and submission.

The transformative potential for creative texts lies in their ability to invite exploration of some possibilities and limitations, leading to an empathetic understanding of the other. The childless women through their mother-work and affective labour threaten and bend the cautiously drawn boundary of motherhood. What is crucial is these characters’ position outside hegemonic femininity. Commenting on social (un)acceptance of voluntary and involuntary childlessness, Gayle Letherby writes, “while woman has been defined as the ‘other’ in relation to the male norm, the non-mother is ‘other’ to the feminine ideal” (1994: 530). The textual non-mothers — Mira-masi, Bim, and Bilkisu — if seen from a pronatalist position, belong to the category of the other. However, one must be mindful of their distinct positions in terms of class, ethnicity, and race that intersect with their experiences of femininity. In other words, the non-biological mothers in my chosen texts come from diverse geographical and cultural locations, and engage with their respective mothering in different and distinctive ways. These differences serve as a significant reminder of the multiplicity and diversity of non-biological caregivers and resist any homogenization or even idealization. If Mira-masi and Bilkisu are “childless” in conventional terms, a seemingly emancipatory, modern-day term “child-free” can be applied to Bim. Nonetheless, both these categories are outside the norm as the former invites pity and the latter is often regarded as selfishness and escaping responsibilities (Letherby, 1994: 531). Rather than an uncritical acceptance and defence of the conventional womanly role, a feminist reading of these maternal fictions yields an understanding that forms of informal non-biological mothering which happen frequently everywhere need to be recognized in order to unleash their potential to broaden the scope of motherhood.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was awarded a small grant by Funds for Women Graduate (FFWG), UK.

Notes

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