Introduction

This chapter seeks to engage in two important issues: first, it explores the historical trajectory which made scientific and technological intervention in reproductive health and childbirth in colonial Bengal a pressing imperial/medical imperative, and second, it will attempt to explicate the cultural implications of this intervention in an era of enforced transition from pre-modern to ‘modern’ under the British rule. On both these counts, it will examine the role of colonialism and the nature of ‘enforced modernity’, and look at how the colonial interventions, consequent upon considerations of medical market, constricted the adoption of a modern technology in childbirth that was devised through painstaking indigenous initiatives.

In recent writings on reproductive health, a sharp historical focus on the use of surgical instruments and its socio-cultural and technological implications for a tradition-bound society like India is curiously lacking. All the major scholarly interventions made so far in this direction have been confined only to casual references to surgical instruments and their impact on the colonized. Postcolonial feminist histories also are curiously silent on how colonial contentions over issues like marriage and reproduction produced bodies as accessible sites to modern science. Even in nineteenth-century Britain, when the medical profession was characterized by tradition and prejudices about women were slow to recognize the real needs of women, the development of obstetrics and gynecology was not a smooth one.