‘Healthiest’ Babies: Gender, Medical Expertise and Mothering Advice in British India and beyond

Abstract

Baby and health welfare week exhibitions and their baby shows serve as crucial entry points into local and global child health histories. By primarily using gender as an anchor, this paper explores the underexplored topic of local baby weeks and baby shows in colonial India, with a spotlight on Bengal. Such exhibitions, spanning almost an entire week, were often comprised of competitive baby shows, ladies’ or purdah day, baby food stalls, and health advice sections which primarily included ‘magic lantern’ lectures, model exhibits, posters, film-screenings and demonstrations on maternal and infant welfare. This study aims to decolonise ‘scientific’ motherhood advice in India while identifying the larger networks of the transnational baby week movement. This paper highlights that although primarily motivated by the British National Baby Week and introduced by Vicereine Lady Reading in 1924, the baby weeks and their baby shows in India were actually a product of colonial and indigenous local interventions which emphasised on scientising midwifery, birthing, mothering and child healthcare beliefs and practices to check high infant mortality rates. The main argument that emerges here is that advice on child healthcare the ‘proper’ way that surfaced at these exhibitions show the influence of shared colonial and nationalist medicalised discourses, which often intersected with race, gender, age, class, caste, and community, in their drive to create the ‘healthiest’ babies.