for training) in the English language, as opposed to vernacular languages. In Madras Presidency this issue was, however, hotly debated in the 1930s, and the Madras government began to establish stipends and training programs in vernacular languages with the intent of spreading allopathic care to a wider population.41
By 1939 the Madras government explicitly stated that preference for candidates in midwifery would be given to “natives of the Province.” Key restrictions for such candidates, however, were applied. First, candidates had to be between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. And, in addition to the preference given to candidates who had received higher education, unmarried candidates were also preferred. Candidates who were pregnant or nursing would not be considered. And a student who married during the course of training would be considered to have resigned her training and would be penalized.42 The combination of family and professional work was clearly viewed as inimical for women in the colonies, as it was for women in Britain. But such restrictions for candidates may have been particularly problematic in the Indian context, where marriage and maternity were expected at a younger age for most Indian women than for European women. Such restrictions may therefore have favored single European women seeking work in the colonies.
Proponents of the Dufferin Fund felt that part of their mission was to rid childbirth and medical care at birth of what they perceived to be a dominant cultural association of childbirth with “pollution,” and therefore with untouchability in India. The profession of obstetrics thus had to be presented as both sanitary and noble. The success of the Dufferin Fund relied in many ways on the vilification of the dai as unsanitary and on the representation of home birth as inherently dangerous. Over time, however, it became eminently clear that due to the economic condition of colonial India it was not realistic to expect that all birthing women could be served by medical professionals in the short term. It was felt that intermediary measures had to be taken to improve the practices of the dais. It was to this end that the Victoria Memorial Scholarship Fund was established in 1903.
VICTORIA MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Although individual civil surgeons and missionaries had provided training to dais as early as the 1860s,43 the Victoria Memorial Scholarship Fund (hereafter called the Victoria Fund) represented the first systematic effort to train dais throughout India. Like the Dufferin Fund, the Victoria Fund was run by a voluntary organization consisting primarily of the wives of colonial administrators and headed by Lady Dufferin. Although it had government support, it was not a government program.
In 1918 a major report on the Victoria Fund, entitled Improvement of the Condition of Childbirth in India, reviewed the goals of the fund and assessed the extent to which these goals had been achieved. Civil surgeons, inspectors general of civil hospitals, and medical officers from several provinces, as well as “medical women” and “qualified midwives” all contributed papers to the report. Almost all contributors were men and women of British descent. An analysis of this report reveals the extent to which this project was conceived of as part of the civilizing process and was riddled with the contradictions regarding the question of whether this process would occur voluntarily or by force. These contradictions were played out in the representation of the dai, who was simultaneously depicted as a victim of “custom” and caste and as a criminal agent acting with free will. The question, therefore, was whether the dai could be enlightened and reformed, or whether she represented a threat to civility and should therefore be forbidden from engaging in her work assisting births.
The report states that the primary objective of the Victoria Fund was “to train midwives in the female wards of hospitals and female training schools in such a manner as will enable them to carry on their hereditary calling in harmony with the religious feelings of the people, and gradually to improve their traditional methods in light of modern sanitation and medical knowledge.”44 The emphasis on the gradual pace at which this transformation should take place was further underscored by Colonel C. Mactaggart, the inspector general of civil hospitals in the United Provinces, who wrote:
I am strongly of the opinion that in all sanitary and medical matters in this country progress can only be made by carrying the people with us, and not by driving them. Progress in such matters can only be very slow and gradual and it can only be made as the result of a general advance in education and a gradual increase of the confidence of the people in the methods of Western medicine. No greater mistake can be made than to attempt to do too much and to endeavor to advance our methods by compulsion.45
The notion that the best way to achieve desired changes is through education so that the public comes to desire change of its own will reflects what Foucault has noted as a change from juridical power to discursive power that has been a hallmark of the discourse of civil society.46
This attitude also reflects a general change in colonial policy in India following the Mutiny of 1857, after which the colonial government felt that it had moved too quickly to establish British-style institutions and morality under the leadership of Lord William Bentinck, and that it was too removed from the social lives of Indians to understand them and therefore to rule effectively.
Indian society was primarily conceived of in religious terms as “Hindu” society, and although there was a move to understand that society, there was also a retrenchment from becoming involved in or directly transforming “Hindu” institutions. Hence the reference above to the importance of training dais in such a way that their work is “in harmony with the religious feelings of the people.” The post-Mutiny policy was to move into the inner spaces of Indian society in order to gradually transform and reform those spaces, to “carry the people with us” toward progress. Nevertheless, Christian missionary activity in India during this time continued to actively seek out converts in part through the provision of biomedical maternal and child health care.47
The private sphere of women, and in particular of mothers, became a great new frontier for colonists during this period of High Empire following the Mutiny. The “dark,” “inner recesses” of women’s space had to be penetrated in order to change the Indian public’s attitudes about medicine and “sanitation.” The representation of these spaces as “dark” in and of itself equated them with bad sanitation, and in the context of childbirth, the darkness and stuffiness of the space in which women delivered was repeatedly cited as a cause for disease. But by penetrating this space and bringing to it knowledge of Western medicine and sanitation, not only the private space but the entire nation could become enlightened. In short, embedded in the discourse on childbirth was the notion that the hope for the progress of the nation lay in the minds and bodies of India’s women, who were homogeneously referred to as “the Indian woman.” As the Scottish doctor Dagmar Florence Curjel, working with the Women’s Medical Service in India, wrote in the Victoria Fund report:
[T]he real solution to the problem lies in educating the Indian woman in the case of her own health, and that of her offspring, and in the elements of domestic hygiene, by every possible means. It seems to me that the question is truly one of home rule—for the woman is the heart of the Indian home, and it is she who will be the decisive factor in improving the conditions of childbirth in India.48
In the passage above, “home rule” refers to the growing nationalist movements for independence and in particular to the Indian Congress party’s Home Rule campaigns, which were instigated by Balgangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant in 1916. Partha Chatterjee has argued that for Bengali nationalists during this time, Indian women—and the clothes draped around their bodies—became powerful symbols of superior Indian spirituality which was protected within the confines of the home and could thus resist internal colonization.49 In colonial medical discourse, however, Indian women’s desire and ability to improve the conditions of childbirth were construed as a prerequisite for political autonomy. As Scottish Dr. G. J. Campbell from Rainy Hospital in Madras wrote:
Much requires to be done in the
