India Program in Madurai, one of India’s most important centers of Hindu pilgrimage. It was on that program that I first began to struggle with and delight in the innumerable retroflexes and alliterations in the Tamil language. And it was during that year that I began to explore issues of gender in India through visits to a Gandhian women’s development project in nearby Gandhigram, through the practice of Bharatanatyam dance, and through a fieldwork project on women’s roles in my own neighborhood’s nocturnal festival for Mariamman, the goddess of smallpox.
I returned to India and Tamil Nadu again briefly in 1991 and 1993 as an anthropology graduate student trying to formulate a dissertation project which would combine my interest in issues of gender and class and which I felt would have social relevance to people involved in the Indian women’s movement.54 It was during these visits that I was drawn into the field of maternal and child health care and decided to focus on childbirth. And it was this topic which led me to become a medical anthropologist. Once again personal experience was influencing my intellectual agenda. In this case, my own stage in the life cycle was a motivating factor, since I was recently married and contemplating having a child myself.
Finally, in January 1995 I returned to Tamil Nadu with my husband and our six-month-old daughter to begin my dissertation fieldwork.55 We set up home in Besant Nagar, a quiet, newly developed residential neighborhood on the southern edge of Madras. This location enabled me to split my research time between the city of Madras and the semirural community of Kaanathur-Reddikuppam, which lies directly south of Madras, one hour away by bus. Since most of the studies on childbirth in India had been conducted in rural areas, I wanted to look at an urban situation and a semirural community like Kaanathur-Reddikuppam, which was going through a rapid transition in the availability and use of modern MCH services. I spent the year of 1995 in Tamil Nadu, and we all returned to the United States in January of 1996. I then returned to India for a one-month follow-up research trip in May of 1997.56
Urban Landscapes: Nochikuppam, Madras
My research in Madras (now officially called Chennai) was greatly facilitated by my affiliation with the Working Women’s Forum (WWF), a women’s NGO based in Mylapore, Madras, which has branches throughout Tamil Nadu and beyond. It was through the WWF health supervisors and health workers that I was introduced to the residents of Nochikuppam and Bapu Mastan Dargha (BM Dargha), low-income neighborhoods in south and central Madras, respectively. I decided to focus much of my research on the predominantly Hindu neighborhood of Nochikuppam since I felt an immediate rapport with the two WWF health workers who lived and worked there. Therefore the descriptions of Madras field sites which follow will focus on Nochikuppam. My work in BM Dargha was less comprehensive but important for my study since the majority of the residents in this neighborhood were Muslims, and I wanted to be sure to meet women from all three major religious groups in Tamil Nadu, namely Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Both Nochikuppam and BM Dargha had small populations of Christians as well.
A fishing community, Nochikuppam lies on the southern end of Madras’s Marina Beach, the second longest urban beach in the world. Like other beaches around Madras, Marina Beach remained virtually empty all day, scorched by the hot sun. But in the coolness of the evening, it became a fairground. Parents brought their children to play on the slides. Lovers sat together quietly in the secrecy of dusk. And groups of young men met to smoke cigarettes and cool their feet at the water’s edge. For the residents of Nochikuppam, Marina Beach was practically an extension of their own beach front, and many set forth in the evening to try to sell snacks to the revelers. The stretch of beach directly in front of Nochikuppam, along its eastern border, was used as a staging ground for all the activities surrounding the arrival and departure of the fishing boats.
The temple of Ellaiamman, a Hindu goddess whose temples reside on the edges of many Tamil villages and towns, lay on the western edge of Nochikuppam.57 Ellaiamman both defines the spatial parameters of the community and protects those inside the boundary from the dangers which lurk outside of it. She was a special goddess for the fisherpeople of Nochikuppam. Fishermen worshiped Ellaiamman before they set out in their boats; and as their boats pushed out to sea, they sometimes stood to look upon the tower (kōpuram) of the temple and pray. Some fisher-women took pots of milk out to the beach on Fridays and prayed to Ellaiamman from there. They then entered her temple and poured the milk onto the statue of the goddess as a form of worship (abishekam).
As a community grows, it tends to extend beyond the boundary on which Ellaiamman sits. But in Nochikuppam her temple remained the geographic marker of the community since a paved thoroughfare ran along the backside of the temple. The residential and commercial areas which lay on the other side of this main road were connected by paved roads, whereas the government-subsidized high-rise cement buildings and thatched huts of Nochikuppam were connected by footpaths which were dusty in the summer months and muddy and slippery during the monsoon season. Above these narrow footpaths brightly colored saris hung flapping in the sea breeze, drying on poles which connected one high-rise building to another.
With no public roads running through the neighborhood, Nochikuppam remained somewhat secret and closed off from nonresidents. And many people from Madras, particularly from the middle and upper classes, had never even heard of this neighborhood. Those who had knew it for its reputation as one of the poorest and most crime-ridden sections of the city. It was in part because of this geographic boundedness that residents of Nochikuppam would often say their neighborhood was like a village (i
Nochikuppam got its name from the fact that the land used to be covered by a forest of nochi trees. The forest was gradually cleared as members of the fishing community began to build huts right along the beach. It was not until 1973 that the cement, three-story “housing board” complexes were constructed on this land by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board, while Dr. M. Karunanidhi, of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, was Tamil Nadu’s chief minister. After the housing board complexes were constructed, the government assigned flats to families based on a lottery system. Each flat consisted of one all-purpose room (used as living room, bedroom, and dining room), one small kitchen, and a bathroom. Often an extended family of six or more lived in one such flat. Initially each family was required to pay the government Rs. 12 per month per flat. In a later power struggle between the DMK and the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Kazhagam) parties, however, promises were made to do away with the rent altogether, and that remained the policy in 1995.
Electricity was installed in all the flats at the time of construction, and it was paid for by the flat owners. The supply of water, however, remained the greatest problem in many people’s minds. City water was not provided in the flats. Some residents had their own pumps which drew water from the community well, but that water was salty. Most residents got their water from the large water tanks which dotted the road that ran along
