Female Infanticide in India

Reena Dube, Renu Dube, Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

Description

Female Infanticide in India is a theoretical and discursive intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist theory. It focuses on the devaluation of women through an examination of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India and the reemergence of this practice in the form of femicide (selective killing of female fetuses) in postcolonial India. The authors argue that femicide is seen as part of the continuum of violence on, and devaluation of, the postcolonial girl-child and woman. In order to fully understand the material and discursive practices through which the limited and localized crime of female infanticide in colonial India became a generalized practice of femicide in postcolonial India, the authors closely examine the progressivist British-colonial history of the discovery, reform, and eradication of the practice of female infanticide. Contemporary tactics of resistance are offered in the closing chapters.

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. The Practice of Femicide in Postcolonial India and the Discourse of Population Control within the Nation State

2. Center and Periphery in British India: Post-Enlightenment Discursive Construction of Daughters Buried under the Family Room

3. Social Mobility in Relation to Female Infanticide in Rajput Clans: British and Indigenous Contestations about Lineage Purity and Hypergamy

4. A Critical History of the Colonial Discourse of Infanticide Reform, 1800–1854

Part I: Infanticide Reform as Extra-Economic Extraction of Surplus

5. A Critical History of the Colonial Discourse of Infanticide Reform, 1800–1854

Part II: The Erasure of the Female Child under Population Discourse

6. Subaltern Traditions of Resistance to Rajput Patriarchy Articulated by Generations of Women within the Meera Tradition

7. The Meera Tradition as a Historic Embrace of the Poor and the Dispossessed

Appendix: The Baee Nathee Case

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791483855
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

F E M A L E I N F A N T I C I D E I N I N D I A

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F E M A L E I N F A N T I C I D E I N I N D I A

A Feminist Cultural History

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube, and Reena Dube

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2005 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Susan Petrie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bhatnagar, Rashmi Dube, 1954– Female infanticide in India : a feminist cultural history / Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube & Reena Dube. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6327-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6328-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Infant girls—Violence against—India—History. 2. Infanticide—India—History. 3. Women—Violence against—India—History. 4. Women—India—Social conditions. I. Dube, Renu, 1958– II. Dube, Reena, 1961– III. Title.

HV6541.I5B53 2005 392.1'2—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2004045253

To Saroj Rani Pathak, Rekha Dube, and Carol Kay 

Inspired by the work inaugurated by Ranajit Guha

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1. The Practice of Femicide in Postcolonial India and the Discourse of Population Control within the Nation State 2. Center and Periphery in British India: Post-Enlightenment Discursive Construction of Daughters Buried under the Family Room

3. Social Mobility in Relation to Female Infanticide in Rajput Clans: British and Indigenous Contestations about Lineage Purity and Hypergamy 4. A Critical History of the Colonial Discourse of Infanticide Reform, 1800–1854 Part I: Infanticide Reform as an Extra-Economic Extraction of Surplus 5. A Critical History of the Colonial Discourse of Infanticide Reform, 1800–1854 Part II: The Erasure of the Female Child under Population Discourse 6. Subaltern Traditions of Resistance to Rajput Patriarchy Articulated by Generations of Women within the Meera Tradition 7. The Meera Tradition as a Historic Embrace of the Poor and the Dispossessed

Appendix: The Baee Nathee Case Notes Bibliography Index

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Preface

This book emerges from our years of combined scholarship as well as from our own lived experience of growing up, living, and studying in postcolonial India as women of a recently decolonized nation-state. We had always been aware that the phenomenon of woman-devaluation was pervasive in our society and that most girls and women were socialized to accept the seeming naturalness of son-preference and its corollary, the devaluation of the life of the girl child. Yet as women scholars we could not help but recoil in horror when we recalled the multitude of allusions in novels, films, and everyday conversations that casually referred to girl child murder. We then began a journey to uncover the coded ways in which talk about female infanticide was socially sanctioned. The initial horror we felt was an important critical subject position with which to begin our journey because it forced us to acknowledge and deal with how we were implicated as women and as scholars in the sanctioned ignorance of the widespread postcolonial Indian practice of femicide. Our critical and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of female infan- ticide and femicide leads us from the present into the past. Instead of offering a sensational account of violence on women in the third world, we have tried to understand this issue discursively. This means firstly, that we see this phe- nomenon as part of a larger continuum of violence on women and of a piece with the worldwide phenomenon of the devaluation of women. Secondly this means that our approach to the issue of female infanticide and femicide is dis- cursive, historical, as well as theoretical: we trace the history of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India, critically evaluate the British efforts at reform, and theoretically examine the ferocious re-emergence of this formerly localized practice across contemporary India. Our approach is guided not only by the important question of how and why female infanticide and femicide take place, but by the more important question of how does this practice become productive for families and communities so that it continues to re- emerge despite legal governmental measures against it. In the first chapter of the book we examine the national and global implications of femicide in postcolonial India by focusing on the nexus between First World reproductive technologies and the discourse of popula- tion control and development within the nation-state. We inaugurate our dis- cussion of femicide by analyzing the present situation regarding femicide

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