Good Mothers & Best Babies? Decolonising Mothering and Childcare Advice at Public Health Exhibitions in British India and Beyond

Application summary

The project historically analyses scientific mothering and child healthcare advice offered at the baby and health week exhibitions and their competitive baby shows across early twentieth century British India (with a particular focus on Bengal) and its transnational connections. The main argument emerges, underscored by decoloniality and historiography of colonial medicine, that public health exhibitions were not just spaces for colonial ‘civilising missions’ but also agency, identity formation and self-representation by the colonised. The project objective is driven by the questions of why and how did these exhibitions, introduced as a colonial ‘civilising mission’, become repurposed and championed as an anti-colonial nationalist citizenship project. Such exhibitions were primarily directed towards educating mothers as key agents of modernisation and citizenship. By locating colonial India at the centre of the transnational mothercraft and baby week movement (most influenced by New Zealand doctor Frederic Truby King), the project highlights that educating Indian mothers and traditional midwives (dais) was complicated by racialised, communalised, classed, and caste-ridden negative stereotypes of dirt and disease.