ABSTRACT
Breastfeeding is highly valued in Hindu and Jain Gujarati families, providing health, promoting perfect nutrition in a pure white, God-given fluid for the new infant. While feeding her child a mother is thought to transmit, through her milk, her own emotions, life force, karma and ‘knowledge’ of her ancestral heritage. After the birth, the woman and her infant’s bodies are in states of transition between pregnancy and motherhood, intrauterine existence and life outside the womb, and as such are subjected to contradictions and dichotomies. At this time, the mother is both producing a pure, white food in the form of milk, and also excreting potentially polluting red blood. The infant’s body is in a pure state after birth but may also have been affected by the impurity of the birth process. This ambivalent and transitional status of the bodies of both the newly delivered woman and her child makes them both vulnerable. They are cared for in the maternal home for forty days after birth, until this danger has subsided, and rituals are performed to protect them and other household members. At this time, women’s bodies are sources of ultimate purity and extreme pollution. These contradictions and dichotomies became apparent during qualitative research I carried out in Harrow, north London and Ahmedabad, India for a doctoral thesis. The research was conducted with families that had young children, and the methodology used included participant observation and unstructured, taped interviews, which were transcribed, ensuring all names were fictitious to protect the identity of the informants. In this chapter I will examine the cultural imperatives to give pure, God-given milk, but also the potentially polluting effects of breastfeeding, through focusing on the bodies of Gujarati women and children and the dichotomies of purity and impurity, and positive and negative energies.
