ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of modernisation of childbirth within the boundaries of an 'ideologically fertile social field' that emerged in response to colonial modernity. It demonstrates how many of the changes effected by the middle class were driven by modern and scientific sensibilities that overwhelmingly came to influence bhadralok ideology from the 1830s and 1840s, and acquired greater visibility in the burgeoning print culture of the 1860s. Public anxieties over infant mortality were further accentuated by official reports, especially the census reports from 1881 onwards, which revealed high infant and maternal mortality rates. While the nineteenth-century arguments were driven by reason and the bhadralok urge to modernise and self-improve, the twentieth-century ones had explicit nationalist and political overtones and often got drawn into a highly charged emotional debate on motherhood and future of the Bengali race.
