ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a discussion on why and how medical practitioners particularly blamed maternal ignorance and customary breastfeeding practices for the contemporary high infant and maternal mortality rates. They emphasised that mothering had to be learned as not just anyone could be a ‘good’ mother. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, particularly in Calcutta, childcare advice insisted that breastfeeding had to be a disciplined activity by the clock. Using gender as an anchor, the second section of the chapter explores the making of the systematicity and material culture of modern motherhood in colonial Calcutta.
