ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Health and Child Welfare Exhibition in colonial Calcutta in 1920. It begins with an elaborate introduction to the Exhibition followed by discussion of ‘clean’ versus ‘dirty’ midwifery, the bhadramahila ‘ideal’ and childcare by the clock. The central argument is that these public lectures emphasised on the very making of the ‘ideal’ Indian nursing mother, often as the traditional yet modern bhadramahila mother figure. Finally, it elaborates on Brahmo and nationalist Calcutta daktar Sundari Mohan Das’ combined worldviews on Hinduism, Ayurveda and western medicine in his nationalist deification of the nursing ‘Indian mother’ figure as Ma Lakkhi alongside her pathologisation and medicalisation with the help of Truby King’s globally resonant ideas of ‘mothercraft’ and childcare by the clock.
