Mothercraft, “Clean” Midwifery, and Child Care: “Scientific” Motherhood Advice at Health Exhibitions in Colonial Bengal

This study examines "scientific" mothercraft child healthcare advice from public health exhibitions (child welfare, baby week, and health week) in colonial India, with a particular focus on Bengal, mainly Calcutta. I analyze "expert" advice about mothering and midwifery given by famous figures such as the Bengali nationalist <i>daktar</i> Sundari Mohan Das at the Health and Child Welfare exhibition in colonial Calcutta in 1920, as well reports from public health exhibits in the region. The first section of this paper shows how baby and health week exhibitions directed public health education particularly to mothers and upheld the middle-class values on which both mothercraft and nationalism were predicated. The following two sections examine child feeding, hygiene, and midwifery. I argue that in colonial India engagement with Western medicine did not solely objectify the colonized but also allowed their agency and identity formation. These public health exhibitions can offer historians a significant entry point into transnational child health histories, illustrating how ideas and practices circulated widely in the early twentieth century and were taken up locally in specific ways.