Motherhood beyond biology: Two Indian women writers’ fictions of non-biological motherhood

Abstract

In India, the feminist theorization of motherhood is a relatively new concern that has emerged in the last decade. Indian feminists such as Jasodhara Bagchi and Maithreyi Krishnaraj have repeatedly lambasted the societal obsession with biological motherhood, which chimes with dominant social mores around “sacrosanct” marriage. However, despite the rise of scholarly interest in maternal matters over the last decade, the issue of non-biological mothering is one area that has received little scrutiny (in the social sciences) and almost no critical attention (in literary studies). My article addresses this lacuna, aiming to explore the maternal beyond biology by focusing on the portrayals of non-biological mothering by two ostensibly “childless” women in Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day (1980) and one in Nandita Bagchi’s short story “Bilkisu Becomes a Mother” (1999). Amid many forms of non-biological mothering, I choose to concentrate on the literary ramifications of two modes — informal mothering by female kin and delegated caring labour by nannies — which lie outside the dominant paradigm of motherhood. My concern here is to exploit the subversive potential of literary texts in order to disrupt the popular polarities of mother and non-mother. I argue that these works of fictions create an eclectic definition of motherhood while suggesting that a latent tension of acceding to conventional feminine roles nonetheless exists in the texts.