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Female infanticide in India : a feminist cultural history

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Actions Tools Choose a colour. This book traces the history of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India, evaluates the British efforts at reform, and examines the re-emergence of this formerly localized practice across contemporary India. It contains 7 chapters. In the first chapter, the national and global This book traces the history history Subject Category: Disciplines, Occupations and Industries see more details of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India india Subject Category: Geographic Entities see more details , evaluates the British efforts at reform, and examines the re-emergence of this formerly localized practice across contemporary India.

In the first chapter, the national and global implications of femicide in postcolonial India are examined by focusing on the nexus between First World reproductive technologies and the discourse of population control and development within the nation-state. In the second chapter, the history of female infanticide is explored to understand how the crime crime Subject Category: Miscellaneous see more details of female infanticide was discovered by the British in colonial India, and the politics involved in the way this crime was named and discussed.

Female Infanticide in India

Chapter 3 explores how and why female infanticide was productive for the infanticidal community. In chapter 4, the administrative history of a successful case of British infanticide reform in the Kutch and Kathiawar regions of colonial Gujarat is examined. Chapter 5 deals with the historical emergence of the first colonial census at the site of female infanticide reform. The last 2 chapters are devoted to resistance resistance Subject Category: Properties see more details to female infanticide carried out by ordinary women women Subject Category: People Groups see more details , men, and the subaltern classes under the name of Meera, a woman poet in 15thth-century Rajasthan.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine traditions of female dissent, which are opposed to the idioms and material practices of woman devaluation. Buy Instant Access You are not logged in. Please sign in to access your subscribed products. If you want to include your highlights and annotations you must: Please enter a valid email address. Export upto 10, records per session in batches of max. Are you sure you want to remove this search from Saved Searches? Cancel Add to project.

Neonaticide , being the killing of a child within 24 hours of birth, is sometimes considered as a separate study. British colonists in India first became aware of the practice of female infanticide in , during the period of Company Rule.

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It was noted among members of a Rajput clan by Jonathan Duncan , then the British Resident in Jaunpur district of what is now the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Later, in , officials noted that the practice was so entrenched that there were entire taluks of the Jadeja Rajputs in Gujarat where no female children of the clan existed.

According to Marvin Harris , another anthropologist and among the first proponents of cultural materialism , these killings of legitimate children occurred only among the Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. The rationale was mainly economic, lying in a desire not to split land and wealth among too many heirs and in avoiding the payment of dowries.

Sisters and daughters would marry men of similar standing and thus pose a challenge to the cohesion of wealth and power, whereas concubines and their children would not and thus could be allowed to live. Sociobiologists have a different theory to Harris. Indeed, his theory and interest in the topic of infanticide is born of his more generalised opposition to the sociobiological hypothesis of the procreative imperative. Harris believes this to be a fallacious explanation because the elites had sufficient wealth easily to support both male and female children.

Another anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes , has criticised both of these theories. On the one hand, opposing Harris, she says both that the quickest way to get more male warriors would have been to have more females as child-bearers and that having more females in a village would increase the potential for marriage alliances with other villages.

Against the procreative imperative theory she points out that the corollary to well-off elites such as those in northern India wanting to maximise reproduction is that poor people would want to minimise it and thus in theory should have practiced male infanticide, which it seems they did not. There is no data for the sex ratio in India prior to the British colonial era. Reliant as the British were on local high-caste communities for the collection of taxes and the maintenance of law and order, the administrators were initially reluctant to peer too deeply into their private affairs, such as the practice of infanticide.

Although this did change in the s, the reluctance reappeared following the cathartic events of the Indian rebellion of , which caused government by the East India Company to be supplanted by the British Raj. The British made their observations from a distance and never mixed with their Indian subjects to understand their poverty, frustrations, life or culture at close hand.

Cohn says, "female infanticide thus became a 'statistical crime'", during the colonial rule of India. Aside from numerous reports and correspondence on infanticide from colonial officials, [10] there was also documentation from Christian missionaries. They sent letters back to Britain announcing their missionary accomplishments and characterising the culture as savage, ignorant and depraved.


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A review of scholarship by Miller has shown that the majority of female infanticides in India during the colonial period occurred in the north-west, and that it was widespread although not all groups carried out this practice. David Arnold , a member of the subaltern studies group who has used a lot of contemporary sources, says that various methods of outright infanticide were used, including reputedly including poisoning with opium , strangulation and suffocation.

Poisonous substances such as the root of the plumbago rosea and arsenic were used for abortion, with the latter also ironically being used as an aphrodisiac and cure for male impotence. The act of direct infanticide among Rajputs was usually performed by women, often the mother herself or a nurse. Administration of poison was in any event a type of killing particularly associated with women; Arnold describes it as "often murder by proxy", with the man at a remove from the event and thus able to claim innocence.

Major famines occurred in India every five to eight years in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, [28] [29] resulting in millions starving to death. According to Mara Hvistendahl , documents left behind by the colonial administration following independence showed a direct correlation between the taxation policies of the British East India Company and the rise in female infanticide.

The decennial census of India from through recorded a consistently skewed ratio whereby the number of males exceeded the number of females. Visaria states that female deficit among Muslims was markedly higher, next only to Sikhs.

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South India region was an exception reporting excess females overall, which scholars attribute partly to selective emigration of males and the regional practice of matriarchy. The overall sex ratios, and excess males, in various regions were highest among the Muslim population of India from to , and the sex ratio of each region correlated with the proportion of its Muslim population, with the exception of eastern region of India where the overall sex ratio was relatively low while it had a high percentage of Muslims in the population.

Infanticide in India, and elsewhere in the world, is a difficult issue to objectively access because reliable data is unavailable. Its frequency, and that of sex-selective abortion, is indirectly estimated from the observed high birth sex ratio; that is, the ratio of boys to girls at birth or 0—1 age group infants, or 0—6 age group child sex ratio. Higher sex ratios than in India have been reported for the last 20 years in China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and some Southeast European countries, and attributed in part to female infanticide, among other factors.


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The suggested reasons for high birth sex ratio include regional female foeticide using amniocentesis regardless of income or poverty because of patrilineal culture, [45] [46] the under-reporting of female births, [47] smaller family size and selective stopping of family size once a male is born, [48] [49]. Sheetal Ranjan reports that the total male and female infanticide reported cases in India were in , 86 in and in ; [50] the National Crime Records Bureau summary for gives a figure of Reports of regional cases of female infanticide have appeared in the media, such as those in Usilampatti in southern Tamil Nadu.

One of the biggest reason for increase in female infanticide is being associated with the increase in number of private Ultrasound Scanning Centres which often tell the sex of baby, and as they become more accessible and affordable people who could not find out the sex of baby historically, have started finding it out and often results in abortion in case of girl child.

Extreme poverty with an inability to afford raising a child is one of the reasons given for female infanticide in India. The dowry system in India is another reason that is given for female infanticide. Although India has taken steps to abolish the dowry system, [58] the practice persists, and for poorer families in rural regions female infanticide and gender selective abortion is attributed to the fear of being unable to raise a suitable dowry and then being socially ostracised. Other major reasons given for infanticide, both female and male, include unwanted children, such as those conceived after rape, deformed children born to impoverished families, and those born to unmarried mothers lacking reliable, safe and affordable birth control.

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Elaine Rose in reported that disproportionately high female mortality is correlated to poverty, infrastructure and means to feed one's family, and that there has been an increase in the ratio of the probability that a girl survives to the probability that a boy survives with favourable rainfall each year and the consequent ability to irrigate farms in rural India.

Ian Darnton-Hill et al. In the Girl Child Protection Scheme was launched. This operates as a long-term financial incentive, with rural families having to meet certain obligations such as sterilisation of the mother. In the Government of India started the "baby cradle scheme". This allows families anonymously to give their child up for adoption without having to go through the formal procedure. The scheme has been praised for possibly saving the lives of thousands of baby girls but also criticised by human rights groups, who say that the scheme encourages child abandonment and also reinforces the low status in which women are held.

The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu added another incentive, giving money to families that had more than one daughter. In , 1, cases of female infanticide were reported, the scheme was deemed a failure and it was abandoned. It was reinstated in the following year. The census data showed a significant decline in the child sex ratio CSR. The program is intended to prevent gender discrimination and to ensure survival, protection and education of girls.