Female Empowerment and the Traditional Midwives of India

by Soma Mukhopadhyay

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[Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of an article which appears in Midwifery Today Issue 99, Autumn 2011. View other great articles and columns in the table of contents. To read the rest of this article, order your copy of Midwifery Today Issue 99.]
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A friend in need is a friend indeed. This proverb is very much applicable to the women folk of rural India who earn their livelihood through midwifery. Usually known as dai, or dhais, they play a role of social significance and have served Indian society through the ages. Though society has never taken their profession seriously, now the time has come to reassess their role and importance.

Midwifery is one of the ancient professions of the world. The oldest epic, that of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BCE), refers to Ishtar of Arebla, the senior midwife and wet nurse of Esarhaddon. In the writings of Hippocrates and two eminent physicians of ancient India, Charaka and Sushruta, are references to the profession of midwifery, as well as to the social status of midwives.

After extensive study of the lives and culture of midwives in West Bengal, I have reached the conclusion that most Indians have very little knowledge of traditional midwives. Most people hold the view that a dai’s only work is to cut the umbilical cord of the newborn in a barbaric way (using a sharpened bamboo stick, locally known as chanchari). Yet, the writings of Charaka and Sushruta reveal that midwives used to come from well-to-do families and were well-regarded as wet nurses, not umbilical cord cutters. Unfortunately, we don’t know how they gradually lost their social status and became accepted as untouchable by the higher castes.

Soma Mukhopadhyay, PhD (Jadavpur University), is a researcher from Calcutta, West Bengal, India, working in the government sector. She is interested in female empowerment and women’s health. She has studied the traditional midwives of India for the last 15 years and wrote a book on the subject, Baglar Dai (Midwives of Bengal).

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