Debating Women's Health: Reflections in Popular Hindi Print-Culture

This paper tries to delineate the intervention of ‘educated section’ of Bañaras with Western medicine, scientific knowledge about reproduction, reproductive organs and mechanical means of contraception and the manner in which it was discussed in the public sphere. In this context, this study explores the way women have been represented, shown or projected in the twentieth century in popular Hindi print culture. It further shows how scientific knowledge about reproduction was invoked in public? What were the debates about norms of marriage, procreation and pleasure? For this purpose, this paper examines Premchand's Godan, medical tracts published in Hindi and advertisements of contraceptives and aphrodisiacs placed in Hindi newspapers and journals. It argues that this intervention generated a rich corpus of medical tracts in Hindi which familiarize the scientific notion about body, sex and reproduction among ‘the masses* or those within the broad circumference of a reading public. Nevertheless, their main concern was only about a healthy mate progeny and man ‘s pleasure thus marginalizing woman. The ‘educated section ‘, in their engagement at various levels, sought a new pedagogical role in public life by disseminating this knowledge in paternalistic form to women and married couples. However their primary agenda was to build a ‘strong’, ‘virile' and ‘masculine’ nation. Women were expected to be ‘good’ wives and mothers, and reproduce/nourish healthy male children for this nation. On the basis of our exploration one can perhaps argue that the tracts and the debates opened issues related to sex/sexual pleasure and sexuality to the public domain.