Read May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons for Free Online Page A

Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood.”
    Mayo reserved some of her most graphic prose for accounts of the methods used by dais, the village midwives, to deliver babies. She described the first dai she encountered as having a “Witch-of-Endor face,” “vermin-infested elfs-locks” and “dirty claws.” Citing doctors’ reports, Mayo wrote that if a delivery is delayed, the dai “thrusts her long-unwashed hand, loaded with dirty rings and bracelets and encrusted with untold living contaminations, into the patient’s body, pulling and twisting at what she finds there.” If the delivery is difficult, “the child may be dragged forth in detached sections—a leg or an arm torn off at a time.”
    Sixty years later, Indians still revile Katherine Mayo, although, interestingly, there has been an American radical feminist reinterpretation of her work. Mary Daly, in her 1978 book,
Gyn/Ecology
, wrote that Mayo “shows an understanding of the situation which more famous scholars entirely lack. Her work is, in the precise sense of the word, exceptional.” Mayo, in her own way, was a feminist, and although her observations often reveal more about her than about India, many of the conditions she reported still exist. Village dais,though not nearly so malevolent as Mayo described, have helped to keep India’s maternal mortality rate one of the highest in the world, even though the Indian government has attempted, with mixed success, to train the dais to give up dangerous medical practices they have followed for thousands of years. When I went to a meeting of dais organized by government health workers in a tribal region of the western Indian state of Gujarat, I learned that many of them still push on the mother’s stomach during labor, risking rupture of the uterus, and cut the baby’s umbilical cord with an old knife or a stone. On the wound they sometimes put cow dung, which they believe is an antiseptic.
    Katherine Mayo, as egregious as her views were, held a certain fascination for me. She had done, after all, what I was trying to do. There is little written about her, but one line in her entry in
Notable American Women 1607–1950
says a great deal: “Katherine Mayo’s moral indignation at the sexual exploitation of women had long been an unrecognized concern of her own life, an anxiety she could confront openly only in writing about distant places and alien cultures.” She came to India for only three months, relied extensively on British government statistics and met no women leaders of the nationalist movement. Her larger failure, of course, was the lack of balance she displayed in making judgments about a society that was less developed—and held different values—than her own.
    But how does an outsider measure India? When one assesses the government’s village health care system, should India be admonished for inadequate facilities and the lack of medicines at its clinics, or should it be praised for at least creating an extensive rural health care network? Where does one strike the balance between criticism of a five-thousand-year-old civilization and forty-year-old nation always at risk of disintegrating into religious and ethnic violence, and admiration that it has at least remained a democracy, if only on its own terms, at a time when one neighbor, Pakistan, has mostly been a military dictatorship and another, Nepal, a monarchy? For Katherine Mayo, these questions were easy. She judged India by rigorous Western standards, dismissing those before who had “swathed the spot in euphemisms.”
    I embarked on my own journey with open eyes, and in my encounters along the way I tried to understand before I judged. The first half of this book is an exploration, through the lives of certain women, of the problems that plague most other Women in India. In the middleof the book is a chapter about the current feminist movement and how it is struggling to solve those problems. The last part of the