Call in the Midwife: Gendered Medical Knowledge and Colonial Intermediaries in French India
Jakob BurnhamOn October 29th, 1743 at seven o’clock in the morning in the city of Pondichéry–a former French colony in South Asia–the corpse of a female infant was found in some hedges. Antoine Ferrier, the city’s surgeon-major, went to examine the child, but could not be sure what had happened.[1] He declared in his report that the child appeared to be full term and had been born alive no longer than twenty-four hours beforehand. According to him, the mother could have smothered it, or she could have been injured during the pregnancy, resulting in the baby’s postnatal death. Of course, the mother, a woman named Moutou, could not be trusted to truthfully report on the event. Instead, the investigators sent their South Asian interpreters to question locals. In the course of their investigation, they uncovered the role of the midwife, Nagny, in the affair. According to them, after assisting with the birth, Nagny had brought the deceased child to where it had been found beneath the hedge. Nagny attested that, in fact, the child had not been full term but only seven or eight months along; it had come early and stillborn, “spoiled and rotten because of the mother’s pox.”[2] As was the case here–and so often in the early modern period–midwives were an essential intermediary in narrating the events of everyday colonial life.
Intermediaries were everywhere in the colonial process in South Asia during the eighteenth century, but midwives are rarely counted among their ranks. Most often, we think of the trading intermediaries that assisted merchant-agents of various European East India companies with establishing connections with local production networks to acquire desirable trade goods.[3] The centrality and importance of these positions often allowed these intermediaries to gain substantial wealth and influence in their respective colonial settings. In addition to these men, there were also linguistic intermediaries, a more diverse cast of characters that included men, women, and children from both Europe and South Asia. Jesuits often acquired language skills to assist in their proselytization mission, and young children were raised and educated in needed languages so they were fluent in both.[4] Even women born in the colonies themselves could serve in this capacity. Jeanne Vincent Dupleix, wife of the French governor-general, was born in Pondichéry and spoke multiple languages, which she used to assist her husband in his posting.[5]
These two categories of intermediaries are not exhaustive. Pondichéry and other colonial cities were populated with many other kinds of people like midwives, whose work and knowledge transcended cultural and linguistic boundaries to help maintain the running of these spaces. With few European women making the months-long trek from the continent to the Indian Ocean, colonial residents often relied on locally-born midwives to tend to them during their pregnancies. As a result of early modern medical practitioners’ perception that obstetric medical knowledge should generally remain within female hands, European male medical officials kept few (if any) accounts of pregnant women in Pondichéry.[6] Local women must have been successful in their labor, though, given the regularity of births in the city. Tragically, this work appears rarely in the records, except in cases such as the opening one, where midwives’ knowledge and experience could provide useful information in suspected criminal activities.
Yet, even from these sporadic references in the archives, midwives’ work can and should still be seen as fitting comfortably within the frame of the intermediary. Though a categorical definition can be murky at times, midwives helped other colonists navigate liminal spaces and create productive relationships in many ways. There was the work these women did with the mothers-to-be, where they assisted them in the transition between biological stages. There was their work as generational intermediaries; they literally worked to bring a new generation of colonialists into the world, thereby supporting the social perpetuation of the colonial project.
Further, they served as medico-legal intermediaries. Their unique place in society, coupled with their gendered medical knowledge, made them essential in the maintenance of the sexual-social ordering of life in the early modern world. When called upon, they could serve to support or discredit narratives of the accused. Though male officials were often skeptical and wary of their testimonies, these men still recognized the midwife’s experiential knowledge and its necessity to criminal investigations.[7]
Luckily for Moutou, Nagny’s testimony satisfied the investigators. Instead of launching a full criminal trial, officials quietly closed the episode and took no further action. In cases like this one and others where the cause of infant death was unclear or parental malfeasance seemed possible, officials looked to and usually trusted those who could lead them to a sound conclusion. Midwives assumed the mantle of colonial intermediaries by using their gendered knowledge to resolve the issues of colonial life.
Notes
- France, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, INDE, P, 024, ff.241-242, Procès-verbal d’un cadavre trouvé. ↑
- France, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, INDE, P, 024, ff.242, Procès-verbal d’un cadavre trouvé: “qu’il n’était pas à la terme n’y ayant que sept à huit mois que sa mère était grosse laquelle est gâtée et pourie de vérole.” ↑
- The scholarship in colonial intermediaries is extensive. For a Pondichéry-specific example, Sinnapah Arasaratnam, “Indian Intermediaries in the Trade and Administration of the French East India Company in the Coromandel (1670-1760).” in Maritime Trade, Society, and European Influence in South Asia, 1600-1800, 135-144. (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1995). ↑
- Children have a long history of serving as interpreters in the French colonial project dating back to the sixteenth century. For the particularities of the eighteenth century, see: Julia M. Gossard, Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World, States, People, and the History of Social Change 3 (Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). ↑
- Jeanne Dupleix, born in Pondichéry in 1706, was the daughter of a Frenchman and a Luso-South Asian woman. According to the memoirs of Ananda Ranga Pillai, she fluently spoke French, Portuguese, Tamil, and other local languages–likely Mughal Persian and Telugu. ↑
- On the debates and regulations of midwives in early modern Europe, see Susan Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France, (ManchesterL Manchester University Press: 2004), 16-43. ↑
- For more on midwives and other female medical experts in the legal process, see Cathy McClive, “Blood and Expertise: The Trials of the Female Medical Expert in the Ancien Regime Courtroom”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82: 86-108. ↑
Featured image caption: Courtesy Charanjeet Channi.
Dr. Jakob Burnham is a Lecturer of Early Modern Europe and the World in the History Department at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Georgetown University in May 2024. His research centers on early French colonialism in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dr. Burnham is particularly interested in the complicated intersections of social practice and colonial development, which he explores through a variety of themes including, medicine, domesticity, and slavery—among others. While Writer-in-residence, he will continue to examine how the archives of eighteenth-century French Indian Ocean history can reveal dynamic questions about the histories of medicine, health, race, and gender.
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