A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India

Abstract

The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the hub of Global North medical infrastructure and scientific advancement, at attractive Global South rates. Legalized only in 2002, international commercial gestational surrogacy (ICGS) in India, a lucrative niche market within the sector of medical and healthcare tourism, has been an industry worth US$ 2.3 billion annually at its peak. Now, however, it stands on the brink of being banned by a bill introduced in the Indian parliament in 2016. This essay advances the argument that the selling points of ICGS have been premised on structural and systemic inequalities of gender and class, as well as of biopolitical power. We further build on Graham Huggan’s early twenty-first-century thesis on the marketing of the postcolonial margins to explore the emergent gendered subjectivities and attendant fictional representations of ICGS and its various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India’s ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.

• India
• international commercial gestational surrogacy (ICGS)
• postcolonial literature
• re-orientalism
• Syal
• Meera

ORCID

Ana Cristina Mendes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-0701

Notes

1 In an article on the banning of surrogacy in India, Rudrappa (2017) states this industry was estimated “to have garnered anywhere from $400 million to $1 billion per year.”

2 This advertisement used in a medical tourism website is quoted by Reddy and Qadeer (2010, 71), but the website is no longer active.

3 The label “New Indian Woman” (Lau 2010) has been applied to middle-class, educated, urban Indian women, who are able to have career and incomes, carving out new spaces for themselves, having opportunities new to their generation, taking up new roles and pursuing autonomy in areas of life ranging from the financial to the romantic.

4 For an overview of the ways recent cinematic narratives on commercial surrogacy in India offer a critique of the contested bodies of neoliberalism, see Mendes (2018).

5 The term “mothers” can be contentious in this industry; in an attempt to isolate the rights of surrogates over the baby, they are often referred to only as “surrogates” rather than “surrogate mothers” with that parental stake implied in the term. However, by Indian law, the woman who delivers the baby is the mother and contractually has to relinquish her rights before the commissioning parents can “adopt” the baby, give it citizenship of the intending parents, and gain an exit visa from India.

6 It is worth noting that Ram’s surname is not given, and there is no sense of Ram and Mala being a family unit as such, which also then makes it more plausible that Mala so lightly leaves her husband, both to come to the UK for the remainder of her pregnancy, as well as for the long term, to live with Toby and bring up her child. (Presumably, she marries Toby for her continued presence in the UK to be legalized).