Based on an interview with the Amitabh Prashar, the maker of a BBC documentary on female infanticide, Aparna Vats shares a spine-chilling narrative about crimes that were accepted in the past but are now under reform.
The Female Infanticide Protection Act was enacted in India 1870, 154 years ago. However, female infanticides continued to haunt some areas of Bihar well into 1990s. The number given out by a government of India report for 2019 is 36 in the whole year, with none reported in Bihar. A journalist called Amitabh Prashar came out with a new BBC documentary on this issue in 2024 after investigations carried out over thirty years in Bihar, called The Midwife’s Confession. Prashar, wrote in a BBC article of a 1995 report: “If the report’s estimates are accurate, more than 1,000 baby girls were being murdered every year in one district, by just 35 midwives. According to the report, Bihar at the time had more than half a million midwives. And infanticide was not limited to Bihar.”
Basing his coverage on the confession by dais or midwives, this film unveils the terrifying practise of female infanticide in Bihar. The documentary begins by screening the confession video of Dharmi Devi who stoically confesses to how many children she and her accomplice had killed and buried in the forest.
Prashar started his investigations when he read of a case of female infanticide near his village in Purnia, Kathiaar district. In the documentary, he explained how a news clip that came out in the Hindustan Times of Purnia, a village in Bihar, motivated him. It was a report of a father choking his infant daughter to death and was recorded as the first case of infanticide in the area. He had visited Bihar for the sake of the story as the father had been arrested and the mother was under societal pressure to withdraw the case. Through his interactions with a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) working in the area and the midwives in 1995-96, he realised that the occurrence was not an isolated case. Unmarried and a novice in this field, Parashar said he took the risk to return to Delhi and rent a camera at Rs 4500 per day to start his exploration.
He admitted getting the midwives them confess was a major struggle but an understanding of the interviewee’s personal lives helped him understand their society and circumstances better. Certain key findings were that the infants were killed by the midwives, as the families considered the girl-child a financial liability, especially for arranging dowries. The midwives were themselves struggling to arrange dowries for their own daughters.
In the documentary, Hakiya, a midwife, was the first to confess how post birth, the men of the family used to threaten the midwives with sticks and offer money to them to kill the child as the cost of care, that was primarily dowry (‘Tilak-Pratha’) for them, weighed heavier than the barbarism of this sin. Filing a police report was out of the question. The repetition of this crime had forced these women to accept this carnage. Siro Devi, a midwive who Prashar had been in touch with from 1996, confessed: “Dekhiye sir, aurat ke haath mein marna, aurat ke haath mein jeewan dena (Sir, it is in the hands of women to kill or to give birth).”
Prashar set out to uncover more. He interviewed Anila Kumari, the owner of an NGO who worked with these midwives. Bihar suffered a state of economic crisis in the 1990s when the per capita income was growing at a mere 0.12%. The sheer state of economic desolation and social oppression coerced these women to kill more than 1000 girls in a year in Kathiaar alone, claimed Prashar.
Prashar explained this story is not exhaustive in its list of injustices. Often the sole earners post-marriage, these midwives were recruited sometimes at the young age of ten. It was a customary practice passed on from generation to generation. Their remuneration was conditional to the happiness felt by the families when the child was born which was estimated as per the sex. Unsurprisingly, a girl-child rendered lesser payment.
Kumari started working with the midwives to stop the practice of female infanticide. Families trusted midwives more than doctors. The rescued children were brought to the NGO in life-threatening states and were either registered for adoption or raised by them. One of the adopted girls called Monica was put in focus in the documentary.
Prashar said in the interview that the midwives were from the backward castes and extremely poor. A deeper analysis of the inter-community relations reveal that they were themselves victimised. They also felt guilty for their actions. Rani, a midwife, who was not featured in the documentary due to time related constraints, was such a person. She was herself struggling to get her daughters married while languishing in the guilt of having killed other’s daughters. Some of the midwives were arrested. Parashar said he visited Bihar a few days prior to the release of the arrested midwives to ensure that they did not get into legal hurdles or come under societal pressure.
Mr. Parashar confessed he was but a commoner for the people and visited Purnia at least twice a year for reasons that were unrelated to the documentary. After some initial interactions, the villagers lost interest in his activities and for a documentarian, that was the best scenario. “When characters start to ignore, that is the best thing a director can think of,” he said. He self-funded his project in which shots stretched 200 hours.
The documentary starts with joggers rescuing an abandoned girl child. And then, it plunges exploring darker aspects of this attitude that sees the girl child as a burden leading not only to abandonments but also to female infanticides brought to light by the midwives. The film concludes with a heartwarming interview with the adoptive parents of the girl child rescued by the joggers and their happy eight-month-old ward.
Reference:
Aparna Vats is a student from Bangalore.
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