The blessings of a midwife: Interviews with Sulagitti Narasamma
Indira Chowdhury

I had read about Sulagitti Narasamma some years before meeting her. She was a traditional midwife who had been honoured in 2013 with the first National Award for Senior Citizens – the Vayoshreshtha Samman and in 2018 with the fourth highest civilian award of the Republic of India, the Padma Shri. She had been honoured by two Presidents: Pranab Mukherjee and Ram Nath Kovind; bestowed the Rajyotsava award by the State of Karnataka in 2013 and conferred an honorary doctorate by Tumkur University in 2014. In my ignorance, I had assumed ‘Sulagitti’ was her name. It was not. The word, ‘sulagitti’, I learnt, was Kannada for the traditional midwife, the woman who assists with the delivery of babies. Her name was Narasamma, but everyone called her ‘Midwife Narasamma’ – identifying her with her occupation. As I discovered when I interviewed her, being a midwife was more than her ‘profession’, indeed, it was her calling.

My first meeting with Sulagitti Narasamma in a hospital in Tumkur, 26 August 2018. With me is T.B. Dinesh. She blesses me as we sit down to talk.

Our very first meeting takes place in a hospital in Tumkur in August 2018. She was unwell and had been admitted the day before. I tell her son that I would come back another time, but he tells me she is keen to meet me and I should drop by. I make my way there with my friend, T.B. Dinesh of Janastu, which serves “non-profits with free and open-source software, developing ways for re-narration of the web with web accessibility for the print-impaired”. (see Wikipedia]. It is Dinesh who had found her son’s contact for me. Together we arrive at the hospital where Sulagitti Narasamma sits surrounded by her children, grandchildren and other relatives. She greets us with blessings. She insists that she would like to record her story. I am uncertain whether this would be the right thing to do. Would the doctor not reproach us? I ask, trying to avoid recording in the hospital room. She smiles and says she has helped people of the doctor’s mother’s generation give birth – implying that she, therefore, has the authority to decide what she could do or not do. She begins by recording the names of her parents, her grandmother and other family members. But the most memorable story she tells me is about the first flight she took to Delhi. She tells me that President Pranab Mukherjee had honoured her in 2013 with an award for which she had travelled by plane to Delhi.  It was her first flight. After she had boarded the plane, which she thought was a bus, she fallen asleep and had woken up only after the aircraft had landed in Delhi. She had reprimanded her son that he had misled her about coming to Delhi – “I know it takes three days to reach Delhi. Just because I have not gone to school, are you trying to fool me?” After the award ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan, she had boarded another flight. This time, her son had ensured she had a window seat. She tells me she had looked out the window in wonder:

Sulagitti Narasamma: While I was coming back. I looked out and I saw all the gods and I bowed down.

Pavagada Sriram: She told me, “See, my son, there is Bheema, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva, all going together. Fold your hands and do namaskara.”

SN: But he refused to do namaskara because everybody else will see!

PS with T. B. Dinesh translating: She was looking around and she saw the Air Hostesses coming towards her and she started bowing to them as well. The Flight attendants looked like goddesses to her. She thought they are deva kanyas (literally, ‘daughters of the gods’). She said, “Look! deva kanyas have come here!” The flight attendants bowed to her, they came up to her and held her hands and said, “Ajji (grandmother), you are elder, you should bless us. We learnt about your achievements on TV.”                     

After they left, Sulagitti Narasamma told her son, “See my son, when you do punya (good) in life, deva kanyas come and touch your hands. You did not do any punya – that’s is why they did not touch you! [ Interview with Sulagitti Narasamma, Session 1, 26 August 2018].

That day, as we take leave, I promise to return, she orders her son, “Offer them some buttermilk.” No matter, this is not her home, the traditions of taking care of a guest, could not be ignored. Then she blesses us again: “May the reasons for your birth be fulfilled. May the gods take care of you.” And then, “You must come and visit me in Tumkur where my two sons and their wives live. You must come home and have a meal.” Followed by a mild reproof, “This is not how you visit.”

It is unusual to come across practising dais or traditional midwives in present day urban India. Vilified in the colonial period, traditional dais were viewed as ‘dirty’ and ‘evil’. Katherine Mayo, the American journalist writing her essay, ‘Mother India’ in 1927 had presented them as ‘ignorant’ women who promoted ‘unhygienic’ birthing practices. This attitude towards the dais, Krishna Soman reminds us in a recent paper, “was probably an extension of domination not only in political power but also the institution of knowledge related to childbirth and it’s ‘management’.” [Soman, 2011]. The medicalization of birth, the promotion of biomedicine over indigenous medical systems for being more ‘scientific’, had marginalized the existing indigenous medical systems and the traditional midwives. This had continued after independence which brought with it an emphasis on institutionally trained Auxilliary Nurse Midwives (ANM). But in 2010, the Jeeva Project turned away from such stereotypes to research the services dais provided in remote villages and observed and studied their skills and their knowledge using a framework that combined public health and indigenous knowledge systems.  This study used quantitative and qualitative methods as well as oral histories with dais; it covered a population of 40000 spread across four states in India – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh. The Jeeva project brought to the fore a community-based perspective and focused on the many contributions the dais make to maternal and newborn health. Acknowledging the skills of the traditional dais, the Jeeva study argued for “letting the Dais continue their work in co-ordination with the formal care providers and envisions safer childbirth through strengthened community-based birth attendance with appropriate support from the formal health care system.” [ Sadgopal, 2013] I had read some of the oral histories before meeting Narasamma and my interviews with her confirmed the role she had played within the community.

When I return to Tumkur in September and October that year to interview Sulagitti Narasamma, she repeats her story several times adding different details each time. She speaks Telugu, a language I don’t understand, I rely on her son, Pavagada Sriram to translate. Narasamma was born on 16 June 1920, in a village called Thimmenayapete in Pavagada in the district of Tumkur, Karnataka. She was one of her parents’ seven children. Her parents were Kadirappa and Bavamma. Her father, Kadirappa was a leather worker who earned a living by making leather containers (‘kapila bane’ in Kannada) that were used for drawing water from wells. They were chamars by caste and lived on the outskirts of a brahmin village, Swamigalu halli (later renamed, Krishnapura). She had grown up in the hut her father built on the land he bought with money earned from leather work. The dwelling was small, she tells me, a mud and stone structure, with three rooms – there were two rooms for the animals, one for the oxen, cows and buffaloes, one for the sheep and goats and one in which the family cooked and slept in during the monsoons. The rest of the year, they would all sleep outside.

Sulagitti Narasamma at her son’s home in Tumkur, 20 September 2018.

Narasamma’s grandmother, Marigamma, had two daughters and had lost her husband when she was quite young. Narasamma’s mother, Bawamma, was Marigamma’s younger daughter. As a young widow, Marigamma worked as a midwife or as Narasamma put it, did ‘Sulagitti work’ in the village of Madakasira. She did not charge money for the work she did and villagers took care of all her needs, offering her food, clothes, and any implements she needed. Narasamma recalled that her grandmother would take her along when she went on call as a midwife.

Narasamma was only twelve years old when she was married to Anjinappa from Krishnapura village in Tumkur district. But the Sarda Act or the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 was in force which restricted the age of marriage of boys to 18 and girls to 14. Her son, Sriram prompts her to tell a family story about her wedding. After the wedding when she was going to her husband’s home, she had to pass the Pavagada police station. To avoid arrest she and her husband had changed into ordinary clothes and walked past. Her elder sister had donned Narasamma’s bridal wear.

Her young husband was dark and very tall she tells me. He had spent time training with her father and was very skilled. He worked with leather, making shoes as well as waterskins; he knew how to work with metal, making tools for farming; he also worked with wood, making doors and windows; he made musical instruments such as drums and tamburas. She tells me how he had made her a black leather bag in which she would carry all the things she needed for the delivery of a child. She would use go mutra [cow urine] to purify the area outside the threshold as was the tradition. In her bag she would carry pieces of clean cloth, a piece of iron, needle and thread, leaves, roots, cloves and garlic which she used as medicine and a razor-sharp knife with a straight-edged blade which her husband had made for her. The knife would be heated and made ‘pure’ (sterilized) before use.

She tells me she was still an adolescent when she delivered the first baby. She was married by then but had not yet had a baby herself. Her husband’s aunt, Kanumakka, who was pregnant, had returned early from work, feeling too weak to continue the manual labour she did for a living. All other women in the neighbourhood were away at work, and Narasamma was alone at home. Seeing Kanumakka writhing in pain she understood that her time was near. She summoned a young girl to help and delivered her aunt-in-law’s baby. Kanumakka blessed her saying, “Narasoo, this is the easiest delivery I have experienced. Your hands are blessed. You should do this service.” (This incident is described in detail in Dr. S.P. Padmaprasad’s book, Mother of Thousand Babies).

Narasamma had twelve children in all but lost four of them when they were very young (two were mere infants). Her grandmother Marigamma helped her with the birth of her first four children. As for the others, she would go inside the room to give birth with a couple of women and instruct them to help her as she managed her own labour and the process of giving birth.

Her work as a midwife was not confined to her own village; she mentions that people came with vehicles from Raichuru and Guduru and she would travel with them to deliver babies. But not everyone appreciated this messy work of the Sulagitti. Although her husband would teasingly say “Here comes “Doctor-Amma!” when she got back. Others in the family wanted her to stop doing this ‘polluting’ work. Her husband used to make buttermilk for which there was demand, but as Narasamma continued her “Sulagitti” work, people stopped buying his buttermilk.

Despite such expressions of social rejection, Narasamma continued the “Sulagitti” work which she saw as her lifework. In this she was not different from the dais that the Jeeva Project interviewed in Northern India. Janet Chawla mentions that “Dais often refer to their work as ‘sewa ka kaam’ or ‘work of service.’ (See Chawla, 2006). Narasamma told me more than once during our interactions that she ‘did God’s work’, nobody else could help the woman when she was in labour, only she could. She tells me with great pride that she was called in especially for difficult births. The first time I meet her she tells me of a Brahmin doctor who came and took her to his house to manage a difficult birth.

“In our village, our community is not supposed to cross theirs. Even so the doctor came. They took me to their house.”

Then she continued:

“The doctor said that in the hospital, “We gave injections, we gave medicines, still nothing is happening. You can manage anything.” And this doctor was a Brahmin!” [Interview with Sulagitti Narasamma, 17 September 2018].

Her youngest son, Sriram, explains how there were strict rules about crossing the boundary wall and entering a Brahmin home. Besides, she was also mistreated in some upper caste homes where she was asked to deliver the baby in the courtyard. In her recollection, she had always remained calm and focused on the task at hand even when there was ill-treatment along with hostility. After all, she had to help the woman who was suffering, and she had to help birth the baby. She tells me there were many communities in and around her village – the Brahmins, Kurubas, Irulas, the Nayakas but as a Sulagitti she saw all of them as equal; when giving birth all women suffered pain and she had the knowledge of offering relief and help bring forth new life. A story that she narrated one morning spoke not only of of her quiet strength but her phenomenal intervention in the world. Once she was asked to stop serving the upper castes. She ignored this instruction because she told me with a smile, in a few months, this man’s wife was due to deliver, and I knew he would come to me! When he did, I told him I had already met his wife, and I would take care of her when her time came. She had added that no matter the community, the suffering women went through during childbirth is the same. It was best not to drag that into politics, she had said. Her quiet dissent questioned the limits of politics. Her worldview in which women’s suffering was the same irrespective of the social class or caste and all women needed relief from suffering was one that was suffused with the wisdom that came from lived experience.

Sulagitti Narasamma with her son Pavagada Sriram, 9 October 2018

Her commitment to service had made her fearless in other ways too. She tells me about the difficult delivery of Marakka, the wife of Chandrappa who was from Budubudukula. Chandrappa belonged to a nomadic tribal community from Andhra Pradesh who are itinerant fortune-tellers and performers who she tells me later had a special relationship to birds. This community had come to Krishnapura and was staying along with their animals in make-shift tents in the outskirts of the town, near the forest. One night it was raining heavily when Chandrappa’s wife went into labour. Narasamma was summoned. She took her bag and laboriously navigated the slippery mud path into the forest area. It had taken her 3 or 4 hours to get there, and she delivered the baby safely. The tribals were joyous when the baby was born alive and gave her some herbal medicines they made using plants from the forest. She recalls that she learnt about some of these medicines from the tribals.

Narasamma plays with her young grandson, Suryagupta, Her sons, Sriram and Ramakrishnaiah sing the burra katha, Tumkur, 9 October 2018.

Narasamma’s reputation as a skilled midwife circulated widely. Some years prior to this incident, she had helped a folk artist Poosalu Gangamma deliver her baby. Gangamma had honoured Narasamma with a burra katha about her – a form of oral storytelling that is musically rendered. On 20 September 2018 when I meet Narasamma, her son Sriram sings what he recalls of the song. In October, he and his brother, Ramakrishnaiah (who is Sulagitti Narasamma’s eleventh son) perform the burra katha for me. The song is translated for me by Vidya Sigri who tells me about the Narasimha temples in Andhra Pradesh and my friend, Kamalini Kanneganti provides a cultural commentary. Together, the translation and commentary provide the context which would have been lost in a mechanical translation. Part song, part narration, the story begins with various incidents related to Narasamma:

“Sulagitti Narasamma went in the middle of the night to deliver the baby of Budubudukula Chandrappa’s wife – of the nomadic people who lived far away from the village. She travelled far and wide – on foot, and on bullock carts to deliver babies. She is a midwife who never refuses to come to your aid. She lived in Swamigalu palli and would do good to everyone. “If you call her, she responds always! And this is why people wait for her.” – the chorus chants. [Recording of Burra katha by Pavagada Sriram and Ramakrishnaiah, 9 October 2018.]

The song then provides Narasamma’s genealogy: names her father Kadrappa, her mother Bavamma and her grandmother, Marigamma from whom she learnt to deliver babies. The performance elaborates the incident when she went with her grandmother to a home where a baby was to be born.

Her uncle, Durgappa tried to make the child sit outside and gave her the task to chase away other children from peeping in. But Marigamma did not agree. She said her daughter would really beat her up if anything happened to Narasamma. In the words of the song: “Fate couldn’t intervene or stop her!” and the “little Narasamma absorbed the basics of delivery work with her two eyes and registered everything in her little head.” [Recording of Burra katha by Pavagada Sriram and Ramakrishnaiah, 9 October 2018.]

The song repeats what she had already told me in a slightly different way. She told me that most people would object to this little girl being allowed into the birthing room. But her grandmother would insist, “What if this child just runs off and I cannot find her afterwards? Let her sit inside, or I shall worry so much that I won’t be able to work.” And so it was that the young Narasamma began to observe childbirth very closely. She also observed her grandmother dealing with difficult births or gently turning the baby if it was in a breech position.

On my second visit to Tumkur in September 2018, she is keen that I stay back for lunch and have the chicken curry and rice she had promised to serve me. Though she herself eats a frugal meal of idli and sambar or rice and sambar by herself around 11 am, she sits around and is very pleased that I appreciate the meal. This time I also visit a school that Sulagitti Narasamma’s son, Sriram has set up. The Darvin International English School is named after renowned naturalist, Charles Darwin, as Sriram tells me. The campus of the school is named after Sulagitti Narasamma. This must be the only school that has a campus named after a traditional midwife.

The Darvin International English School at Tumkur where the campus is named after Sulagitti Narasamma. The courtyard wall has a large painting of Narasamma. Tumkur, 20 September 2018.

Narasamma’ process of learning about childbirth through observation while accompanying her grandmother, was not very different from the learning processes that dais in Jharkhand recalled when they were interviewed for the Jeeva Project (2011-2014):

… the dais’ learning is a unique system of apprenticeship…. Almost all dais interviewed come from families where dai work has been a tradition and they start at the early age of 8-9 when they go along with their grandmothers, mothers, and aunts wherever they are called for a delivery. Sitting crouched next to their mothers they observed keenly every movement that was made. They were told, “Just come with us and see exactly how I do things and you do it that way. It will be good for you” (Kalo, age 45) … These observations were then transformed into their play where little girls conducted births on each other. (Chawla, 2013)

Narasamma’s apprenticeship taught her to trust her hands – to feel the pulse of the baby, to measure with her hands if the baby’s head had ‘engaged’ and know if the time of birth was near – all these remained a part of her experiential learning. Several times during our interactions she keeps showing me her hands – emphasizing she used only her hands to help with birth – no instruments. Her hands, though old and wrinkled now are delicate and small. As she holds out her hands, I think of the all the new life that her hands have held, all the children she has helped birth. And she makes me see that a midwives hands represent embodied knowledge, indeed, they are a depository of sensory understanding, of feeling temperature, sensing dryness, perceiving the movement of fluids below the skin, of identifying shapes that move and change and recognizing the readiness of a body to give birth. (See also, Chawla,2006).

As she holds out her hands, I think of the all the new life that her hands have held, all the children she has helped birth.

What herbs did she use during delivery I had asked, Narasamma said she used medicinal plants – leaves, barks, roots, fruits of the Neem and the Ravi mara or the Peepal tree. She had also learnt of other plants from the Budubudukula community – the nomadic people she had helped. But she couldn’t recall them at that point. And did she pray to any particular god when she worked? I wondered. She said she always asked the god that the family prayed to protect the woman who was in labour; she herself prayed to Ahobilam Narasimha – the lion-headed avatar of Lord Vishnu whose nine temples at the pilgrimage site of Ahobilam in Andhra Pradesh are believed to be very powerful. Indeed, Narasamma’s name is derived from Narasimha, the fourth avatar of Vishnu.

Looking back on this interview I am struck by the number of times Narasamma repeats her story – as if to make sure that I had understood the essence of what she had done in life. Long after the interview, another surprise unfolds. I had shared with Sriram, Narasamma’s youngest son, the consent form for the interview. As in all my interviews with those who are non-literate, I prefer the process of recording an oral consent after explaining what I would do with the interview. I never insist on them marking a printed consent form with their thumbprint – we in India, well know how many times the non-literate have lost their lands by putting their L.T.I. (left thumb impression) on a piece of paper that they were unable to read. Sriram had held the consent form in his hand and spoken in Telugu to his mother. She repeated the words after him and added some sentences of her own. All the while, she had her hands placed on my head to bless me. This one time, Sriram had not translated what his mother had said. I was curious about what she had said, and it took me a long time to find a speaker of Telugu who would skilfully translate and explain the nuances of what she said.

Narasamma’s consent begins by greeting me by name with a namaskara. She tells me she is ninety-eight years old and had done this work for seventy years with no mistakes. She then named sixteen villages where she had delivered babies. She had performed her duties with no error and had offered dietary advice to women who were pregnant as well as to new mothers. Mother’s milk, she says is best for the baby – it is one medicine for all diseases – like the arrow of Rama (Rama vanam). She had knowledge of sixty-four herbs, leaves and roots and she had gained this knowledge from her grandmother as well as communities such as the Budubudukula nomads who talk to the birds and other tribal communities. She also used this knowledge to help those who could not conceive a child – she would give the couple roots and shoots of medicinal plants and ask them to ‘cooperate’ with each other and not quarrel; together the couple had to offer puja and pray for the good fortune of a child (santana bhagyam). When a woman does not conceive, she is cruelly called ‘barren’ or ‘infertile’ (godralu in Telugu), Narasamma mentions this and declares when a woman has no children, she should not be blamed because it could also be the shortcoming of the man; that is why too both husband and wife had to take the medicine she prepared. She would also prescribed mantras for the couple to recite which her grandmother, Marigama had taught her. But she repeats again, under no circumstance, should the woman be called ‘barren’. She then goes on to say, what she feels is the most important thing she had learnt in her life:

“Everybody who is born must die one day. Between birth and death, it’s the good deeds we do that protect us. The work of a Sulagitti was given to me by God. I have done this for seventy years. This work is more sacred than offering pujas to crores of gods, because delivering a baby is a good deed that helps me and helps the people I help, it also helps the babies who are born and therefore, so many people. Delivering a woman from labour pain is more sacred than a puja. May good things happen to everyone.” (Interview with Sulagitti Narasamma, 20 September 2018).

My consent form had mentioned that I was doing a project on the oral history of midwives and she blesses me saying, “May you have success in whatever you have set out to do.” This mode of consent might surprise oral historians who want the consent form to be replicated exactly in the language of the narrator and to be read out verbatim. But here she was, greeting me by name, repeating her story and wishing me success in my project! Her repetition was perhaps a way of reminding me of the key aspects of the work she had done and through the additional compassionate reflections she included on the barren woman, she had shared the wisdom she had gained in her years as a Sulagitti. My translator, Rekha Suhas had paused and commented on Narasamma’s radical statement about the barren woman which conventionally minded people cruelly and unthinkingly repeat even now. “She was ninety-eight when she said this?” she had asked in wonder. We had both paused to acknowledge how exceptional she was, how her questioning of conventions was done gently but with authority. And for me, as an oral historian, the occurrence of this statement in the consent form articulated one more intervention in the world she lived in.

I have always felt as an oral historian, I am committed to understanding how people live in the world they inherit, what they learn, what they observe and the thoughts they wish to share. I have always been mindful of not pushing my narrators to speak about the things they do not wish to revisit. But I have always been curious about how people step into a situation and alter the outcome. In the case of Sulagitti Narasamma, I started with trying to understand her life as a traditional midwife, but our conversations led me to an understanding of her phenomenal intervention in the world. And that is what I felt grateful to listen to. Today, 16^th June 2026, would have been her 106^th birthday and I am happy to share her story and my reflections on what she had taught me.

Some years before I conducted this interview, I was trying to explain to my mother the work I did. As long as I taught at the university, my mother understood my working life well, but she was puzzled about my new work as an oral historian. After I explained, she was quiet for a long time. Then she told me, “So this work you do now – you must be showered with blessings by the people you interview. Nobody wants to sit down and listen to people’s stories, you know.” In my mind I thought of these blessings as something people did silently. Maybe they blessed me, I wasn’t sure. I was an oral historian recording what might otherwise be lost, finding webs of meaning that were so often violently brushed aside. But maybe, my mother was right, may be, this work also helped people look back at their lives with a sense of purpose. Though I was not sure at the time, my mother’s understanding did help me see my work as doing some good in the world. Though I never wanted to admit it then, that thought and the pleasure it brought remained lodged in my heart for a long time. Sulagitti Narasamma passed away on 25 December 2018, barely five months after I first met her. My mother died some years later and I never had a chance to tell her that apart from all the other blessings I had gathered, I had received one that was articulated aloud in words and action when Sulagitti Narasamma had offered me the gift of her story.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the family of Sulagitti Narasamma and particularly, her youngest son, Pavagada Sriram for supporting my interview with his mother and always answering the questions I had. I thank T.B. Dinesh of Janastu for accompanying me to meet Narasamma for the first time. I thank the many translators of the recordings: Priyanka Koleri, Hemantha Kakani, Rekha Suhas and Vidya Singri. Thank you to Kamalini Kanneganti for her comments on the recordings. As always, I am deeply grateful to Vivek Dhareshwar for his insightful interlocutions.

I acknowledge the Jeeva Project which worked on the world of the traditional midwives led by the Jeeva Shepherds: Mira Sadgopal, Imrana Qadeer, Janet Chawla, Leila Caleb Varkey, Anuradha Singh, Sandhya Gautam. I thank particularly Lindsay Barnes for all that she taught me.

References:

Janet Chawla, ‘Out cast women and cast out birth knowledge’ in Arima Mishra and Suhita Chopra Chatterjee (eds)., Multiple Voices and Stories: Narratives of Health and Illness. India: Orient Blackswan, 2013.

Janet Chawla, ‘Mapping the Terrain’, in Birth and Birthgivers: The Power Behind the Shame. India: Har-Anand Publications, 2006.

Mira Sadgopal, ‘Towards Recognition of Traditional Midwives (Dais): The Jeeva Study’, IIAS Newsletter, No. 65, Autumn 2013. https://www.iias.asia/sites/iias/files/nwl_article/2019-05/IIAS_NL65_26.pdf

Krishna Soman, ‘Women, Medicine and Politics of Gender: Institution of Traditional Midwives in Twentieth Century Bengal,” Occasional Paper No. 32, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, 2011. https://idsk.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/OP-32.pdf

Dr. S.P. Padmaprasad, Mother of Thousand Babies: Dr Sulagitti Narasamma, Tumkur: Gadinadu Publisher, 2014.