Childbirth in the Background of a Conflict: Narratives from Bodo Territorial Region, Assam

This chapter uses a gender and intersectionality lens to examine how gender interacts with ethnicity, religion, and other context-specific elements to impact those who are vulnerable and persistently impoverished, particularly in conflict-affected areas. The chapter depicts women’s experiences of childbirth against the backdrop of an ethnic conflict based on ethnographic evidence from three case studies. The case studies describe the myriad challenges faced by pregnant women and their families from the Bodo and Bengali Muslim communities in the Bodo Territorial Region in Northeast India during an ethnic conflict between the two communities in 2012. These challenges include persecution and increased vulnerability to physical, social, economic, and psychological abuse. As in any ethnic conflict, one community was blamed as “illegal immigrants,” and the other claimed to be the “sons of the soil.” The chapter describes how the ethnicity of pregnant women mediated their pregnancy journey during the conflict. Further, within the same ethnicity, women were not homogenous and various factors further differentiated their experiences.