Surrogacy and Motherhood in Neoliberal Times: Narratives of Developing India

Despite the economic success of International Commercial Gestational Surrogacy in the early 2000s, in 2021, the government banned commercial surrogacy in India. This chapter uses two contemporary Indian novels based on the themes of surrogacy and motherhood to explore the multiple issues that led to the change in this legislation. The novels under consideration in this chapter—Meera Syal’s 2015 novel The House of Hidden Mothers and Kishwar Desai’s 2012 Origins of Love—provide a picture of the two decades at the turn of the twenty-first century during which the technological and medical advancements that harnessed the reproductive labour of women and projected it as a way out of poverty and dependency ran into the troubled waters of socio-economic exploitation and the unbridled pursuit of profit. A close look at the narratives reveals the neo-colonial equations that structure the technologies and business of commercial surrogacy. The intrusion of the neo-colonial global marketplace enabled by commercial surrogacy has deep repercussions for the intimate spheres of motherhood, family, and kinship as the inequalities that shape the developing and the developed world enter the well-guarded sphere of private family life.