The Shraddhanand Mahilashram shelter is located in the Matunga district, which borders on India's largest slum, Dharavi, in southern Mumbai. The white and green Art Deco building sits quietly opposite the Nirmal Hospital, which began as a children's hospital with a neonatal unit in 1983 and expanded its services to include adult patients in 2001. Since 1927, the shelter has provided refuge to women and children of all religions and castes.[FN1 Until 1955, the shelter limited its support to Hindu women and children. After that, the shelter became a secular institution providing support to women and children irrespective of religion or caste.] The institution was founded partly as a counterpoint to Christian missionary institutions that made the assistance they offered to women and children in distress conditional on their conversion to Christianity. Alice Honegger, a social worker from the canton of St Gallen in Switzerland selected children from the Shraddhanand Mahilashram for adoption by Swiss couples. Honegger was known for decades to be placing children for adoption in Switzerland without the proper authorisation.
The Shraddhanand Mahilashram shelter in Mumbai has been helping mothers and children in distress since 1927. Photo: Andrea Abraham and Sabine Bitter, February 2023
Since its founding, many of the women who visited the Shraddhanand Mahilashram came because they were pregnant out of wedlock. At the shelter, they received medical attention and social care, access to education and moral and religious instruction.[FN2 Neela Dabir, A Study of a Shelter Home for Women in Distress, SNDT Women's University, Bombay,1994.] But even here, pregnancy out of wedlock was considered an offence to society. This was reflected, for example, in the fact that the institution imposed a fine on women who had become pregnant out of wedlock right up until the 1990s.
In the everyday life of the shelters, unwed pregnant women had the lowest status, as the Indian sociologist Neela Dabir found in her dissertation on the shelter Shraddhanand Mahilashram.[FN3 Neela Dabir, A Study of a Shelter Home for Women in Distress, SNDT Women's University, Bombay, 1994.] For this reason, women entering the institution were advised to be cautious about revealing their history.
Nine shelters for unwed pregnant women in Bombay
In the early 1990s, Bombay had 25 shelters for girls and women in need. Of these, nine offered support for unwed pregnant women while also serving as adoption agencies.[FN4 Neela Dabir, A Study of a Shelter Home for Women in Distress, SNDT Women's University, Bombay, 1994.]
- Asha Sadan Rescue Home in the Umerkhadi district of Bombay
- Bal Anand in the Chembur district
- Bal Asha in the Mahalakshmi district
- Bapnu Ghar in the Mahalakshmi district
- Salvation Army in the Sion district
- Shishu Bhavan (Missionaries of Charity, Sisters of Mother Teresa) in the Parle West district
- Shraddhanand Mahilashram in the Mutunga district
- St Catherine's Home in the Andheri West district
- Sukh Shanti in the Anushakti Nagar district
In the 1990s, the Asha Sadan shelter was one of ten institutions in Bombay that offered support to unwed pregnant women and single mothers. Photo: Andrea Abraham and Sabine Bitter, February 2023.
Most of these institutions were supported by donations and some were run according to religious values. St Catherine's Home and the , Missionaries of Charity for example, were Roman Catholic institutions, the Salvation Army upheld Protestant values and the Shraddhanand Mahilashram home followed Hindu traditions. They were also open to women from other religions, however. 'Government reception centres' were another place that unwed pregnant women and mothers could turn to for assistance. Hospitals also sometimes had wards where pregnant women could stay until the they gave birth and that worked with the shelters and agencies.[FN5 Agencies were homes that had a licence to place children for adoption.]
Pregnancy and birth
Pregnancy out of wedlock was a source of stigma for both the women and their families. For most women, the only option was to part with their child – whether by means of abortion, adoption, abandonment or infanticide.[FN6 The Cradle Baby Scheme was introduced in Tamil Nadu in 1991 in response to the high rate of infanticide and was later adopted by other Indian states. This was a prevention programme that allowed parents to hand over their children anonymously to institutions, which then placed the children for adoption.] The circumstances surrounding the conception, pregnancy and birth were kept a secret. There was less risk of the pregnancy out of wedlock becoming known if the girls or women were taken or fled to distant cities during their pregnancy and childbirth. In many cases, the hospitals, adoption centres and shelters worked together. As gynaecologist Anand Ghosh*, a contemporary witness interviewed by Andrea Abraham and Asha Narayan Iyer in Mumbai in 2023 recalls:
"We had a special ward in the hospital for this type of patient. They came and were admitted for nine months. […] If they had stayed in their local community, in their own home, the neighbours would have known they were pregnant and they would be stigmatised. […] They gave birth, the baby was sent somewhere else, and they went the other direction."
Leaving home meant that the women could not rely on familiar structures, practices or people during their pregnancy. For example, they could not rely on older women in their family or community and there was no announcement or celebration of their pregnancy.
Anwara with her child in the Asha Kendra shelter in Calcutta, 1986. The photo series, published in India Today magazine in 1986, provides a rare insight into the everyday life of a shelter. It features portraits of women who stayed at the shelter after becoming pregnant out of wedlock.
Foto von Andrea Abraham, April 2023
Ambivalent places where there was care and coercion, relief and trauma
Institutions such as shelters and hospitals were often the only places women who became pregnant out of wedlock could turn to for help. Although such institutions offered women in need protection, food, medical and antenatal care, most of them doubled as places where mothers were separated from their children. In her dissertation, the Indian sociologist Neela Dabir describes how the care that could be accessed through such institutions was conditional upon the mother's willingness to part with her child:
"All these homes are reluctant to offer shelter if the woman is not willing to hand over her child for adoption. […] No other facilities are available for further help and rehabilitation."
Neela Dabir, A Study of a Shelter Home for Women in Distress, SNDT Women's University, Bombay, 1994, here p. 342.
In the example of the Shraddhanand Mahilashram shelter, Neela Dabir describes how, for mothers, parting with their child could be both "a trauma and a relief".[FN7 Neela Dabir, A Study of a Shelter Home for Women in Distress, SNDT Women's University, Bombay, 1994, here p. 301.] Shelter staff provided most of the care, while the mother came in contact with her child primarily to breastfeed. The shelter wanted the children to be breastfed for health reasons, but, as the study observed, this was difficult for the mothers for bonding reasons. Furthermore, the women in these liminal spaces no longer occupied the position and roles that had structured the everyday routines and responsibilities of family life. They were isolated from society and had to live by the rules of the institution.
Until 1991, mothers were obliged to stay in the shelter for six months after giving birth to protect them from being married off too early by their parents. The women needed time to recover and this also allowed the physical traces of pregnancy and childbirth to fade, whereby caesarean section scars and stretchmarks never disappear entirely. Shelters also saw it as their mission to restore the women to society and used the six months following the separation to help the women prepare for life outside the shelter.
In the last third of the 20th century, shelters and children's homes that were registered as adoption agencies served as the main contacts in India for Swiss adoption agencies.[FN8 For example, Terre des Hommes, Helga Ney, Divali Adoption Service (Jo Millar), Haus Seewarte (Alice Honegger), Adoption International (Rupert Spillmann), Seraphisches Liebeswerk, Elisabeth Kunz, Ingenbohl Sisters Waldtraut and Hermann-Josef and Adoption Unity (Christine Inderbitzin).]
Until the founding of the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) in 1990, there was no central point of contact in India for intercountry adoption, so the Swiss adoption agents worked directly with Indian shelters and agencies. The collaboration between the Swiss and Indian agencies was based on mutual benefit. Swiss adoption agencies provided Indian agencies with funding, in return for which the Indian agencies agreed to make Indian children available for foster placement and subsequent adoption by couples in Switzerland.[FN9 Andrea Abraham, Sabine Bitter, Rita Kesselring, "Indian Legal Practice in Intercountry Adoptions. Conclusions for Switzerland", in: Andrea Abraham, Sabine Bitter, Rita Kesselring (ed.), Mother Unknown. Adoption of Children from India in the Swiss Cantons of Zurich and Thurgau, 1973–2002 , Zurich 2024, p. 109–120.] This circumstance exacerbated the ambivalent nature of the care provided, since it placed the focus on the children, future adoptive parents and the interests of the Swiss and Indian adoption agencies. The biological mothers were largely omitted from the discourse surrounding adoption. They would try to reintegrate into society, preferably through marriage, but what their lives were like after they left the shelter remains largely unknown.
