During the period from the 1970s to the 2000s in India, romantic relationships that faced opposition from families or did not conform to societal expectations frequently resulted in separation. If the woman involved was pregnant or already a mother, the chance that she would find a way to keep her child was small (see also: Unwed mothers and Keeping the baby).
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Amba and Daniyal: Hindu and Muslim
Amba and Daniyal*[FN1 All names marked with an asterisk have been changed. The story of Amba and Daniyal was told to Andrea Abraham in an interview she conducted with Amba and Daniyal's son in Switzerland in May 2023.] fell in love in a northern Indian city at the end of the 1960s. Amba was training to be a nurse, Daniyal was a doctor. Their relationship became complicated when Amba fell pregnant. Amba came from a Brahmin family, and was therefore a member of the highest Hindu caste (Indian caste system). By falling in love with Daniyal, Amba had thus made a choice that should have been made by her parents: she chose her own husband. Although Daniyal worked in a high status profession, his Muslim background made it impossible for Amba's family to accept their life together (Religions in India).
Photo of a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in southern Mumbai.
Although from the 1970s to the early 2000s people of many different religions lived side by side in everyday life, interfaith marriages between Muslims and Hindus were virtually impossible or created significant obstacles.
Photo: Andrea Abraham, February 2023
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Amba was forced by her parents to leave her place of study and move to a larger north Indian city to give birth and relinquish her child. After giving birth to her son in 1969, she handed him over to a Missionaries of Charity institution run by Mother Teresa in Delhi. Her uncle signed the deed of surrender (see below), stating that Amba wished to relinquish her parental rights. Amba then returned to the village where her family lived and was married to a Brahmin man chosen for her, with whom she later had three children. She never saw her first son again. The nuns named him 'Paul' in honour of Pope Paul VI.
Video by adoptee Paul Vezin about tracing his origins
Read the audio transcript
Video Paul Vezin
0:02
You know, I was given up for adoption when I was eight days old.
0:09
So I was more than young and my life was very early linked to the orphanage of modern Teresa.
0:20
So I was with us since my 8 years old till my three years old.
0:26
After that I was given up for adoption in France.
0:35
I met Mother Teresa again when I was 10 years old in Lyon during a very big meeting, let's say in front of very, very large assembly.
0:46
So I met her again.
0:48
It was emotional.
0:50
But in the meantime, it's it's now an old memory and when you are 10 years old, it's quite, it's quite hard to say, it's emotional.
0:59
It was emotional.
1:03
She named me Paul, because I came back with the same plane as the Pope Paul, six in the plane.
1:11
When I came back to Europe, it was in 6067.
1:18
It was very important for me to discover my roots.
1:20
It was a deep feeling to to know where you come from.
1:24
This is the questions that I heard every day of my life, Where you come from, where you come from.
1:29
And this is the questions I was not able to to answer when I had my first child.
1:45
I was 25 years old.
1:49
Of course it was.
1:49
It was very important for me to go back to India.
1:52
Began to be very important for me.
1:54
I just said to myself, if one day he asked me, hey dad, where do you come from?
2:02
I was not able to answer one more time.
2:05
And I just say I have to give him some answer.
2:08
And I came back to India for the first time when I was 30 years old.
2:16
When I went back, of course I tried to to find my mother there.
2:21
The family was originally from Cogno, so I went there directly to find my family and she was belonging to quite a rich family.
2:32
So that's why I had all the papers with me, all the details, the address of the family also.
2:38
That's why I was able also to to find them.
2:41
I went to India also with my children when they were young and now my children, they go on their own.
2:48
So I was, I'm very proud of that.
2:51
I also began to learn Hindi so to be closer from my roots.
Paul Vezin
Deed of surrender for a child
'Deed of surrender' written and signed by a man in 1964 on behalf of his sister before he handed her child over to the Missionaries of Charity.
Ajanae and Fardad: Jain and Parsi
Amba and Daniyal's love story ended when she became pregnant. Other mixed-faith couples tried to find a way to make it work. Although they were of different religions, Kavindra's parents Ajanae and Fardad* from the state of Karnataka got together in the 1980s.[FN2 The story of Ajanae and Fardad was told to Andrea Abraham by an adoptive mother whom she interviewed in a Swiss city in February 2023. They are the biological parents of her adoptive daughter Kavindra.] Ajanae was a member of the Jain religion and Fardad was a Parsi, a follower of the Zoroastrian religion.
A Parsi temple in Bangalore, the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka (source: Nvvchar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
Since the early 1970s, countless Western hippies had settled on the west coast of India and Goa in the state of Karnataka became a place where people came to experience different lifestyles. It was here that Ajanae and Fardad tried to live independently of their families.
When their daughter Kavindra was born in 1993, everything changed. Fardad left his partner and child after a few months to return to his family of origin, where he was married to a woman chosen by his family from his Parsi community. Fardad was thus quickly settled in a marriage arranged in accordance with social expectations and the future his family had chosen for him. Now that she was alone, Kavindra's mother Ajanae had no choice but to return to her family. She, however, was only allowed to return home if she handed over Kavindra, who was now 14 months old, to an institution run by the Missionaries of Charity. From there, Kavindra was placed in Switzerland by Helga Ney, an adoption agent from the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, where she grew up with her adoptive parents along with two other children adopted from India.
Sundari and her boyfriend: different castes and religions
In 2002, Sundari*[FN3 Sundari's story is told by Pien Bos in the contribution "Relinquishment & Adoption. The Perspective of Indian Mothers", 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. 91–107.] was 22 years old. She came from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and was a member of the Christian Nadar community. As soon as Sundari passed her secondary school final exams, her mother sought to arrange her future with a man from the right community – a Christian Nadar with a 'good family background'. While her mother was negotiating Sundari's marriage, Sundari fell in love with a work colleague, a 25-year-old mechanic from the company in which she worked as a seamstress. They were romantically involved for a year, during which they discussed marriage and dreamed of a future together. However, Sundari was also aware of the fact that her mother would never accept the match. Sundari was not supposed to select her own groom and the man she was in love with belonged to a Scheduled Caste (Indian caste system) and was a Hindu, and thus a member of the 'wrong' religion. After she became pregnant Sundari's life turned to chaos. Her mother shouted, cried and physically ill-treated her when she found out. She did not break off the negotiations with the man she had selected for her daughter. Since it was already too late for a legal abortion, Sundari's mother decided to hide her pregnant daughter in a shelter for unwed mothers until she had given birth and given the baby up for adoption.
Sundari felt it would be inappropriate and impossible to raise her voice against her mother. She felt extremely guilty bringing shame upon her, and she strove desperately to make up for it.
Interview with cultural anthropologist Pien Bos about Indian mothers who gave up their children for adoption, June 2023, St Gallen
Transkript zum Audio lesen
00:00:00 Pien Bos
My name is Pien Bos and I'm from the Netherlands.
00:00:03 Pien Bos
I'm a cultural anthropologist and I did a lot of research in the field of adoption, but then from the perspective of the mothers.
00:00:13 Pien Bos
So I work as assistant professor.
00:00:17 Pien Bos
But this research I did as PhD student for the Ratwald University in Nijmegen.
00:00:22 Andrea Abraham
So you are one of the very few researchers that I know of that is actually doing research on a very invisible group, the birth mothers.
00:00:31 Andrea Abraham
And can you please explain how you came up with this idea on doing research on these group of people?
00:00:38 Pien Bos
Yeah.
00:00:39 Pien Bos
In the nineties I was working for an adoption agency and in the Netherlands was my first job and I very much believed in adoption as a very good intervention.
00:00:52 Pien Bos
In those days this was the dominant discourse anyway, in society, in the dutch society.
00:00:58 Pien Bos
And I thought, well, there are children without parents and there are parents without children.
00:01:02 Pien Bos
So one plus one is three, I thought.
00:01:07 Pien Bos
And then I worked in this agency and more and more questions raised in my mind, like, what is going on on the other side of the world?
00:01:17 Pien Bos
And there were ideas among the social workers, like about the background of the children.
00:01:23 Pien Bos
But I was just wondering, did anybody ask these women themselves?
00:01:29 Pien Bos
And nobody did.
00:01:31 Pien Bos
So that's the reason why I eventually wrote a research proposal and this was funded by the Ministry of Justice and by the Ministry of research and education from the Netherlands.
00:01:48 Andrea Abraham
So it was quite a challenge to actually do this study.
00:01:52 Andrea Abraham
Could you talk about the main challenges that you faced?
00:01:55 Pien Bos
And, well, getting funding is a challenge, but that's what I succeeded with.
00:02:02 Pien Bos
And then the next worry for me was getting access, getting access to the mothers, because people told me, well, nobody wants to talk to you.
00:02:14 Pien Bos
This is a taboo.
00:02:17 Pien Bos
Why should a woman share this with you?
00:02:20 Pien Bos
And you can talk to the social workers so they will give you the information.
00:02:25 Pien Bos
But that was not what I was interested in.
00:02:28 Pien Bos
So that was a big worry for me.
00:02:30 Pien Bos
Do I get access to the mothers?
00:02:34 Pien Bos
Would they like or choose to talk with me and to share this very delicate and sensitive life history?
00:02:45 Andrea Abraham
And how did you manage eventually to talk to them?
00:02:50 Pien Bos
That's a long story.
00:02:52 Pien Bos
It has to do with some practical things, but also luck.
00:03:00 Pien Bos
And these practical things are not so very interesting.
00:03:04 Pien Bos
But what is important is when I finally got access, these women were very eager to talk with me.
00:03:12 Pien Bos
So once I was sitting down with them, I hardly asked questions.
00:03:18 Pien Bos
They just shared their stories, sometimes several times and for hours.
00:03:25 Pien Bos
So this was.
00:03:30 Pien Bos
I talked with women who were.
00:03:32 Pien Bos
Many women who were in that actually period of their life, that they were carrying a child as an unmarried mother or just delivered the baby.
00:03:43 Pien Bos
So there was a lot of issues going on and there was a lot of panic and very difficult circumstances.
00:03:51 Pien Bos
And they were actually quite happy to share this period of life with me and also with my assistant, who was a professional social worker and who counselled them sometimes.
00:04:04 Pien Bos
So it was not just only very sac interviewing, but sometimes we parked the interview and stepped into another role.
00:04:14 Andrea Abraham
Today in your presentation, you mentioned a very powerful sentence.
00:04:18 Andrea Abraham
You said that also in India it is possible to raise a child as a single mother if you stay away from the agencies.
00:04:26 Andrea Abraham
Can you be more precise on this sentence?
00:04:29 Pien Bos
Yeah.
00:04:29 Pien Bos
What I try to explain today is that the stigma of unmarried mothers in India is really very severe.
00:04:37 Pien Bos
It causes a lot of suffering.
00:04:41 Pien Bos
That's clear.
00:04:43 Pien Bos
I mean, there's no doubt or discussion about this.
00:04:46 Pien Bos
But relinquishing a child, if young mothers, we are talking about teenagers, children themselves.
00:04:57 Pien Bos
If these girls relinquish a child for adoption, this is an irrevocable, irreversible decision.
00:05:05 Pien Bos
It can never be made undone, and the child will live the life of their mother.
00:05:12 Pien Bos
And there is no power anymore to get in touch.
00:05:17 Pien Bos
They are depending on the goodwill of adoptive parents somewhere on the other side of the world.
00:05:22 Pien Bos
So this is a very big intervention in a young life of a child, of two children.
00:05:31 Pien Bos
I also spoke with women who reflected upon that in India, but also in Vietnam and also in the Netherlands.
00:05:41 Pien Bos
And one thing is clear, the lives of these girls or these women, these young women, these lives change.
00:05:50 Pien Bos
They become older, maybe they really become old.
00:05:54 Pien Bos
Sexuality has a different place in the culture when you are old.
00:05:59 Pien Bos
Different meaning they get mature, sometimes they become mother again.
00:06:05 Pien Bos
And one thing is clear, they never forget about this child.
00:06:09 Pien Bos
It always remains their child in their experience.
00:06:13 Pien Bos
And signing a document doesn't change anything about that.
00:06:17 Pien Bos
They have their lifelong worries about a child.
00:06:22 Pien Bos
Did I do the right thing for my child?
00:06:25 Pien Bos
So I think we should be aware of the impact of this intervention.
00:06:34 Pien Bos
And actually, after 20 years, I think we should not do intercountry adoption anymore because it doesn't do right how mothers experience their motherhood.
00:06:52 Pien Bos
And I, they don't experience that.
00:06:56 Pien Bos
They become the ex mother.
00:06:58 Pien Bos
And the mothers that I spoke with who raised their children as unmarried mothers, they did not have an easy life, that's clear.
00:07:07 Pien Bos
But they did not have a new stigma, the stigma of a bad woman, a bad mother who is willing to sell a child.
00:07:18 Pien Bos
That's how people mention it.
00:07:21 Pien Bos
Like a mother who gives her child away.
00:07:23 Pien Bos
What kind of mother is she?
00:07:25 Pien Bos
So they were.
00:07:30 Pien Bos
The motherhood gave them power.
00:07:33 Pien Bos
Power to be proud and to be true to themselves, and it gave them also agency.
00:07:44 Andrea Abraham
And do you know anything about their children, the status of their children in society, children of mothers, of, of unwed mothers?
00:07:54 Pien Bos
It depended.
00:07:55 Pien Bos
I've interviewed mothers who left their family or sent away, and they were living separate from families who were not in touch anymore, and they were working in the city in households or expert companies or whatever.
00:08:11 Pien Bos
But I also spoke with especially one mother who was raised in a village.
00:08:19 Pien Bos
It's almost one full chapter in my book, with all the layers of difficulties also.
00:08:25 Pien Bos
But she was supported by her parents, and there was a big stigma.
00:08:31 Pien Bos
Indeed.
00:08:32 Pien Bos
But she managed, and she also was proud of herself.
00:08:38 Pien Bos
And people also respected her in a way for doing what she did.
Adoption research team, 2023
Sundari's story of 'impossible' love arose from an interfaith relationship with a man of the wrong caste. Other constellations that were doomed from the outset and often resulted in single motherhood included affairs with married men and broken promises of marriage.
Lahna and Farookh: an affair with a married man
Some women chose to end their love story without telling their partner they were pregnant. Kinjal Sethi,*[FN4 Andrea Abraham and Asha Narayan Iyer interviewed Kinjal Sethi during her research visit to India in April 2023.] who had headed an adoption agency in the state of Maharashtra since the 1970s, remembered these women. She had compiled various adoption stories she encountered or heard about in an unpublished booklet. One of the stories she tells is from the perspective of Lahna*, who parted with her daughter at the agency in the 1970s:
"I was only 15 years old […]. I went to the village school. After school, I went to the home of my maths teacher for extra tuition. We fell in love and I conceived a child. […] […] I knew he was married, so I didn't tell him I was pregnant. In the early days of my pregnancy, he was transferred to another village. I kept my secret to myself."
(Excerpt from Kinjal Sethi's unpublished booklet)
Kinjal Sethi says that Lahna went to the city in secret to give birth to her baby. Shortly after giving birth, she decided to hand over her daughter to Kinjal Sethi, asking that the baby be adopted by a family "who could give her the love and security she would have given her in happier circumstances". The daughter was then placed with a married couple.
Around thirty years later, the adoptee, who was now researching her roots, got in contact with Kinjal Sethi. Kinjal Sethi describes what happened when she first reached out to Lahna after all these years.
"When we first contacted her birth mother through a discreetly-worded message, she was overcome with fear and shock, and was almost suicidal. She worked for a farmer in the village who cultivated large fields of jasmine. The farmer saw her shock and asked her to tell her story. He was a great support to her and actively encouraged her to face her past."
Eventually, the mother agreed to be reunited with her daughter.
The four examples illustrate how from the 1970s to the 2000s, mothers were typically only permitted to keep their children within socially accepted marriages. Interfaith and inter-caste relationships often resulted in complications or insurmountable obstacles. The enduring popularity of the 'interfaith romance' genre in Indian cinema reflects society's concern and fascination with these challenges.[FN5Wikipedia lists dozens of films in this genre under the category: Indian interfaith romance films - Wikipedia] Lovers from different religious backgrounds have been defying their families and communities in their attempts to stay together on Indian screens since the1960s. (See also: Unwed mothers in film and literature.)
