“You drowned me in tears, where did you go?” Narratives of Reproductive Loss and Grief in Middle-Class India

Abstract

This study is an analysis of middle-class couples’ experiences of reproductive loss, the ensuing grief, and their relentless struggles in order to achieve reproductive success in Kolkata, India. Based on ethnographic engagements, the study explains how the increasingly biomedicalised setting and middle-class ethos of 21st century, urban India shape such profoundly disruptive reproductive experiences. In doing so, the study illustrates how the couple’s experiences of loss and grief were constituted by multiple and intricately entangled enactments of gender roles, gendered emotions, entities, and normative concepts. Finally, the study pays attention to the processual utilisation of constrained agency by the actors, particularly, by the women, in order to show how they coped with their loss as well as their disrupted conjugal lives.