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By Huned Contractor Delhi-based filmmaker Sameera Jain's documentary Born At Home focuses on the skills and relevance of almost 1 million traditional midwives or dais in India
 The birth of a child, especially when it happens at home and not in the antiseptic confines of a hospital's maternity ward, is not a pretty affair. In Delhi-based filmmaker Sameera Jain's Born At Home, you don't have that typical shot of a doctor stepping out of the operating theatre, taking off his mask and announcing with a broad smile: "Congratulations, it's a boy." No, here we see a pregnant woman suffering the final throes of delivery and a village dai (midwife) who will anchor the entire process of childbirth and the 'aftermath', when the blood-soaked placenta is carried away and the umbilical cord is snipped to give the child a new beginning.
 A 60-minute film on indigenous childbirth practices and practitioners, Born At Home not only unveils the mystery of childbirth, it also places it within the sphere of social norms, traditions and requirements. Jain says: "The film is also about how the doctor and the dai share the best and the worst practices. Female infanticide or even the killing of the female foetus, aided by ultrasound, pregnant women deprived of nourishment, doctors who will do Caesareans to finish a job quickly and make more money, dais who will not follow the traditional tenets of hygiene... this lack of caring can be seen in both worlds, the traditional and the modern, and the worst and the best exist in each."
According to research done by Jain prior to gaining access to the homes of pregnant women across Rajasthan, Bihar and the urban working class area of Jahangirpuri in Delhi, dais handle about 50% of births in India. While that in itself is a reflection of how rural healthcare facilities are yet to make an impact in remote areas, the issue raised here is about how the skills of the dais have been continually devalued by the mainstream. The film poses the critical question: Why does the state not recognise the almost 1 million traditional practitioners in India?
Shot on digital video, Jain's film is remarkably and brutally honest in terms of its visual stance. Childbirth may be a gory and messy affair, but Jain does not shy away from capturing the details -- a woman unable to bear her labour pains, helped later by a dai who understands the intricacies of right timing through the power of touch, the actual birth of the child, and the post-childbirth ritual that makes a woman clean once again. Explaining how she was able to cinematically enter into what has always been a closed-door event, Jain says: "At the start of the project I had decided that there would be no attempt at filming a birth. The reasons were clear -- the birthing space is an intensely private one and filming would be an intrusion into this space, creating discomfort for the mother, midwife and other attendants. This rather strongly-held position changed completely over my travels in the villages. I found that the dais were keen to share their knowledge, the pregnant women not at all averse to filming once they got to know us. Some dais actually tried to inform us in faraway villages when they felt that a birth was imminent." It was in Bihar, on a full moon night, that Jain and her team witnessed a birth. "The labour itself was an amazing experience and not just for the opportunity it offered us to observe the dai's methods, but also because we found that we were actually not perceived as obtrusive. Ironically, it was in the labour room of a public hospital that we felt intrusive -- and were glad to leave once our work was done," Jain says. This difference in attitude became all the more clear when Jain asked for permission to shoot a childbirth sequence at the hospital. "The women (in labour) at the hospital were almost pathetic in their vulnerability, their legs spread wide apart by attending nurses. These women were not even asked by the doctors if it was okay to have a camera there. Their families were not allowed to enter, but we were given permission by the head gynaecologist," Jain narrates. This taught Jain a lesson: "It's only intrusive to be in a space where no individual understanding and warmth exists. It's not intrusive to share an intimate experience if there is mutual trust," she explains.
Born At Home simultaneously showcases the skills of the dais. Amidst the human element that makes us think about how we take childbirth for granted, Jain's film makes an emphatic statement about the need to improve the lot of the dais. In villages that are so far-flung that it would be impossible for a pregnant woman to make it to a hospital in time for the birth, it's the dai who performs the miracle. And yet, it's ironical that the dai occupies a place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Born At Home was made almost six years ago but, as Jain puts it, "it is unfortunate that it has still not become outdated". Unfortunate? "Yes," she adds, "because there is still no recognition of the value of these indigenous practices of childbirth, or the knowledge of these practitioners. There is still no name for the dai in medical hierarchy, unless a state-supported programme has trained her. And most of these training programmes have a top-down approach -- there's very little attempt made to learn anything from the dais ." Sad indeed, considering how childbirth is otherwise an occasion for immense joy and celebration. Sameera Jain can be emailed at:
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-- Huned Contractor
(Huned Contractor is a freelance journalist and filmmaker based in Pune) InfoChange News & Features, September 2006
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