TRANSIENT MOTHERS

In Transient mothers I am looking at the process of surrogacy, a biological marvel and yet a source of grimace for plenty. Until 2016 (when the ART bill was passed in the parliament), India was on its path at becoming the surrogacy capital of the world. As of 2019, most clinics have stopped taking on new cases. Doctors themselves have been suggesting Ukraine and Georgia as new destinations to those who can afford it.

Surrogacy however had been a source of income for plenty of women in India for almost a decade.

Who are these women?

Born in rural areas, educated until just before they could enter high school and married right after seems to be the story of most of these women. With family incomes grossly insufficient to provide for the family, surrogacy aids in making money that would otherwise be almost impossible for them to obtain.

“We aren’t doing anything illegal. We are just helping parents who cannot have children. How is that wrong?”, most of them seem to voice out the same opinion.

I spent several months with these women, talking, eating, laughing and sometimes even gossiping. When I began this project, I knew who I was looking at and what I was looking for. I knew that surrogacy wasn’t right. It wasn’t right to take away a child from a mother. It wasn’t right to use a human body as an incubator. It was a modern marvel that probably shouldn’t have even existed. But what about the mother who, for no fault of her own, has been deprived of even the choice to have a child? What about the mother who for no fault of her own does not have the choice to be able to provide for her family? And if not surrogacy then what? The question seems to echo from the commissioning parents, surrogate mothers and now even from me.

What happens when a process that is so biological and organic and most importantly extremely personal, ends up becoming so mechanical, engaging multiple players and entailing multiple procedures?

The photo document I have shown here looks at surrogate mothers and their immediate surroundings. It looks at their lives and the space that they transiently call home just as they transiently become the mothers of the children they carry.