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15 Socio-Legal Rev. 131 (2019)
Biology, Intention, Labour: Understanding Legal Recognition of Single Motherhood in India

handle is hein.journals/soclerev15 and id is 144 raw text is: BIOLOGY, INTENTION, LABOUR: UNDERSTANDING LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD IN INDIA -Saptarshi Mandal* In recent years, the state's conception of parenthood, giv- ing priority to the father in the child's public identification, has been challenged before the courts in multiple ways. The cases are sociologically significant for they capture emerging modes of parenthood outside the patriarchal family model. But more importantly, the article argues, the terms on which identification through father is dispensed with in these cases show the judicial regard for the social. The social phe- nomenon of single motherhood in India encompasses a much broader set of mothers than how the statutory law imagines this category. In addition to mothers of illegitimate chil- dren, as single adoptive mothers or single mothers using arti- ficial reproductive technologies, this group includes mothers whose husbands have died, divorced mothers, and mothers deserted or abandoned by their husbands, among others. The article shows that in according legal recognition to this broader social category, judges constructed single mother- hood not only through biological relatedness or intentionality but also as a function of who performed the labour of par- enting. Single motherhood then is a social phenomenon with multiple legal forms and normative bases. Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, OP. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Shaping Law, Shaping Gender workshop at Humboldt University, Berlin in October 2018. I thank the workshop participants for their questions and comments. I also want to thank Pooja Badarinath for reading an early draft of this article and assuring me that I had a point; Debolina Dutta, Oishik Sircar, Rohini Sen and Sayan Bhattacharya for being my sounding-boards-on-demand; and the editors of Socio-Legal Review for their close and ruthless reading that helped me clarify my argument.

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