Garbhsanskar Guru: Sanskar Dons the Garb(h) of Caste Politics

An expecting couple’s first introduction to Garbhsanskar might be the interface of a wellness app marketing itself as a symposium of sacred Ayurvedic texts. Garbhsanskar, the ancient Indian branch of knowledge prescribing care to the mother during pregnancy, comes from the Sanskrit words garbha, womb, and sanskar, the rites of passage or values—literally, the rites of passage in the womb. It holds roots in the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, Ayurvedic texts compiled between 100 BCE and 400 CE, which prescribed care for pregnant mothers: balanced nutrition, emotional equanimity, and gentle movement. Garbhsanskar Guru, the aforementioned app, however, is ever so slightly different. It compresses decades of knowledge traced through the webbed innards of India’s past into sattvic meal plans, shloka sessions, yoga classes, Garbhsamvad (conversations with the unborn child), and what the app calls “right-brain development games”—perhaps because the right is always right! It further claims to serve 2.5 million families across 75 countries, cites a peer-reviewed study with 1,323 mothers as the foundation of its scientific backing, and modestly names itself the world’s first research-backed Garbhsanskar app on the official website. Where the practice of Garbhsanskar promises care, however, its app-store descendant offers customisation. The saffron-coloured claws of Hindu nationalism, it seems, do not spare even the youngest of us.    

Garbhsanskar is marketed as the practice of building the ‘perfect’ baby, the uttam santati, while it is still confined to the walls of the womb. It takes root in the perceived superiority of certain characteristics associated with a diaspora socially conceived as being more worthy than its counterparts; a Hindutva take on eugenics. Whiter skin and better height (the markers of an ideal person, surely!), the features that parents supposedly clamour for, are promised to expecting parents by Garbhsanskar. A sentiment not buried by the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project launched in Gujarat by Arogya Bharti, described by The Hindu as “the health and family welfare wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.” Dr. Karishma Mohandas Narwani, national convenor of the project, laid out this sentiment in plain enough terms: “Our aim is to produce superior offspring, full of values and culture. The secrets are all there in our ancient Hindu texts.” An echo chamber of blind faith, Dr. Hitesh Jani, national convenor of Arogya Bharati, a graduate of the Gujarat Ayurved University and a Sangh member since 2000, underscored this declaration. In an interview with The Sunday Express, he said, “If the proper procedure is followed, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser height can have fair complexion and grow taller. He further claims that the quest to have an “uttam santati” is dictated in the Hindu shastras, and believes that a strict adherence to Garbhsanskar both before and after pregnancy will ensure that, “The new egg and sperm thus developed will not have genetic defects”. This conflation of features such as dark skin and shorter height with genetic defects reveals the farce of a “proper procedure” rooted in eugenics, with the pseudoscience of selective breeding being re-imagined as the enforcement of casteist practices to attain so-called “superior offspring”. The Hakenkreuz was inspired by the swastika after all. 

The definition of this “proper procedure”, however, leaves much to be desired. The perverse fixation on features that are espoused with Brahmin standards, specifically those pertaining to Brahmin men, is monetised by the RSS and apps such as Garbhsanskar Guru. They advertise the elimination of features socially perceived as undesirable to parents who have learned to scorn these features on their own bodies. There exists, here, a capitalization of baseless caste stereotypes built upon generations of discrimination. The image of perfection as “tall” and “white-skinned” is not a lesson in preference, but a manifestation of casteist ideals. The Sanskrit word for caste, varna, translates literally to “colour”. With this as the foundation upon which caste logic rests, research published in ‘CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion’ depicts the construction of fairness as a marker of caste purity, and the darkness of complexion as its opposite. Garbhsaskar Guru’s promise of a fairer child is not a medical necessity, but a casted aspiration to secure hegemonic ideals and facilitate another generation of brahmanical specimens. 

The uttam santati is hence a product to be customised and bought, its personality and values mapped out before it is even conceived. It is perhaps difficult to see through the saffron haze of Hindutva ideology, especially when it feeds into the hierarchical, casteist, misogynist, and classist dogmas prevalent among the Indian populace. The supporters latch onto a lust for furthering these ideals, encouraging expecting women to “read religious texts like Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, chant Sanskrit mantras and practise yoga,” to then birth “sanskari and deshbhakt” babies. 

 Garbhsanskar Guru goes the extra mile, preaching the inclusion of a “sattvic diet” to instill good values in the fetus under the pretense of better nutrition. Protein, then, is not deemed necessary for the development of muscle in a fetus, as sattvic diets prohibit meat and poultry. Ashok Kumar Varshney shares his knowledge in this area of obstetrics, saying, “Calcium is required in the third month when bones develop; therefore, she should take milk and related products. Brain [sic.] is developed in the fifth month, hence ghee is required. When eyes develop during the sixth or seventh month, she needs vitamin A.” The regurgitation of readily available information, masked as Ayurvedic medical insights, seems to support the conception of Garbhsanskar as ‘scientific’ while aiming to eliminate the need for science-backed data. Veiled in legitimate medical jargon, the discriminatory principles underlying Garbhsanskar seem to infiltrate the lives of new-age parents, fostering a new generation of swayamsevaks. 

The idea of the “perfect baby” morphs from surface-level vanity to a sinister distinction between who fits the concept of perfection under this hegemonic dictation of procreation, and who doesn’t. The perfect child does not have dark skin, disabilities, female reproductive organs,  features such as homosexuality, or anti-caste values. The perfect child is a product of a Brahmin-aligned diet, a language that facilitated the hegemony of upper-caste elites, and religious texts focused on the teaching of only one religion. The perfect child is the poster child of right-wing Hindu nationalism. 

The irony, of course, is that many of these supposedly desirable traits are biologically unattainable through the mantras and rituals prescribed by the app. Garbhsanskar's promise reveals something about the fantasy of caste aspiration— “perfection” less as an attainable condition than as a horizon of exclusion, sustained precisely through its perpetual inaccessibility. 

An ‘unclean’ womb is the site of all disaster. As per Dr. Karishma Mohandas Narwani, an expert in Garbhsanskar, “Ayurveda has all the details about how we can get the desired physical and mental qualities of babies. IQ is developed during the sixth month of pregnancy. If the mother undergoes specific procedures, like what to eat, listen to and read, the desired IQ can be achieved. Thus, we can get a desired, customised baby.” In alignment with the ideals of the RSS, Garbhsanskar commodifies the reproductive organs of women, portraying them as objects to be fixed and altered. It is the mother who carries the child, and hence, there lies an insinuation that it is the mother who pollutes the child. Ideological fantasy turns into a state of control exerted over the female body, politicising the very site it claims to purify. It is, therefore, because of the purification of an unclean womb through the policing of expecting women that the perfect progeny is blessed upon the world. The womb becomes a political site for the construction of ideals founded in Hindutva, monitored by the state to deliver members of the population well-suited to the governing body. 

Garbhsanskar Guru, in its current form, represents a contemporary rearticulation of the Indian tradition of Garbhsanskar, recast through the rhetoric of purity, discipline, and control. It is a policing of the female body adorned in the pink petals of a lotus flower—enforcement disguised as empowerment. A campaign presented as care for the unborn and the expecting is a veiled project of erasure born out of the anxiety of upper-class, upper-caste Hindu elites. It is a recipe to quieten dissent and difference by customising the next generation, while profiting from false truths preached to expecting parents. It is the collapse between political and personal, as motherhood ceases to be the bond between mother and child. It instead becomes a duty to the state, the husband, and the unforgiving nation; a responsibility to produce ideologically brainwashed, caste-purified tools of the state. Its ideal outcome is the production of a compliant social subject, fashioned through the chanting of mantras and adherence to diets that exclude and stigmatise entire communities. A blanket acceptance of Garbhsanskar, then, comes with the condition that before a life even begins, its right to exist must be justified (Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Aishani Misra.)