Whose baby is it anyway?

In a futuristic, dystopian world reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the women held captive at the Complex in Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 (2024) are forced to undergo pregnancy to fulfil the dreams of an autocratic ruler. They are confined to pods when pregnant and later discarded when a serum from the foetus is extracted. They are merely seen as vessels to bear babies and have no rights over their offspring.

The pan Indian mythic fantasy blockbuster, starring Prabhas, Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and others, is a very different film from the Malayalam drama Ullozhukku (2024) which was released a week earlier. But there is a common question running through both – whose baby is it anyway?

Ullozhukku, directed by Christo Tomy, is an intimate portrait of the equation between two women battling difficult circumstances. Anju (Parvathy) is pregnant with her lover’s child. Her husband, whom she was forced to marry, is bedridden and soon dies. The mother-in-law, Leelamma (Urvashi), believes her son to be the father and assumes that Anju will stay with her. Meanwhile, Anju’s lover, Rajeev (Arjun Radhakrishnan), displays his unease with Anju having lived with another man even as he asserts his ownership over the pregnancy. As the mother bearing the baby, Anju appears to have no rights over it. She has to remind those around her that the baby is actually hers and that nobody else should have a say on her choices.

Motherhood is venerated in patriarchal societies but curiously, the baby isn’t viewed as belonging to the mother. It is the norm in most communities for the baby to have the father’s name or surname as its last name. In the case of intercaste marriage in India, for instance, it is presumed that the child belongs to the father’s caste. This presumption was used to declare that Rohith Vemula, a PhD scholar from the University of Hyderabad who took his own life after alleged harassment by the administration, was not Dalit. While Rohith’s mother, Radhika, who brought him up, is Dalit, his father who abandoned the family belongs to an OBC community. 

Similarly, children belonging to a Parsi mother and a non-Parsi father cannot enter the Fire Temple while children belonging to a Parsi father and a non-Parsi mother can do so. This is because Parsi women who marry non-Parsi men are considered to have become non-Parsi whereas Parsi men get to retain their religious identity in an interfaith marriage. In traditionalist interpretations of Islam, a Muslim man is permitted to marry a non-Muslim woman as long as she is Christian, Jewish or Sabian (People of the Book). A Muslim woman, however, cannot marry a non-Muslim man. In the former case, children born of such unions are recognised as Muslim while in the latter, they’re considered to have been born out of wedlock.

But how and why did this happen?

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