"I always thought I was fertile": Reproductive uncertainty, bodily doubt and andarooni kami in North India.

Authors

Rashmi Patel

Published in

Social science & medicine (1982). Volume 411. Pages 119990. Oct 28, 2026. Epub Oct 28, 2026.

Abstract

This paper examines how infertility reshapes experiences of body, self, and uncertainty among married couples seeking assisted conception at a private infertility clinic in Uttar Pradesh. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across three phases between 2020 and 2023, it traces how participants moved from unquestioned assumptions about their reproductive capacity toward growing bodily doubt as repeated attempts at conception failed. The paper argues that prior to infertility, most participants carried what it terms a "fertile self": an assumed confidence in reproductive capacity so embedded in social expectations of marriage and adulthood that it rarely surfaced as conscious thought until disrupted. When conception repeatedly failed despite apparently normal bodily functioning, this confidence gave way to uncertainty and bodily doubt. Central to the analysis is the explanatory idiom andarooni kami (internal deficiency), invoked by participants and their families to account for reproductive failure in bodies that appeared outwardly healthy. The paper demonstrates that this idiom functioned as a culturally intelligible explanation for an epistemological crisis that biomedicine itself could not always resolve. It further shows that reproductive blame was distributed along gendered lines, with women's bodies subjected to suspicion on the basis of failed conception alone while doubt toward men required visible dysfunction or medical confirmation. By attending to how women interpret their own bodies before and beyond medical diagnosis, this paper contributes to anthropological understandings of infertility, embodiment, and gendered reproductive experience in North India. It argues that infertility does not necessarily begin with a diagnosis, it begins with the first unanswered question about a body that appears normal yet will not conceive.

PMID:
42967479
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Nov 2026.

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