Janet Chawla Draft Copy, 16 August 2001, for Invoking the Goddess: Gender Politics and Religion in India Editor, Dr. Nilima Chitgopetkar The data on which this paper is based would not have been generated without the invaluable contributions of the dais and NGOs of Bikaneer in Rajasthan (Urmul); Gomia in Bihar (Mahila Jagriti Kendra); Fategarh in Punjab (Voluntary Health Association of Punjab); and Jehangirpuri, Seemapuri, Nand Nagri and Dakshinpuri in Delhi (Action India and Ekal Aurat Mahila Samooh). Likewise the MATRIKA team (Deepti Priya Mehrotra, Renuka Ramanujam, Madhu Agrawal and Lola Mathai) was essential to the evolution of workshop methodology as well as generating and interpreting the material on indigenous reproductive health knowledge. NEGOTIATING NARAK AND WRITING DESTINY: THE THEOLOGY OF BEMATA IN DAIS’ HANDLING OF BIRTH i To the extent that feminism itself views the splitting of the self as an index of the fundamental crippling of women in patriarchy, and implicitly posits a unified and continuous self as the aspiration of a feminist sense of subjecthood, we stand the risk, which is acute in a country such as India, of ceasing to be able to apprehend the voices of women who situate their experience within a religious framework. This in turn violates what is equally one of the consititutive features of feminist ethics, which would entail developing the capacity to listen to the voices of women telling of their experiences, however radically differently situated those women might be. Anthropologist Kalpana Ram ii INTRODUCTION This paper attempts to “apprehend the voices of women who situate their experience within a religious framework.” More specifically, it is trying to understand the voices of indigenous midwives as they speak about their ethno-medical work with childbearing women. It is based on the presupposition that the package of services traditionally delivered to women during