A Profession on the Margins: Status Issues in Indian Nursing

This joint paper attempts an unusual collaborative approach that offers an understanding of the problems that registered nurses of India have faced. Through this paper, we seek to locate the problem of ‘social status’ in both historical and contemporary landscapes, representing a relatively rare attempt to bridge the gap between studies of the institutions of colonial society, and studies of the current fortunes of their post-colonial inheritors. The study of nursing provides an important opportunity to understand the complex interaction between colonial and post-colonial modernities, and some of the results of that interaction. This is an important exercise, especially because of the invisibility of nurses and nurse leaders anywhere in the discourse on/by the women’s movement.Women teachers and doctors are highly visible, and nurses, who are seen as personification of women professionals, are almost completely absent. Even accounts of women’s movements’ history which are critical of elitism elsewhere and recognise, like Forbes, that ‘our sources on women’s work in the nineteenth and even much of the twentieth century are vague and unanalytical’ (1996: 157), do not go beyond the scope of earlier writings and look only at women like Haimavati Sen, Anandibai Joshi and Muthulakshmi Reddy, , who were doctors, as representatives of women in modern professions, while pioneer nurses are lost to history. This paper begins with an attempt to define and understand the concept of ‘status’. Implications of status in the context of the nursing education and profession are discussed as part of this section. Status concerns in Indian nursing have to be located in the modern nursing of the West because of the strong colonial connections of the modern Indian health sector in general, and nursing in particular. An understanding of the causes and origins of status anxiety is provided in the paper. In the colonial context, constant anxiety over status stemmed from the refusal of all sections of society to recognise nurse leaders’ claims that nursing was respectable, important, and could lay claims to being a profession. This anxiety was partly inbuilt into the institution of trained nursing, a gendered, culturally specific and relatively young institution of Anglo-American modernity. Nursing in the West was also characterised by endemic status anxiety, resulting from the gap between what leaders wanted nursing to be middle-class, professional, ‘noble’ and what it was in reality dominated by working and lower middle-class women, requiring labour very close to that of a domestic servant, and often viewed by the public as morally questionable. In colonial Indian society, working women’s claims about the status and importance of nursing found even less acceptance. Indian society tended to view nursing as not only menial and morally dubious, but also as polluting work typical