What does it mean to mother alone in a country that reveres marriage?

Despite societal judgment and legal hurdles, India’s single mothers are carving out resilient lives on their terms. But can they reshape society’s perceptions?

Beena Babu, 33, is a Mumbai-based banking professional who met her husband when she was 19. They fell in love and got married in 2013; had a baby in 2015, but headed for separation by 2019. Incidents of domestic violence, abuse and exploitation by her husband led Babu to pull herself and her child out of a situation that felt like a trap.

By 2022, the couple had gone their separate ways, and Babu now raises her son alone, with visits to his father twice a month. “Being single is not very daunting, especially after all the emotional trauma you’ve gone through, it feels like it’s better to be single than go through all that again,” she says.

Babu is among the growing tribe of single mothers in India, which, according to a report by the United Nations released in 2019, shows that 4.5 per cent of Indian households, or 13 million of them, are run by single mothers. This marks a significant increase from 4 per cent in 2015. Babu attests to the fact that while this freedom of parenting alone can feel liberating—to bring up a child the way one pleases—it can also come with its pangs of loneliness. “There are those times when you wish there would be someone to help you share your load, take care of your kid, give you a break. That emotional drain you face of handling everything—finances, their education, household—all by yourself, takes a huge emotional toll. So, more than anything else, it’s lonely,” she says, admitting that ideally, parenting is a two-person job, and she isn’t closed off to finding love and companionship in the future.

The different single mothers

Renu Ghai, a 29-year-old school teacher in Kochi, has wanted to adopt a child for five years now, even when she was dating a man until two years ago. Despite having no plans of marriage, they had discussed adopting a child together, which, after their separation, Ghai realised was something she still wanted to pursue as a single woman. “It’s not the easiest choice, but what is, especially if you are a woman?” she asks.

Among the myriad criteria listed for single women who wish to adopt a child in India, a major one demands they have a robust support system—something that may be challenging to prove for single adoptive parents who live away from family or have a nuclear one. “I don’t have siblings, and my only surviving parent is my mother, who is too frail to look after a child all by herself because she has a long-term ailment. I know I can afford help if and once I have a child, but how do I prove to the authorities that I am ready to take on the job just because I have a very small family?” Ghai asks. She agrees that it takes a village to raise a child, but she also does not subscribe to the heteronormative definitions of a family comprising a man, a woman and a child. “If I believe I am capable of raising a child because I am financially secure enough to do so, and have non-familial support to look after my child in my absence, why should the state make it that much more difficult for me to achieve that?” she asks.

The answer, perhaps, lies in the ways in which society defines the single mother. “Is she single because she is unmarried, separated, divorced or widowed? Widowed single mothers can be objects of sympathy—they were married and started a family within the supposedly sacred marital unit—whereas the unmarried single mom chose to be a mother outside it. This is so because marriage is still largely considered the only morally acceptable way to have sex and make babies,” says Dr Amrita Nandy, visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Her research focuses on women’s non-normative choices vis-a-vis motherhood, mothering ideologies and the family.

According to Nandy, certain stigmas, such as unwed motherhood, may be condoned in small circles where women are financially independent, live feminism as their politics, and would choose to have a child outside marriage to make a point. However, by and large, “single mothers cannot be seen as ideal for raising a child alone. We can be so hypocritical as to first make life difficult for single women and then tell them how hard it is to be a single mother, so they’d better marry. All of this is a way to regulate women's sexuality and autonomy,” Nandy says.

In her book titled Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women (2017), Nandy illustrates the thoughts and trepidations surrounding the subject of single motherhood.

“…lately there have been queries from single women in their 30s. They think it is a romantic idea…(in a mocking tone) ‘let us not get married, raise a child on our own, we are strong women’. When a child is young, you can still raise the child with the help of your parents, etc. But when this child grows up, especially if it is a boy who goes to school, has a circle of friends, it is difficult for the child. You know single women usually work. They are busy, have no time. So how they will do it? We look for single women with strong support systems but see, if the baby is going to be raised by the parents or a maid then why adopt? Even the father figure is absent. Both a father and mother are essential…”

In this excerpt, the scholar underlines the fact that conventional morality always defines the single mother as an inadequate, anomalous figure. Ironically, this co-exists with the figure of the absent father—a normalised stereotype who is entrusted with being the sole breadwinner, which, in turn, justifies his absence. The same, however, rarely holds for a mother.

The guilt of being a single mother

Raised by a single mother herself, Mumbai-based journalist Swati Chopra, 40, has a nine-year-old son she has been raising with help from her mother for the past four years ever since her divorce. Much like Babu, Chopra’s son, too, visits his father occasionally, mostly to do “fun stuff”—like he would on a holiday—whereas home is where rules are followed. “I have just made peace with the fact that he will hate me sometimes for making him do homework and go to bed on time. He will sometimes come back home and say he hates it here and he loves it at his dad’s, but I’ll take that. Not having my son with me when we were separating was never an option,” Chopra says.

While growing up, Chopra saw her mother go through a divorce as she raised two children, which initially led her mother to want to urge Chopra to try and make her marriage work. But Chopra knew it was over, as she and her ex-husband had started to look at life differently. “I have grown up in a very unhealthy home environment, so I know the kind of trauma it can leave on a child or the low relationship standards it can set,” she says. Chopra wanted to normalise a divorce to the best of her ability for her son by answering every question he had, no matter how difficult. However, having been on both sides of the fence—as the child of a single mother and now a single mother herself—Chopra admits that the needle has shifted slowly but steadily.

Having supportive workplaces where one doesn’t have to hide personal struggles goes a long way in supporting single mothers. However, for Chopra, guilt often sets in when she reaches out for help, even from her closest support systems. “I know my mother will look after my son and loves to do so, but then I think she too has her life, and I wonder if looking after him gets in the way of that,” she thinks out loud. Seeking help from someone besides her mother can sometimes require justifications for her unavailability, which Chopra finds draining. “So I just stay back and do it myself,” she says. “The fact that you're the sole person responsible for another human’s mental health—that is the biggest weight that I carry with me every single day,” she adds.

The woman’s burden of caregiving

The caregiving burden for women is disproportionately higher than that of a man, whether emotional, mental or social, “and these can be translated into financial costs too,” according to Nandy. “The percentage of educated women who quit their education, careers, and jobs to raise children reveals the skewed burden of caregiving that mothers carry. In the childcare economy, the mother is central, with other female support systems (who could be mothers themselves) such as the mother’s mother, mother-in-law, sister, and domestic worker who help her look after the child,” the scholar points out.

Mumbai-and Goa-based psychotherapist Alaokika Motwane, herself a single mother, repeatedly emphasises the need for a support system and resources for single mothers, no matter in what form or shape. “Access to support has increased as divorces, separations, and singlehood are less stigmatised. Even 10 to 15 years ago, how many children in a classroom would have single parents? Today, in a class of 50, maybe 15 children come from single-parent households, and that has gone a long way in providing support to single mothers,” she says.

There’s also the fact that an upwardly mobile, urban woman is more aware of her rights and will not settle for anything less than an equal partnership. “And if they don’t find that, they are okay with becoming a parent by themselves by choosing to adopt or through surrogacy, or any other means,” Motwane points out.

For women to reclaim more autonomy and agency, it is important to culturally pose lesser “whys” as questions when a single mother reaches out for help, says Motwane, echoing Chopra’s thoughts. “Those ‘whys’ come from a place of fear, not courage. If they come from courage, those ‘whys’ will start looking different,” and tend to serve women better in a world designed to serve men.

It’s these “whys” that concern Babu, Ghai, Chopra and Motwane, despite a gradual demystification of the single mother figure over the past decade. Yet, institutional support—in the form of legal provisions made by the state—remains scarce. “For example, a mother has to be listed as the first official guardian in all official documents. This is to allow mothers, especially single mothers, to sign official documents (school admission forms, passports and so on) without being subjected to awkward interrogation or negation, although these continue to happen from time to time,” Nandy explains, adding that adoption remains a challenging process for single parents within a patriarchal set-up, which favours a traditional father-mother, heteronormative family structure.

Nevertheless, a single mother tends to be less stigmatised than a single woman without children. In a culture that venerates motherhood, Nandy observes that “the aura of motherhood can soften public judgement.”

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