“Maybe I was born on February 15, 1979“​: A qualitative study on knowledge gaps, fragments of information, and assumptions regarding the origin of adopted persons from India​

In many countries of the Global North, fierce controversies are taking place regarding the past and future of international adoptions. Adopted persons are demanding information about their origins and the circumstances of their separation from their birth parents. In Switzerland, despite the high number of internationally adopted persons, there is still little research on the subject of adoption. The first studies have now been carried out in this context as part of efforts to come to terms with the past.

This contribution provides an insight into one such study, which deals with the adoption of Indian children by Swiss couples in the 20th century. The focus is on the study part that deals with the birth parents in India. In numerous adoption dossiers stored in Swiss archives, the entry on birth parents contains terms such as “mother unknown”. The contribution explores the question of how actors in the field of adoption - adopted persons, adoptive parents, Swiss and Indian adoption agencies, and Indian adoption activists - deal with the discursive “void” of birth mothers. How does this void manifest itself, how is it maintained and justified? And which “filler narratives” emerge in dealing with the void?

To answer and discuss these questions, the contribution draws on qualitative interviews and ethnographic data collected in Switzerland and India. It shows what missing, inaccurate or constantly changing information can mean for the lives of adopted persons and adoptive families, and what strategies they have developed to deal with these knowledge gaps: In an attempt to get answers, they conduct research, imagine and visualize their origins and construct multifaceted images of mothers. They do this against the backdrop of a persistent silence about birth mothers in India whose children were put up for adoption. Many of them were unmarried mothers. To this day, Bollywood films and fiction are the only social spaces in which these unmarried mothers are talked about.

The silence is accentuated by the tension between the adopted person's right to know their origins and the culturally granted right to anonymity of the biological Indian mothers. From a social anthropological perspective, this refusal to address the issue in Indian society can be understood as a “polyphonic silence”, which can be an expression of social taboo, oppression and exclusion of unmarried mothers, but also of protection and concern for their stigmatised identities.

This area of tension illustrates the complexity of conducting transnational adoption research in the sense of a “shared history”: Switzerland and India are at very different points in terms of their willingness to conduct critical-historical adoption research, which poses major challenges for research collaborations between country of origin and receiving country. The contribution provides an insight into the results outlined above, as well as into the methodological, ethical and political challenges of such a study. Using the example of adoptions of Indian children by Swiss couples, it presents findings and discussion points that are relevant for all research on international adoptions between the countries of the Global North and Global South.