The future seems to be on many people’s minds today. Young people are fighting for their educational futures, and some parents are fighting for the future of their children. During the recent student protests, many children below the age of 10 held placards saying ‘please save my future’, while some waxed eloquently on how the present dispensation’s actions affected their futures.
Gen Z who are still unmarried and without children didn’t just fight for their own future but also fought for the future of their unborn children. In Instagram reels, many said they were doing this for their future children, to show they were on the right side of history. Some Gen Z also treated the site of the protests in various parts of India as a dating site, planning future dates with other young people who share the same political convictions.
In Bihar, a young man brought home a bride after he was injured in the Delhi protests, saying that she stood by him when he was in hospital, after which they eventually fell in love. But in this upsurge of the young, or of those with children, what about those who are not young anymore and who don’t have any children? Whose future can they fight for? Can they imagine a future or have a stake in it if there is no progeny to carry forward their legacy?
In an interview about her memoir Just Being, historian Romila Thapar talked with regret about not having adopted a child: ‘“Now, in old age, I do regret not having a child,” she said. “I don’t regret not having a formal husband. I do regret not having a child – I would love to have a sort of continuity.” There was some truth to what her mother had said about having someone to look after you. But what she really misses is a channel for “just that feeling of – something’s carrying on.”’
What does Romila Thapar mean by this sense of ‘continuity’ and ‘carrying on’ that children bring, and how does this inhibit those who are childfree or childless? For someone with an unmatched legacy and body of work like Thapar’s, what does continuity mean? Many historians have built on Thapar’s work, and one would assume that is continuity enough. But is that so?
What is special about one’s own children as continuity, which doesn’t get fulfilled by decades of intellectual work and teaching? Is legacy, especially for women, always measured in terms of the bloodline rather than passing one’s ideas or shaping a large part of intellectual thought in India?
American literary critic Lee Edelman answers this question rather nihilistically in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. He argues that the figure of the queer person can be read as anti-social and future-negating and urges queer people to embrace that stance joyfully. Are individuals without children, queer or otherwise, also anti-social, future-negating figures?
If that is so, is the future only granted to those with children? With falling fertility rates and increased childlessness, the future then seems to be taken away from a number of individuals, especially women who have increased access to education and employment and are refusing to become mothers. To follow Edelman is to imagine an increasing demographic of people without stakes in the future, a thought which might seem scary but isn’t far from the pro-natalist push that many governments have been taking around the world, and even in parts of India.
As a never-married, middle-aged, childfree woman witnessing this upsurge of protests around the future of children and young people, I wonder whether I can be granted a future at all and, in that case, whose future I can fight for. As an educator, I can fight for the future of my students, and as an aunt, I can fight for the future of my nieces and nephews. But is it the same as fighting for the future of one’s own children?
Nationalists might argue that I could fight for the future of the country, while internationalists might argue that I can fight for the future of the world. Others might even say that I could fight for an abstract Future, one which might come some day in the next hundred years.
But in an age where blood ties are still thicker than non-blood ties, where caste, community and religion-based affiliations are still stronger than bonds outside them, the recognition of one’s future is still measured by the presence of progeny. While it is true that historically many childfree/childless individuals have fought for the environment, gender rights, human rights, and the future of the world at large, they were inspired by a larger sense of fraternity beyond blood ties.
While we have seen a rare moment of this fraternity during the protests around the country in the last few weeks, the question still remains the same. Can a childfree/childless person, in a pro-natalist world, fight for someone else’s future, especially one who is not related by blood? If yes, then the grammar of belonging and affiliations have to move beyond caste, community, and religion, and maybe even the nation, and embrace a personhood beyond blood ties and the idea of the family.
Ketaki Chowkhani is an academician and scholar of Singles Studies in India.
Views expressed are the author’s own.