Chohan - Made In India

With my Indian village roots, the surrogate could have been any of my Indian female relatives or if my parents had not emigrated to the UK, even me. The story of those two women was loaded with so much conflicting culture, emotion and politics, I knew I had to write a play around that complex situation, to understand its fertile terrain. When I began writing the play, commercial surrogacy was rife in many countries. In the surrogacy hub of India, it flourished as an unregulated multi-billion rupee industry, with thousands of surrogacies a year. During the writing process, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, Mexico and India introduced varying commercial surrogacy bans. The proposed ban in India upended much of my original story.

Yet it captured a global trend in which legislation began reeling in the rapid advance of science, especially that of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) and the creation of non-traditional family forms. From being staunchly anti-commercial surrogacy, I realised the ban highlighted more than a black and white situation, especially for the impoverished women who had scant options to make as much money elsewhere. Made in India is about gender, economics, reproductive technology and ethics. Globally and locally, we live in a market society where everything is for sale including health, education, emotions and bodies. Too often, morals are sacrificed for rampant financial markets. Western consumers rely on low-cost, low-paid global workers to provide the material stuff of their lives, in the cheapest, most efficient, fastest ways possible whether a pair of trainers, or a baby.

In that power dynamic, consumers can afford to ignore marginalised workers in other parts of the world, their lives and struggles, rather than understand how we connect to them. Commercial surrogacy felt like a fitting metaphor for it all. These (substitute Western) workers labour for profit-driven businesses and affluent global clients whether in the garment, electronics or other sweatshop industries exploitation or empowerment, oppression or opportunity, there is still much to do to protect them. Profit is valued over workers and human dignity is sacrificed for a quick blood-stained buck. Made in India seeks to show how our material choices and demands shape our inequitable world. For Tamashas production, director Katie Posner created this world using minimal props.