Adoption has been part of social and cultural anthropological studies for long yet there is a dearth of adoption literature from India. Adoption is an age old practice in India, and now it is helmed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA). In this paper, I explore adoption disclosure as a process and a strategy of making the adoptive child one’s own. Adoption disclosure refers to the process of informing the child about their adoption status. Though it is highly advisable, it remains an optional practice. I conducted ethnographic interviews with adoptive parents who have initiated this process, and I attempt to understand their experience of why and how adoption is disclosed, what it entails, and how it impacts the process of kinning. For Signe Howell[1] (2003) kinning is a way of understanding how adoptive parents and children create significant and permanent relationships that are expressed in a kin idiom. In this paper, I also bring to the fore parents’ perspectives on birth mother or birth family of their adoptive child as well as the possibility of their child undertaking a search to find them once they are over 18 years of age. Thus, I present diverse practices of managing adoption disclosure, and doing family using Janet Carsten’s[2] (2000) idea of relatedness. I situate this study in the emergent field of critical kinship studies within sociology and social and cultural anthropology which challenges the conventional presumption of what kinship constitutes, and also helps us to look at kinship as a dynamic process.
[1] Howell, S. 2003. Kinning: The creation of life trajectories in transnational adoptive families. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(3), 465-484.
[2] Carsten, J. Ed. .2000. Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge University Press.
