Surrogacy in Hindu Mythology: How Balarama Was Born to Two Mothers

Kamsa has already killed six of Devaki's children. The seventh is conceived and growing inside her, inside the prison, and by the rules of the story it is dead before it is born.

What the Bhagavata Purana does next is the part most retellings hurry past. It does not hide the child or disguise the birth. It moves the pregnancy.

The embryo is taken out of Devaki and placed into Rohini, another of Vasudeva's wives, living far away in Gokula. Devaki appears to miscarry, which is what Kamsa is told and what he believes. Rohini's pregnancy advances. Months later she delivers, and the child is Balarama.

One woman conceived. A different woman carried the pregnancy and gave birth. Those two facts, held together, are the definition of gestational surrogacy, and a Sanskrit text set them down in a narrative that the tradition has recited without interruption ever since.

Medicine arrived at the same arrangement in 1985.

The instruction, in the text's own words

Canto 10, chapter 2 of the Bhagavata Purana opens with the Yadus in hiding and Kamsa killing systematically. Vishnu, already committed to being born as the eighth child, addresses Yogamaya and gives her a specific task before that birth can happen.

The instruction is not vague. It names the woman it is taken from and the woman it goes into, and it names the operation.

devakyā jaṭhare garbhaṁ śeṣākhyaṁ dhāma māmakam

tat sannikṛṣya rohiṇyā udare sanniveśaya

"In the womb of Devaki is that portion of Myself known as Shesha. Draw it out from there and settle it in the womb of Rohini."

Bhagavata Purana 10.2.8

Two verbs carry the whole event. Sannikṛṣya, having drawn it out, extracted it, pulled it across. Sanniveśaya, place it, install it, settle it in. The first governs Devaki's womb and the second governs Rohini's. Between them sits the thing being moved, the garbha, the conceptus.

That is a transfer described as a transfer. Not a substitution of children, not a secret handover after birth, not a woman standing in for another from the beginning. The pregnancy that started in Devaki finishes in Rohini, and the text is explicit that it is the same pregnancy.

The Vishnu Purana carries the event in book five, chapter one, with Vishnu giving the same instruction to Yoganidra. The Harivamsa has it as well. This is not a stray line in one recension that a later editor could have slipped in. It is load-bearing narrative, present across the major sources for Krishna's birth, and everything that follows in Balarama's life depends on it.

A name that records the event

Here is the detail that lifts this above a curiosity.

The tradition did not merely record the transfer. It named the child after it, permanently, and put the naming inside the same passage.

garbha-saṅkarṣaṇāt taṁ vai prāhuḥ saṅkarṣaṇaṁ bhuvi

rāmeti loka-ramaṇād balabhadraṁ balocchrayāt

"Because He was drawn across from one womb to another, on earth they will call Him Sankarshana. Because He delights the world, Rama; and from His great strength, Balabhadra."

Bhagavata Purana 10.2.13

Sankarshana. The root is karṣ, to drag or draw, with sam intensifying it. The one who was pulled across.

Names in this literature usually commemorate an act the bearer performed. Halayudha, the one whose weapon is the plough. Govinda, the finder of cows. Sankarshana is different in kind, because Balarama did nothing. He was the object of the verb, not its subject. The name records something that was done to him before he had any capacity to act at all.

A tradition that found the event unremarkable would not have done this. You do not name a god after a circumstance you consider ordinary. The naming verse is the text telling you, in its own voice, that it knew this was strange.

And the name stuck. Sankarshana is not an obscure epithet recovered by scholars. It is one of the four vyuha forms in the Pancharatra system, invoked in daily liturgy across Vaishnava sampradayas for well over a thousand years. Every time it is spoken, an embryo transfer is being referenced.

What gestational surrogacy actually is

To see how close the parallel runs, the modern procedure has to be stated precisely rather than loosely.

In traditional surrogacy, the woman who carries the child is also its genetic mother. Her own egg is used. This arrangement is genuinely ancient and appears in several bodies of literature, including outside India. It is not what the Bhagavata describes.

In gestational surrogacy, an embryo is created from one woman's egg and transferred into a second woman, who carries and delivers a child she has no genetic relationship to. The pregnancy begins with one woman and completes in another. That separation, between the woman who conceives and the woman who gives birth, is the entire point of the procedure and the reason it took until the late twentieth century to achieve.

The first successful case was reported in 1985, after in vitro fertilisation had matured enough to make embryo transfer between women survivable for the embryo. Before that date it was not a technique that was difficult. It was a technique that did not exist, in any form, anywhere.

The reason is simple biology. An early embryo is a few days old and microscopically small, it will not implant unless the receiving uterus happens to be at a compatible point in its own cycle, and moving it at all requires instruments and a sterile field. Nothing about the problem is intuitive from the outside. Nothing about it is visible without a microscope.

Where the two line up

Set the two side by side and the structural match is close enough to be uncomfortable for anyone who assumes ancient texts could not have got here.

The thing moved is an existing pregnancy. Not a child, not a soul awaiting birth, not a seed before conception. Devaki has conceived. The garbha exists. It is that already-formed conceptus which is relocated, which is exactly the object a modern embryo transfer handles.

There are two mothers and the text keeps both. Devaki is never written out. The Bhagavata continues to treat Balarama as Devaki's son by conception and Rohini's by gestation and delivery, and both women retain a maternal relation to him for the rest of the narrative. Balarama is Rohineya, son of Rohini, and he is also counted among Devaki's children. The tradition did not resolve the double motherhood into a single mother, because the story it was telling required both.

The purpose is to save a pregnancy that cannot safely continue where it is. The medical indication for gestational surrogacy is a woman who can produce viable eggs but cannot carry a pregnancy to term. The narrative indication in the Bhagavata is a woman whose womb is, quite literally, a place where this pregnancy will not survive. Different cause, identical logic: the pregnancy is viable, the location is not, so move the pregnancy.

The apparent miscarriage is part of the design. The text has Kamsa informed that Devaki's seventh conception was lost. From outside, a transferred pregnancy looks exactly like a pregnancy that ended. That is a consequence the author had to think about in order to write, and thinking about it means having modelled the transfer as a real event with observable effects.

The agency question, answered rather than avoided

The transfer is performed by Yogamaya on Vishnu's instruction. It is an act of divine power, and the text gives no technique and no instrument. Anyone reading this article who wants to test it will find that out in the first minute, so it belongs here, said plainly and said by us.

What it does not do is shrink the achievement, and the reason is worth being clear about.

Every ancient text has divine agency available for anything. That is precisely why the specific choices tell you something. A writer with unlimited power at his disposal could have solved Kamsa's threat in a dozen easier ways. Make the child invisible. Strike Kamsa blind. Have Devaki's pregnancy simply not be detected. Move the newborn after birth, which is in fact the solution the very next chapter uses for Krishna, carried across the Yamuna to Yashoda while the guards sleep.

The Bhagavata had that easy option sitting right there in its own plot, and for the seventh child it chose something else. It chose to move the pregnancy rather than the baby.

The mechanism is divine. The concept is not, and the concept is the part that is hard.

To write this scene, someone had to first conceive of a pregnancy as a transferable thing: an entity located in a womb, distinct from the womb holding it, capable in principle of continuing in a different woman's body. That idea is the whole intellectual content of gestational surrogacy. The 1985 achievement was working out how to do a thing that had already to be imaginable.

Why this is the strongest of the parallels

Claims that Hindu scripture anticipated modern science are made constantly, and most of them are made badly. A number is stretched to fit, or a metaphor is read as a diagram. Worst of all, a book written in the twentieth century gets passed off as an ancient one. Each bad claim makes the good ones harder to hear.

This one is built differently, and it is worth saying why it survives scrutiny that the others do not.

The passage is in canonical texts with stable transmission and multiple independent recensions. It is quoted, not summarised. It requires no reinterpretation of imagery and no reading of poetic language as technical language. The Sanskrit says a conceptus was drawn out of one woman and installed in another, and that is what is being claimed about it.

Most of all, the tradition marked its own significance. It gave the child a name meaning "the one drawn across", and it kept using that name for two thousand years. The claim is not being read into the text by an enthusiastic modern reader. The text made the claim about itself, and then repeated it in daily liturgy, across every sampradaya that recites the vyuha forms.

What the tradition chose to keep

Compare it to what sits nearby in the same literature.

The Mahabharata's Adi Parva has niyoga, where Vyasa fathers children on the widowed Kuru queens. That is levirate custom, socially regulated and biologically unremarkable. The same parva has Gandhari's mass of flesh divided into a hundred and one portions and matured in pots of ghee, which is a stranger idea and closer to ex-utero gestation than to anything else.

The Balarama transfer is different from both. It does not extend a known custom, and it does not put gestation outside a body. It relocates a live pregnancy from one woman to another and lets it finish normally, which is the one configuration that stayed impossible until 1985.

Ancient literature is full of miraculous births. Very little of it contains this specific idea, that the woman who conceives and the woman who delivers can be two different women, connected by the movement of the pregnancy itself.

The Bhagavata contains it. It states it in two verbs, names the child after it, and hands the name down through the liturgy so that it could not be forgotten. That is a tradition taking care of something it understood to be worth keeping.