NOIDA: Clutching his elephant toy, Avyaan’s conversation is pretty much limited to a happy gurgle, but the nine-month-old might be about to go down in history for helping make breastfeeding in public more socially acceptable in prudish India, reports AFP.

Public breastfeeding carries a social stigma in much of the world—a situation that World Breastfeeding Week until August 7 hopes to change—but in highly conservative India it is particularly taboo.

The country’s hundreds of millions of women are expected to dress modestly, and even a glimpse of a breast during feeding is a strict no-no, all too often inviting disgusted demands to desist and even unwanted sexual advances.

So this is what a petition brought in little Avyaan’s name—by his middle-class lawyer parents Neha and Animesh Rastogi—and currently before the Delhi High Court is aimed at chipping away at.

“I was flying to Bangalore and my co-passengers were male. My son was exclusively on breast milk and it was so difficult to feed him there,” Neha Rastogi, 30, told AFP at her home in Noida, a satellite city on the outskirts of Delhi.

“We want the government to set aside space in flights and at all public places because we can’t feed in the open simply because breast is just seen as a sexual organ.”

The signs are good that the case may make some progress, with the court demanding city authorities come up with a response at the next hearing day on August 28.

‘Obscenity’ -

But setting aside special places is one thing. Getting wider acceptance for women to feed their babies wherever and whenever they like is a much bigger challenge.

This was what Gilu Joseph, an actress from Kerala in the south, was trying to alter when she posed with a baby—not actually her own—at her bare breast on a magazine front cover earlier this year.

The photoshoot, captioned “Mums tell Kerala: don’t stare—we need to breastfeed”, landed her and the publisher in court on charges of nudity, obscenity and endangering society’s moral fabric.

The court dismissed the petition but Joseph found herself at the sharp end of torrents of abuse.