Reproductive Politics And The Making Of Modern India
In the late 19th century, India played a pivotal role in creating global conversations around population and reproduction. Among the questions posed by colonial administrators, nationalists, eugenicists, demographers and policy-makers, were: age at marriage and its effect on the health and the vitality of a population; how many children married couples should have and how they should be raised; practices like remarriage, monogamy, and celibacy and their impact on individual bodies, families, and wider communities. It was these early discussions that led to the emergence of new ideas linking reproduction, population and the economy.
Mytheli Sreenivas’s detailed examination of existing scholarship from the 1870s to the 1970s—histories of marriage and birth control, of ideas of ‘population’ and ‘economy’ as abstractions, and of famine and crises of subsistence—offers a compelling analysis of how reproduction became an economic question and was targeted for regulation, with serious implications for women’s fertility and reproductive rights.
The author’s deep-dive into archival texts, sourced from three continents, reveals that concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—around poverty and survival, migration and claims of sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for development—which produced the very grounds on which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.
An enormously thorough, compelling, and sobering account of how feminist impulses came to be intertwined with state-led economistic thinking and coercive eugenic measures.
— Ashwini Tambe,
author of Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws
The connections that this book makes are impressive, as is its ability to engage with a scholarship on reproduction and population not only from India, but most broadly, with global histories and historiographies.
— Sanjam Ahluwalia,
author of Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947
For Sale in South Asia Only
Reviews
This wonderfully important book follows arguments about population from the late 19th century, the century of colonial famines, to the post-Emergency years in India... Strong and pungent... a pleasure to read.
, The Book Review
As the world confronts climate catastrophe, and engages with questions of population, reproduction, and economy, Mytheli Sreenivas’ Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is an important and timely intervention. It sits alongside other important feminist interventions on population and development.
, Pacific Affairs
Sreenivas’ meticulous research at the intersections of demographic history, gender/sexuality/sexology, and contraceptive politics offers a complex history of population, nation, and economy in India.
, South Asian Review
Sreenivas’s recent book is an important study in understanding the origins of the discourse that links national population and economic progress and its impact on the reproductive agencies of the female population in India.
, Asian Affairs
Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India examines the significance of family planning in the economic modernisation in India. ...this book is of vital importance to scholars of postcolonial states, modernisation, and population control.
, Economic & Political Weekly
Mytheli Sreenivas’s wonderfully important book follows arguments about population from the late 19th century, the century of colonial famines, to the post-Emergency years in India, years of talk of population control ‘excesses’. Strong and pungent...a pleasure to read
, The Book Review