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Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

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Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.

The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

DOI 10.6069/9780295748856

ISBN-13: 9780295748849

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Publication Date: 06-04-2021

Pages: 284

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Age Range: 18 Years

Mytheli Sreenivas is associate professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the Ohio State University and author of Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India.

What People are Saying About This

Ashwini Tambe

"An enormously thorough, compelling, and sobering account of how feminist impulses came to be intertwined with state-led economistic thinking and coercive eugenic measures."

Sanjam Ahluwalia

"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."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

1 Economies of Reproduction in an Age of Empire 29

2 Fertility, Sovereignty, and the Global Color Line 62

3 Feminism, National Development, and Transnational Family Planning 91

4 Regulating Reproduction in the Era of the Planetary "Population Bomb" 124

5 Heterosexuality and the Happy Family 166

Epilogue 202

Notes 213

Bibliography 247

Index 261