Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. ix, 274 pp (Figures, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780295748849.
In November 2022, the world population reached 8 billion. India, with an estimated population of over 1.4 billion, is projected to be the world’s most populous nation by 2023. As climate catastrophe intensifies, population-related anxieties—often underpinned by neo-Malthusian notions—fuel concerns around resource scarcity and sustainability. Many of these same fears of overpopulation applied to nineteenth-century India, linking population to famine, poverty, and underdevelopment. In the meticulous Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Sreenivas interrogates the underpinnings of these population anxieties and their enduring legacy for India and the world.
Tracing the entanglement of reproduction, population, and economy in India between 1870 and 1970, the book demonstrates how British colonial frames of “population size,” “quality,” and “scarcity” shaped postcolonial Indian imaginaries of nation and responsibility. Carefully documenting the economizing of reproduction (i.e., where reproductive practices are understood as economic opportunities or threats), Sreenivas highlights how reproduction moved from intimate and private realms to public, macro-level concerns of nation and development. The book’s “India in the world” approach demonstrates how these processes of economizing reproduction (6) and the linked, neo-Malthusian calls for controlling population, were fundamental to shaping global debates and discourses on population and reproduction. In contrast to other population histories, this is a unique—and persuasive—argument, placing India at the centre of shaping and producing transnational population developments and debates, rather than as only being subjected to them.
The monograph tackles these arguments over five chapters, bookended by an introduction and epilogue. The introduction sets out the theoretical and methodological approaches. Succinctly explaining the central themes of reproduction, population, and economy, Sreenivas then deftly engages with complex theoretical frames including Malthusianism, Foucault’s biopolitics, and feminist approaches, including reproductive justice. Sources include colonial dispatches, population organizations like the Madras Neo-Malthusian League, and Indian feminists’ editorials and self-help books. This “archive of reproductive politics” (24) includes post-independence materials like census reports, and state propaganda on family planning.
In chapter 1, Sreenivas cleverly juxtaposes Sir Richard Temple’s letter arguing for the immediate curtailing of famine expenditures during the Great Famine of 1876–1878, with the arrest and trial of Annie Besant for publishing a book on birth control and contraception. The two texts reflected assumptions about resource scarcity and population, provoking and justifying calls for reproductive reform that were taken up by the colonial state. The rationalization of these claims and their subsequent administration required enumeration, giving rise to census and population registration systems for governance and policy formulation (many of which continue to shape demographic and population data collection systems across the globe today). These numbers enabled the calibration of life through “colonial Malthusianism,” where Indian conjugality caused Indian impoverishment (61), shaping claims to governance and self-rule.
As chapter 2 details, these notions are intrinsically linked to the “global colour line” (67), which divided white from non-white populations globally, and was built on eugenicist and racist beliefs about population and genetic “quality” and “vitality.” These notions point to one of the core elements of reproductive politics: Whose reproduction matters? Linked to questions of political sovereignty and to claims of territorial possession, migration, and land rights, reproduction thus became a site for interventions and claims-making from a range of actors during the interwar period. The All India Women’s Conference, for example, linked birth control to women’s health, an essential component for nation building. Indian nationalists framed reproductive self-regulation as key to claims of national sovereignty, whilst simultaneously challenging the racial politics of imperialism and the global colour line. Yet, despite refuting the global colour line, Indian reproductive discourses remained stratified along class, caste, and religious lines.
The consolidation of family planning in post-independence national development is further explored in chapter 3. Focusing on the role of feminist and women’s rights groups in shaping national policy on family planning as population control, and of family planning as national social service, Sreenivas underscores how this technology became a vehicle for state priorities and development rather than being used for empowerment or emancipation, or to address gendered class, caste, or religious inequalities. Wedded to economic rationales, the largely upper-caste and middle-class feminist groups marked poor women’s reproduction as irrational, and as sites of reproductive intervention.
Chapter 4, against the backdrop of global “population bomb” concerns, explores the “war footing” (140) of Indian population control efforts. The coercive sterilization of men under the Emergency, as Sreenivas highlights, is part of a longer history of dis/incentivization of reproduction and the differential values placed on reproductive bodies. The gendered relationship between reproductive subjects and the state is clear in the legacy of the Emergency which “[…] marked the reproductive regulation of male bodies as an excess of state power while continuing to intervene in the reproductive bodies and lives of its women citizens” (163). This chapter also details how women resist efforts to regulate their bodies (e.g., refusal of IUDs), and assign multiple meanings to reproduction, often at odds with the state’s understanding of their fertility and needs.
Chapter 5, which breaks from the chronological form of previous chapters, explores state propaganda on family planning, largely aimed at establishing a small family norm. These artefacts, Sreenivas argues, linked sexuality with “planning, affect with economy, and marriage with population control” (167), in service of “modernizing” the family for national development aims. Sreenivas provides a fascinating account of the economization of family life in these texts through the intersection of the history of heterosexuality and the history of development (199). Reflecting on the abstracted figure of the child (199), Sreenivas engages very briefly with queer theory and “reproductive futurism” (200). This feels like too short an engagement for an important idea that is present in every chapter—the anticipatory and speculative futures that one is urged to imagine when making reproductive decisions in the present. The epilogue, drawing on oral history and interviews with women in Tamil Nadu, grounds these histories of population control, reproductive interventions, and continued resistance in the present. The oral histories and interviews are all too brief and expanding on them could have allowed for “studying up” reproductive politics, and enabled an explicit engagement with reproductive justice. Additionally, more methodological detail for the qualitative elements would have added rigour.
Reproduction, as Sreenivas’ excellent book shows, is political and politicized, requiring careful attention to the legacies, resistances, and rationalities that shape them. 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, including Michelle Murphy’s Economization of Life, and Sanjam Ahluwalia’s Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947. Not just of interest to historians, reproduction scholars, or South Asianists, I would make this required reading for demographers and international development scholars.
Rishita Nandagiri
King’s College London, London