Humanities & Social Sciences
May 2021
Reproductive Politics and the Makings of Modern India
by Mytheli Sreenivas
In modern India, reforming individual reproduction, through changing marriage practices or the introduction of birth control, became a means to shape the life of the population as a whole. Mytheli Sreenivas traces moments when social actors questioned the wide-ranging, complex, and sometimes contradictory politics of reproduction, asking how practices associated with biological reproduction, and the social meanings attached to these practices, became the target of public debate and contestation. She reveals the intimate imbrication of population concerns with reproductive politics and the economy, and suggests that the ideologies and institutions that encouraged the government to intervene in the reproductive lives of its subjects were not mid-twentieth-century inventions, but arose from concerns that first took shape in colonial India. Exploring the wide implications of these policies and programs, Sreenivas challenges some of the fundamental assumptions that underpin reproductive politics today, in India and transnationally.
