Reproductive Restraints

Birth Control in India, 1877-1947

Sanjam Ahluwalia

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780252074806
  9780252032400
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252090387
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Reproductive Restraints traces the history of contraception use and population management in colonial India, while illuminating its connection to contemporary debates in India and birth control movements in Great Britain and the United States. Sanjam Ahluwalia draws attention to the interactive and relational history of Indian birth control by including western activists such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes alongside important Indian campaigners. In revealing the elitist politics of middle-class feminists, Indian nationalists, western activists, colonial authorities and the medical establishment, Ahluwalia finds that they all sought to rationalize procreation and regulate women while invoking competing notions of freedom, femininity, and family. Ahluwalia's remarkable interviews with practicing midwives in rural northern India fills a gaping void in the documentary history of birth control and shows that the movement has had little appeal to non-elite groups in India. Finding that Jaunpuri women's reproductive decisions are bound to their emotional, cultural, and economic reliance on family and community, Ahluwalia presents the limitations of universal liberal feminist categories, which often do not consider differences among localized subjects. She argues that elitist birth control efforts failed to account for Indian women's values and needs and have worked to restrict reproductive rights rather than liberate subaltern Indian women since colonial times.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Demographic Rhetoric and Sexual Surveillance: Indian Middle-Class Advocates of Birth Control, 1877–1947
• 2. Global Agenda and Local Politics: Western Advocates and Discourse of Birth Control in Colonial India, 1920s–40s
• 3. Polyvocality, Ambivalence, and Negotiations: Indian Middle-Class Feminism and Debates on Birth Control in Nationalist India, 1920s–40s
• 4. A Fractured Discourse: Colonial Attitudes on Birth Control in the Twentieth Century
• 5. Untrained “Professionals”: Medical Practitioners and the Politics of Birth Control in Colonial India, 1920–47
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index