Finalist for the inaugural ACLS Open Access Book Prize

Calculating the cost of life in a transnational context

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

Calculating the cost of life in a transnational context

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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."

* New Books Network *

"[T]his book is of vital importance to scholars of postcolonial states, modernisation, and population control."

* Economic and Political Weekly *

"[O]ffers a compelling view of colonial and postcolonial India, seen through the lens of the politics of reproduction."

* Population and Development Review *

"The thorough examination of a broad range of archival records backed by extensive engagement with critical theoretical frameworks makes the book a significant contribution to the scholarship on modern South Asia."

* Asian Affairs *

"Temporally, the book is a work situated in modern history, but its investigation of the concepts of "population" and "economy" make it a sharp commentary on the centrality of reproduction in global biopolitics today...What stands out in Sreenivas's work is the animation with which the key actors of the period under study are brought to life."

* H-Net Reviews *

"Sreenivas's book is an important contribution to a growing body of scholarly work that thinks seriously with the transnational politics of gender and sexuality to reimagine this critical period of late colonial and postcolonial development."

* The Indian Economic and Social History Review *

"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. It makes a timely contribution to nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asian history, reproductive and contraceptive histories of India, and colonial and postcolonial gender and sexuality studies."

* South Asian 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 *

"The book is highly relevant to scholars; researchers in sociology, population sciences, demographic, and development studies and other social sciences; and feminist activists. It offers a compelling view of colonial and postcolonial India, seen through the lens of the politics of reproduction and the need for population control and planned parenthood for the development of human beings."

* Women's Reproductive Health *


Awards
Short-listed for ACLS Open Book Prize + Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award 2024 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780295748849
Author Mytheli Sreenivas
Format Paperback
Page Count 284
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 424g