NOTES

1   Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), 262; Beryl Suitters, Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1973).

2   The Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood: Report of the Proceedings (Bombay: Family Planning Association of India, 1952), 9.

3   Third International Conference, 12.

4   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 262.

5   The IPPF’s predecessor had worked in four countries: the US, the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 263. I follow Beryl Suitters in calling the IPPF’s predecessor organization the “International Committee for Planned Parenthood.” Suitters, Be Brave and Angry.

6   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 256; Rama Rau to Margaret Sanger, September 5, 1951, Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries, Northampton, MA (hereafter cited as MSP), series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

7   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 257.

8   Government of India, Planning Commission, The First Five Year Plan (New Delhi: Government of India, 1953), 522.

9   Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

10   For instance, most of the historical research on birth control in South Asia focuses on the 1920s and 1930s: Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (New York: Routledge, 2016); Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

11   For example, Sama: Resource Group for Women and Health, “Population Policies and Two Child Norm,” accessed June 1, 2020, www.samawomenshealth.in/population-policies-and-two-child-norm.

12   Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009); Karl Ittmann, A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race and Power in the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

13   For example, Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Ashwini Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

14   Bangladesh has received scholarly attention in studies of transnational population control programs, such as Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Murphy, Economization of Life.

15   Sarah Hodges, “Towards a History of Reproduction in Modern India,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 2.

16   Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, 3rd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), ix.

17   For an overview of the historiography of reproduction, see Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell, “Reproduction in History,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3–17.

18   In her ethnographic study, Maya Unnithan takes a similarly expansive view of reproductive politics, which she defines as a concept that “combines the gendered struggles over the body … and wo/manhood in the interrelated worlds of families, policymakers, state bureaucrats, legal, medical and health professionals and practitioners, as well as in civil society contexts.” Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics: Re-imagining Rights in India (London: Routledge, 2019), 3–4.

19   For example: Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Elena Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Susanne M. Klausen, Abortion under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Eithne Luibhéid, Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

20   Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 13–14.

21   Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44; Penelope Deutscher, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1: Re-reading Its Reproduction,” Theory, Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 119–37; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), Nook ed.

22   Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, “Introduction: Conceiving the New World Order,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3. See also Shellee Colen, “ ‘Like a Mother to Them’: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York,” in Conceiving the New World Order, 78–102.

23   Angus McClaren questions this assumption in A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1.

24   Hodges, “History of Reproduction,” 16.

25   Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, 3.

26   Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism, 4.

27   I follow the terminology of my sources and use both population control and family planning to refer to top-down systems and policies to regulate reproduction. However, family planning has also been used in more grassroots contexts, and my use of terms is context-specific as necessary.

28   For example, Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, eds., Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

29   J. Devika, Individuals, Householders, Citizens: Family Planning in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008).

30   Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 9.

31   Merriam-Webster, s.v. “population,” accessed May 10, 2019, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/population.

32   Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 67–74.

33   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 139; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 67.

34   Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism, 13.

35   Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139.

36   Ruth Miller, “Rights, Reproduction, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Signs 32, no. 2 (2007): 352, 358.

37   Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Chikako Takeshita, The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

38   Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

39   Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol A. Breckinridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 318–20. See also U. Kalpagam, Rule by Numbers: Governmentality in Colonial India (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

40   T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15–45.

41   Rahul Nair, “The Discourse on Population in India, 1870–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006), chap. 4. See also Sarah Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–42.

42   Nair, “Discourse on Population,” chap. 4; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (London: Palgrave, 2001), chap. 7.

43   Carole McCann, “Malthusian Men and Demographic Transitions: A Case Study of Hegemonic Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Population Theory,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 30, no. 1 (2009): 142–71; Carole McCann, Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

44   Mohan Rao, From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (New Delhi: Sage, 2004).

45   Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, 14–15.

46   Mahmood Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste and Class in an Indian Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

47   Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, chap. 2.

48   Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, ix.

49   Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery, Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility, and Women’s Status in India (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2006).

50   Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995): 434–67.

51   Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 215.

52   Goswami, Producing India, chap. 7.

53   Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 4.

54   Birla, Stages of Capital, 3–5; David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): 247–88.

55   Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

56   According to some scholars, the mid-twentieth-century moment represents a true origin point for contemporary conceptions of the economy. Timothy Mitchell notes that Adam Smith does not refer to “the economy” as a structure or whole, and he traces the “appearance of the idea that the economy exists as a general structure of economic relations” to John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Timothy Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (1998), 85. For a critique of this periodization, see Goswami, who locates a longer history of this concept. Producing India, 335n10. For my purposes here, it seems clear that there were significant changes in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps, as Suzanne Bergeron suggests, the shift was from population as the object of governance in the earlier period to the economy as the object in the twentieth century. Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 7. Nevertheless, following Goswami, I also see key continuities that make it important to trace the history of the concept from the eighteenth century onward.

57   Murphy, Economization of Life, 18–20; Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” 85.

58   Bergeron, Fragments of Development, 6.

59   For discussion of women’s labor and the development of capitalist economies, see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

60   Shirin M. Rai, “Gender and Development: Theoretical Perspectives,” in The Women, Gender and Development Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Nalini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma, and Laurie Nisonoff (London: Zed Books, 2001), 28–37; Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York: Routledge, 2007).

61   Behramji M. Malabari, Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India (Bombay: Voice of India, 1887), 2.

62   All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session (Madras, December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932), All India Women’s Conference Papers, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi, 81a.

63   Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 6.

1   Richard Temple to John Strachey, March 11, 1877, Papers of Sir Richard Temple, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library (hereafter cited as Temple MSS), MSS Eur F86/173.

2   Richard Temple to John Strachey, March 11, 1877, Temple MSS Eur F86/173.

3   The Famine Commission Report estimates five million for areas under crown rule. Other estimates range from four million to over five million. Brahma Nand, ed., Famines in Colonial India: Some Unofficial Historical Narratives (New Delhi: Kanishka, 2007), 1; Kate Currie, “British Colonial Policy and Famines: Some Effects and Implications of ‘Free Trade’ in the Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies, 1860–1900,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1991): 32.

4   Annie Besant, The Law of Population: Its Consequences, and Its Bearing upon Human Conduct and Morals, in A Selection of the Social and Political Pamphlets of Annie Besant, ed. John Saville (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), 25.

5   Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia from Earliest Times to the Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 15.

6   U. Kalpagam, “The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge,” History of the Human Sciences 13, no. 2 (2000): 40.

7   Norbert Peabody, “Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (October 2001): 825–37. Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India, c. 1600–1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (2003): 155.

8   Kevin Walby and Michael Haan, “Caste Confusion and Census Enumeration in Colonial India, 1872–1921,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 45, no. 90 (2012): 306; Peabody, “Cents, Sense, Census,” 832–37.

9   Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol A. Breckinridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 321–26.

10   Appadurai, “Number,” 317; Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5, nos. 3–4 (1982): 279–95.

11   Appadurai, “Number,” 317.

12   Walby and Haan, “Caste Confusion,” 306–10.

13   Appadurai, “Number,” 316–17.

14   W. R. Cornish, Report on the Census of Madras Presidency of 1871, vol. 1 (Madras: Government Gazette Press, 1874), 10.

15   Guha, “Politics of Identity,” 156.

16   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 25.

17   Foucault, History of Sexuality, 26.

18   Famines were not disconnected from the conditions that preceded them. The precise moment when a population living with hunger slipped into “famine” is therefore difficult to pinpoint. In the late nineteenth century, definitions of famine varied, with some focused on widespread hunger within a population and others emphasizing mortality. After the Famine Code of 1880, official designation of an event as “famine” would require an administrative response, which affected when the government declared that a famine was occurring. I follow David Arnold’s insistence that famine represents both event and structure. Famines of the late nineteenth century were distinct events that had a beginning and an end, but were also part of, and contributed to, broader structures of scarcity in agrarian society. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 7–8.

19   Nand, Famines in Colonial India, 1–2.

20   Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 287.

21   Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 58–79.

22   Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan India, 2002), 30–32; David Washbrook, “The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the ‘Dry South,’ c. 1870–1930,” Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1994): 164.

23   David Hall-Matthews, Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 129–30.

24   Burton Stein, “Introduction,” in The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India 1770–1900, ed. Burton Stein (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17.

25   Hall-Mathews, Peasants, 129.

26   Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 9.

27   Arnold, Famine, 125.

28   Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 15–16.

29   Currie, “British Colonial Policy,” 55.

30   Nand, ed., Famines in Colonial India, 1; S. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 79–80.

31   The Bihar famine affected 21.4 million people, and the government spent Rs. 675.9 lakhs on relief. The three previous famines had affected a total of 112 million people, but only Rs. 275.9 lakhs had been spent for relief. Interestingly, Temple managed Bihar relief efforts as well, but he and Viceroy Lord Northbrook were criticized for the expenditure; Temple was instructed to practice greater economy in 1876. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy, 86–92.

32   Arnold, Famine, 110.

33   Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen, [1776] 1904), bk. 4, chap. 5.44, accessed April 9, 2020, www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Smith/smWN15.html.

34   Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy, 72–80, Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 31; James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 40–53.

35   Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 284.

36   Currie, “British Colonial Policy,” 52.

37   Dnyan Prakash, December 4, 1876, Report of the Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library.

38   Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 38.

39   Hall-Mathews, Peasants, 196; William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India, 1876–1878 (London: Longmans, Green, 1878), 340–44. The strike occurred in some Bombay districts in early 1877, following announcement of the one-pound wage. Approximately 136,000 laborers left the relief camps in protest, and when the Bombay government refused to yield, only about one-quarter of them returned.

40   For example, Suthasabhimani, September 1, 1878, Report of the Native Papers Published in the Madras Presidency, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library.

41   Paschima Taraka and Kerala Pataka, October 1, 1878, Report of the Native Papers Published in the Madras Presidency, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library.

42   Arnold, Famine, 96.

43   Hall-Matthews, Peasants, 172.

44   For example: Pros. No. 14 (January 5, 1877), Pros. No. 18 (January 13, 1877), Pros. No. 61 (January 20, 1877), Pros. No. 66 (February 10, 1877), Pros. No. 77 (February 5, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

45   Pros. No. 14 (January 5, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

46   “Famine Narrative no. IV,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1, no. 4 (1877): 55. In more modern categories, this was less, in caloric terms, than the food given to prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 38.

47   Surgeon Major W. R. Cornish to J. H. Garstin, Pros. No. 57 (July 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

48   Pros. No. 66 (March 3, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

49   Report by W. J. van Someren, Pros. No. 55 (March 24, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

50   For example, “Second Famine Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1, no. 1 (1878): 12–21; “Letter to the Famine Commission Regarding the Famine Mortality in the Bombay Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1, no. 2 (1878): 13.

51   “Famine Narrative no. IV,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 1 no. 4 (1878): 64.

52   Richard Temple, “Report of the Mission to the Famine-Stricken Districts of the Madras Presidency in 1877,” Pros. No. 19 (June 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), Temple MSS Eur F86/178.

53   Pros. No. 17 (January 12, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

54   Pros. No. 27 (January 16, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

55   Pros No. 14 (January 25, 1877), Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce (Famine Branch), National Archives, New Delhi.

56   Resolution by the Government of India Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, January 16, 1877, Temple MSS Eur F86/177.

57   See, for example, “Second Famine Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1, no. 1 (1878): 13–21.

58   Resolution by the Government of India Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, January 16, 1877, Temple MSS Eur F86/177.

59   Lewis McIver, Imperial Census of 1881: Operations and Results in the Presidency of Madras, Report, vol. 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1883), 9.

60   Currie, “British Colonial Policy,” 25.

61   John C. Caldwell, “Malthus and the Less Developed World: The Pivotal Role of India,” Population and Development Review 24 (1998): 676–77.

62   John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (London: Standard Library, 1848), 252, quoted in Caldwell, “Malthus,” 679.

63   Catherine Gallagher, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 85.

64   Caldwell, “Malthus,” 677.

65   Mervyn Nicholson, “The Eleventh Commandment: Sex and Spirit in Wollstonecraft and Malthus,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 3 (July–September 1990): 412.

66   Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 44–52.

67   Viceroy Lytton, in Legislative Council Proceedings, 1877, vol. 16, p. 588, quoted in S. Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” Population Studies 30, no. 1 (1976): 6.

68   Indian Famine Commission, Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part I, Famine Relief (London: G. E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1880), 34.

69   Guha, Health and Population, 15.

70   James Caird, Report to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State on the Condition of India (London: Harrison and Sons, 1879), 14–15, 4, Correspondence of Sir James Caird, 1878–1881, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library (hereafter cited as Caird MSS), IOR H796.

71   Lord Borthwick to James Caird, November 13, 1880, Caird MSS.

72   For discussion of this scholarship, see Mytheli Sreenivas, “Sexuality and Modern Imperialism,” in A Global History of Sexuality: The Modern Era, ed. Robert M. Buffington, Eithne Luibhéid, and Donna J. Guy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 57–88.

73   Louis Mallet to James Caird, n.d., Caird MSS.

74   Sir George Couper, confidential memo to Lord Ripon on famine expenses, June 24, 1881, Ripon Papers, Adds. MSS. 43, 615, pp. 27–31, quoted in Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory,” 8, 9.

75   Indian Famine Commission, Report, 35.

76   “Financial Statement,” in Parliamentary Papers, 1881, vol. 68, p. 17, quoted in Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 203.

77   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1, no. 7 (1878): 26. In this passage, as elsewhere in the text, there is a slippage between “Hindu” and “Indian,” whereby the prepuberty marriage of upper-caste Hindus stands in for “Indian” conjugality as a whole. In this conflation, the article anticipates the nationalist politics around the age of consent in the late nineteenth century.

78   T. V. Parvate, Mahadev Govind Ranade: A Biography (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 97.

79   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 26.

80   Antoinette Burton, “From Child Bride to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (October 1998): 1125; Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 46.

81   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 24. The author thus calls for a “scheme of colonization, organized and supported by the state, to take off all the surplus population” (30).

82   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 25.

83   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 29.

84   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 27–28.

85   “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” 32.

86   Mahadev Govind Ranade, “Indian Political Economy,” in Ranade’s Economic Writings, ed. Bipan Chandra (New Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1990), 322–49; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 210–31.

87   Behramji M. Malabari, Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India (Bombay: Voice of India, 1887), 1.

88   Malabari, Infant Marriage, 2.

89   Malabari, Infant Marriage, 2.

90   Keshavlal Madhavdas, comment in Malabari, Infant Marriage, 38–39.

91   Gopalrao Hari Deshmukh, comment in Malabari, Infant Marriage, 31.

92   M. G. Ranade, comment in Malabari, Infant Marriage, 15.

93   Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

94   Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901), 341.

95   Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule, 191.

96   Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule, 191.

97   This is not to suggest that bodies were unimportant to Poverty and Un-British Rule, which employed gothic narratives about healthy and diseased bodies to make its arguments about the drain of wealth. Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 36–74.

98   The Queen v. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (Specially Reported) (London: Freethought, n.d.), 61.

99   Queen v. Charles Bradlaugh, 28.

100   Annie Besant, “The Malthusian League,” National Reformer, July 15, 1877.

101   Annie Besant, “The Fight Before Us,” National Reformer, July 29, 1877.

102   Besant, Law of Population, 32–37.

103   Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 121.

104   Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Gamut, 1963), 249–50.

105   Rosanna Ledbetter, A History of the Malthusian League, 1877–1927 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), 68.

106   Besant, Law of Population, 16, 25.

107   Besant, “England, India, and Afghanistan,” National Reformer, October 20, 1878.

108   Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 53.

109   For discussion of Victorian feminists’ refusal to engage with birth control and sexual questions, see Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 91–92.

110   Vernon, Hunger, 17–40.

111   Mytheli Sreenivas, “Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878,” Feminist Studies 41, no. 3 (2015): 525–33.

112   For example, Madras Mail, July 12, 1877, July 19, 1877, and March 7, 1878; Pioneer (Allahabad), July 13, 1877.

113   Philosophic Inquirer (n.d.), quoted in “Neo-Malthusians in Hindostan,” Malthusian 6 (July 1879): 47.

114   Malthusian 6 (July 1879): 131.

115   The League listed fourteen vice presidents in 1880, and Mudaliar was one of four from outside England. He was still listed in 1908 and was the only representative from the British Empire. Ledbetter, Malthusian League, 64, 68.

116   Veritas [pseud.], “The Population Question in Hindostan,” Philosophic Inquirer (n.d.), repr. in Malthusian 28 (May 1881): 218.

117   Veritas [pseud.], “The Population Question in Hindostan (Continuation),” Philosophic Inquirer (n.d.), repr. in Malthusian 30 (July 1881): 233.

118   Ledbetter, Malthusian League, 192.

119   S. Anandhi, “Reproductive Bodies and Regulated Sexuality: Birth Control Debates in Early 20th Century Tamil Nadu,” in A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, ed. Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), 141.

120   Annie Besant, Theosophy and the Law of Population (Benaras: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896), 12, 12, 11.

121   Goswami, Producing India, 210.

122   For example, M. G. Ranade, Essays on Indian Economics: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1906).

1   Directory of the City Health and Baby Week, comp. Corporation of Madras (Madras: Current Thought, n.d.).

2   Directory, s.vv. “Rajdosan,” and “Jeevamrutam.”

3   Directory, s.vv. “Maternity and Child Welfare.”

4   In addition to age categories up to three years, the “best baby of the whole show” was divided into: “Best Musalman baby; Best Adi Dravida Baby; Best Anglo-Indian Baby; Best Indian Christian Baby; Best European Baby; Best Brahmin Baby; Best Non-Brahmin (Hindu); Best Baby of the Corporation C.W.S.; best twins and triplets.” Directory, 115.

5   Barbara Ramusack, “Bonnie Babes and Modern Mothers: Baby Weeks in Madras” (paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, October 2007); Philippa Levine, “Imperial Encounters,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 485–98.

6   Directory, s.v. “Messages,” 5.

7   Directory, s.v. “Messages,” 7.

8   Directory, s.v. “Messages,” 7.

9   Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 22, 94.

10   Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2; Mrinalini Sinha, ed. Mother India: Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 55.

11   Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 18.

12   Mayo, Mother India, 32.

13   Mayo, Mother India, 12.

14   Rahul Nair, “The Construction of a ‘Population Problem’ in Colonial India 1919–1947,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 2 (2011): 233–42.

15   Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 74.

16   Mayo, Mother India, 371.

17   Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 66–73, 95–97.

18   Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

19   DuBois made this statement at a meeting of the Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 and elaborated further in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Lake and Reynolds, Global Color Line, 1–2.

20   Mayo, Mother India, 379, 380, 408.

21   Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labor Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 367–78.

22   Uma Nehru, Mother India aur uska jawab (Allahabad: Hindustan, 1928), 67–68, quoted and translated from Hindi by Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 124.

23   Radhakamal Mukherjee, Migrant Asia ([Rome?]: Tipografia I. Failly, 1936), 9–10.

24   Mukherjee, Migrant Asia, especially chaps. 5–6.

25   I understand this racialization in the context of the book’s publication in English and Italian by Corrado Gini, an Italian demographer and eugenicist. Gini, a supporter of Italian fascism and an associate of Mussolini’s, first met Mukherjee at a gathering of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems and provided an introduction to Migrant Asia. Bashford, Global Population, 141.

26   Mukherjee, Migrant Asia, 57.

27   Mukherjee, Migrant Asia, 79; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

28   Mukherjee, Migrant Asia, 15.

29   Radhakamal Mukherjee, Food Planning for Four Hundred Millions (London: Macmillan, 1938).

30   Mukherjee, Food Planning, 221.

31   Sanjam Ahluwalia includes Mukherjee among a group of Indian eugenicists and neo-Malthusians that linked birth control to the problem of overpopulation and drew upon caste and community tensions in vilifying the reproduction of Muslims and lower castes. Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), chap. 1, especially 39–40. Alison Bashford and Rahul Nair, by contrast, explore the anticolonial aspects of his work. Bashford, Global Population, 41–42; Rahul Nair, “The Discourse on Population in India, 1870–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 79–85.

32   T. S. Chokkalingam, Piraja urpattiyaik kattuppatuttutal [Restraining population growth] (Madras: Tamil Nadu Power, 1925), 4. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Tamil are my own.

33   P. K. Wattal, The Population Problem in India: A Census Study (Bombay: Bennett, Coleman, 1934), 138.

34   Mohandas Gandhi, Self-Restraint vs. Self-Indulgence, 3rd ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1928), 54, quoted in Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 11.

35   Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 12 (Delhi: Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1964), 136, quoted in Alter, Gandhi’s Body, 11.

36   Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, September 23, 1929, vol. 5, p. 1252.

37   Madras Legislative Council Debates, March 27, 1928, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 32, 37, 32.

38   Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Indian Association and the Chairwoman of the All India Women’s Conference to Rai Sahib Harbilas Sarda, December 1927, All India Women’s Conference Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi (hereafter cited as AIWC Papers), file 5.

39   Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Indian Association and the Chairwoman of the All India Women’s Conference to Rai Sahib Harbilas Sarda, December 1927, AIWC Papers, file 5.

40   Age of Consent Committee, Report of the Age of Consent Committee, 1928–1929 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1929), 168. In practice, the new minimum marriage age was difficult to enforce, and the state showed little political will in doing so.

41   Throughout the 1930s, calls for state-supported birth control clinics were debated and rejected in Karachi, Delhi, and Ahmedabad municipalities; in the Madras Legislative Council; and in the United Provinces Legislative Council. Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 22–25. At the all-India level, a resolution in the Council of State calling for the government to “take practical steps to check the increase in population in India” failed in 1935. A similar resolution calling for the government to “popularize methods of birth control” in view of the “alarming growth of population” passed by a single vote in 1940. Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, 127.

42   Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 257–61.

43   All India Women’s Conference, 7th Session (Lucknow, December 28 1932–January 1, 1933), All India Women’s Conference Papers, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi (hereafter cited as AIWC Papers, Cousins Library), 90.

44   All India Women’s Conference, 7th Session (Lucknow, December 28, 1932–January 1, 1933), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 93.

45   Previous Indian censuses had shown that the population had increased by 13.2 percent in 1881–91 and by 7.1 percent in 1901–11. Nair, “Population in India,” 7n2.

46   Nair, “Population in India,” 178.

47   Government of India, Census of India, 1931, vol. 1, 32, quoted in Nair, “Population in India,” 184n12.

48   Nair, “Population Problem,” 233–39.

49   Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.

50   Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 99.

51   Sarah Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” in Bashford and Levine, History of Eugenics, 228.

52   All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session (Madras, December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 81a.

53   All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session (Madras, December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 83. Reddi remained critical of birth control throughout her political life, but she acknowledged in 1952 that “limitation of the family” could be achieved by birth control only if “self-control” was not possible. Muthulakshmi Reddi, “Message to the Third International Conference of Planned Parenthood,” Muthulakshmi Reddi Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, s. 197.

54   All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session (Madras, December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library.

55   Barbara Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920–1940,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989), 41–43.

56   All India Women’s Conference, 7th Session (Lucknow, December 28, 1932–January 1, 1933), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 95.

57   All India Women’s Conference, 7th Session (Lucknow, December 28, 1932–January 1, 1933), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 90.

58   Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, chap. 3.

59   All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session (Madras, December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 86.

60   All India Women’s Conference, 8th Session (Calcutta, December 24, 1933–January 2, 1934), AIWC Papers, Cousins Library, 137.

61   Sanger first learned of Indian birth control efforts through contact with the men involved in contraceptive advocacy, namely N. S. Phadke, R. D. Karve, and A. P. Pillay. In the mid-1920s, she temporarily had another channel to India via Agnes Smedley, a radical activist who had worked briefly with the birth control movement in New York, and who lived intermittently with the Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyay in Berlin. Sanger’s link to the AIWC was Margaret Cousins, who had been a founding member of the AIWC, and whom Sanger had met in New York in 1932. Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates,” 37–38, 48.

62   Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, 59–60.

63   For example, a letter from Sanger on behalf of the US National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to the Mexican feminist Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón references the AIWC’s resolution on birth control. Sanger to González Caballero, August 27, 1936, Archivo Particular Amalia González Caballero, Secretaría de las Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City, caja 4, expediente 55. My thanks to Katherine Marino for sharing this information with me.

64   Quoted in Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 107.

65   Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998), chap. 2.

66   Sanger and How-Martyn addressed a combined total of 105 public meetings. Sanger did not limit herself to women’s organizations but joined forces with the Madras Neo-Malthusian League, which hosted her visit in that city, as well as with A. P. Pillay’s clinic in Bombay. Margaret Sanger, “Newsletter to Friends, March 1936,” MSP, series III (subseries 1—Correspondence). For a record of Sanger’s conversation with Gandhi, as reported by Sanger’s secretary Anna Jane Philips, see “Gandhi and Mrs. Sanger Debate Birth Control,” Asia (November 1936), 698–703, MSP, series III (subseries 5—Family/Miscellany).

67   Reena Nanda, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11–17.

68   Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, “Women’s Movement in India,” in The Awakening of Indian Women, by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and others (Madras: Everyman’s Press, 1939), 32–33.

69   Chattopadhyay, “Women’s Movement in India,” 33.

70   Chattopadhyay, “Women’s Movement in India,” 34–35.

71   Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” 230.

72   Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” 229, 236.

73   Statement of object of the journal Marriage Hygiene 3, no. 3 (February 1937).

74   Wattal, Population Problem in India, 99.

75   “Poverty of Mother India,” Madras Birth Control Bulletin 1, no. 5 (September–October 1931): 51.

76   The clinic aimed to supply a range of contraceptive methods but promoted the Duofoam powder supplied by Margaret Sanger when she visited Madras. “Birth Control Clinic for Madras City,” Madras Birth Control Bulletin 8, no. 3 (July–September 1938): 42. The clinic did not develop a large clientele and failed to obtain a grant from the Madras Corporation. Consequently, it closed just six months after its opening. Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce, 72.

77   Madras Neo-Malthusian League, The Best Birth Control Methods (Madras: Madras Neo-Malthusian League, 1929), 1, 7. Translated from Tamil by D. Aravindan.

78   “New Year Greetings,” Madras Birth Control Bulletin 1, no. 6 (November–December 1931): 61.

79   Murari S. Krishnamurthi Ayyar, Population and Birth Control in India (Madras: People’s Printing and Publishing House, n.d.), 73.

80   Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, 38.

81   Krishnamurthi Ayyar, Population and Birth Control in India, 73.

82   P. K. Wattal, “Population Trends in East and West,” Marriage Hygiene 3, no. 3 (February 1937): 217.

83   Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (London: Palgrave, 2001), 298–321.

84   E. V. Ramasami, “Karppatatai” [Birth control], Kuti Aracu 5, no. 45 (April 6, 1930): 10.

85   See also V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar, 2nd rev. ed. (Calcutta: Samya, 2008), chap. 10.

86   Uma Ganesan, “Gender and Caste: Self Respect Movement in the Madras Presidency, 1925–1950” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2011), 132.

87   S. Nilavati, “Kattolikkarum karuttatai etirppum” [Catholics and the opposition to birth control], Kuti Aracu 9, no. 22 (November 19, 1933): 4.

88   Indrani Balasubramaniam, “Karppatatai” [Birth control], Kuti Aracu 9, no. 18 (October 22, 1933): 5.

89   T. D. Gopal, “Times When Women Should Not Conceive,” in Karppatci, allatu pillai perrai atakki alutal [Controlling pregnancy, or preventing the birth of children] (Erode: Kuti Aracu Press, 1936), 47. For further discussion of Gopal’s writing on birth control in Kuti Aracu, see Ganesan, “Gender and Caste,” 132–33.

90   Editorial, “Karppatatai” [Birth control], Kuti Aracu 6, no. 44 (March 1, 1931): 4.

91   S. Anandhi discusses the uneven feminist consciousness in the Self Respect movement in “The Women’s Question in the Dravidian Movement, c. 1925–1948,” Social Scientist 16, no. 5/6 (1991): 24–41; S. Anandhi, “Reproductive Bodies and Regulated Sexuality: Birth Control Debates in Early 20th Century Tamil Nadu,” in A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, ed. Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998): 139–66.

92   Shailaja Paik, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2014), 303. See also M. P. Mangudkar, ed. Dr. Ambedkar and Family Planning (Pune: Sangam, 1976).

93   For example, “Opposition to Birth Control,” Kuti Aracu 11, no. 26 (February 9, 1936): 5.

1   Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), 243.

2   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 243.

3   Beryl Suitters, Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1973), 56.

4   Following from this argument about co-optation, scholars of Indian feminism have had little to say about the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993); Mary John, “Feminist Perspectives on Family and Marriage: A Historical View,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 8 (2005): 712–15. However, Mary John questions historiographic assumptions about the “quietism of women’s movements post-independence,” suggesting that this may have been “more apparent than real.” Mary John, “Gender, Development and the Women’s Movement: Problems for a History of the Present,” in Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (New Delhi: Kali/Zubaan, 2000), 108.

5   This assumption underlies accounts of population control that center American and some Indian experts but do not consider women’s activities in organizations like the AIWC and FPAI. These accounts also tend to center policy but do not consider its implementation. For example, Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 260–67.

6   Historians of Indian population control have shown the continuities between the 1950s and later periods. For example, Mohan Rao, From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (New Delhi: Sage, 2004); Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review 32, no. 4 (December 2006): 629–67. However, the particular status of the Emergency (1975–77), as I discuss in chapter 4, tends to overshadow the specifics of earlier decades, especially in mainstream discourse.

7   Of course, not all women’s activists supported population control, and leftist and peasant movements raised a postindependence “women’s question” in different ways.

8   The question of what motivates historical actors is always complex. Debate about motivation animates feminist scholarship about reproductive politics, most notably in ongoing controversies about whether Margaret Sanger’s willingness to connect birth control to racist and eugenicist ideologies came from sincerely held belief or from political expediency. Here, I draw inspiration from Dorothy Roberts’s considered analysis of Sanger, which recognizes the difficulties of ascribing motivation while also emphasizing the impact of Sanger’s decision to connect birth control to eugenicist motivations. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998), 79–81. Similarly, I recognize that Indian feminists’ motivations may have differed from those of some other development planners, but my emphasis here is on the material and discursive impact of their actions, which helped to make top-down family planning that targeted women central to programs of national development.

9   National Planning Committee, Woman’s Role in Planned Economy (Report of the Sub-committee) (Bombay: Vora, 1947). The evidence is not definitive, but I follow Nirmala Banerjee in suggesting that “Durgabai Joshi” may be the person known as Durgabai Deshmukh, after she married C. D. Deshmukh in 1953. Nirmala Banerjee, “Whatever Happened to the Dreams of Modernity? The Nehruvian Era and Woman’s Position,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 17 (1998): WS6.

10   Maitrayee Chaudhuri, “Citizens, Workers and Emblems of Culture: An Analysis of the First Plan Document on Women,” in Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), 213.

11   National Planning Committee, Woman’s Role, 119. The “joint family” references a unit composed of generations of patrilineal kin, often parents, their adult sons and spouses, and grandchildren.

12   National Planning Committee, Woman’s Role, 33.

13   National Planning Committee, Woman’s Role, 174–75.

14   National Planning Committee, Report of the Sub-committee on Population, 2nd ed., ed. K. T. Shah (Bombay: Vora, 1949).

15   National Planning Committee, National Health, ed. K. T. Shah (Bombay: Vora, 1948), 19.

16   Hansa Mehta, Roshni 1, no. 1 (February 1946): 19–20.

17   “Draft of Indian Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties,” Roshni 1, no. 5 (June 1946): 24.

18   Anasuyabai Kale, “Presidential Address,” Roshni 3, no. 1 (February 1948): 15.

19   Shareefah Hamid Ali, “Status of Women: Review and Suggested Programme,” Roshni 8, no. 1 (June 1953): 7.

20   Maitrayee Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” in Feminism in India, ed. Maitrayee Chaudhuri (London: Zed Books, 2004), xvii–xviii. See also Mary John, “Gender and Development in India,” in Chaudhuri, Feminism in India, 251.

21   Avabai Wadia, The Light Is Ours: Memoirs and Movements (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 2001), 124.

22   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 127, 124.

23   Emily Rook-Koepsel, “Constructing Women’s Citizenship: The Local, National, and Global Civics Lessons of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 3 (2015): 154–75.

24   Mithan Lam was involved in the FPAI from its earliest stages, and in addition to being vice president, she served as honorary treasurer. Wadia, Light Is Ours, 518, 521. She served as AIWC president from 1961–62.

25   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 522.

26   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 518.

27   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 246.

28   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 496.

29   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 247.

30   Dr. Hem Sanwal to Marie Stopes, May 5, 1953, Marie Stopes Papers, Wellcome Library, London, PP/MCS/A.313, India: various correspondents A–W, c. 1930–1953.

31   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 133.

32   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 521.

33   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 253, 252.

34   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 505.

35   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 253; Wadia, Light Is Ours, 505.

36   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 253; Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 45.

37   Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 301–16.

38   Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–1965 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 96–98.

39   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 134–35.

40   Rama Rau to Sanger, September 5, 1951, Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries, Northampton, MA (hereafter cited as MSP), series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

41   Rama Rau to Sanger, December 11, 1951, MSP, series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

42   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 260–61.

43   Elfriede Vembu to Sanger, February 21, 1952, MSP, series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

44   Rama Rau to Sanger, September 27, 1952, MSP, series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

45   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 261.

46   Wadia, Light Is Ours, 127, 135.

47   Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 48.

48   Rama Rau to Sanger, September 27, 1952, MSP, series III (subseries 1—Correspondence).

49   Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 38–42.

50   Rama Rau to Sanger, September 4, 1952. Rama Rau quotes a letter from Dr. Conrad Van Emde Boas to Pillay. MSP, series III, subseries 1—Correspondence. See also Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 48–49.

51   Sanger to Rama Rau, September 5, 1952, MSP, series III, subseries 1—Correspondence. The Dutch delegation was not alone in its critique. The Swedish representative (Elise Ottesen-Jensen), who would become the second IPPF president, was a proponent of sex education and critiqued the neo-Malthusian turn of the movement.

52   Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 50–54.

53   Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, “Introduction,” in The Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood: Report of the Proceedings (Bombay: Family Planning Association of India, 1952), iii.

54   Sanger and Rama Rau worked alongside a few others in shaping the agenda, including Abraham Stone and C. P. Blacker. Sanger to Rama Rau, July 1, 1952, MSP, series III, subseries 1—Correspondence.

55   Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, “Address of Welcome,” in Third International Conference, 7.

56   Chattopadhyay, “Address of Welcome,” in Third International Conference, 8.

57   S. Chandrasekhar, Hungry People and Empty Lands: An Essay on Population Problems and International Tensions (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1954).

58   Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 56.

59   Government of India, Planning Commission, The First Five Year Plan (New Delhi: Government of India, 1953), 523, 88–89.

60   “Resolutions Passed at a Special Standing Committee Meeting in Delhi,”, 1944, All India Women’s Conference Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, reel 20 (files 315–27).

61   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 211.

62   For example: “Mothers Who Starve,” Roshni 1, no. 9 (October 1946): 31. On hunger in Indian public debate, see Benjamin R. Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

63   R. A. Gopalaswami, Census of India 1951, vol. 1, part 1-A, Report (New Delhi: Government of India, 1953), 3.

64   Gopalaswami, Census of India 1951, 87.

65   Nirmala Banerjee estimates the informal sector of the economy provided around 90 percent of total employment in 1951. “The Unorganized Sector and the Planner,” in Economy, Society and Polity: Essays in the Political Economy of Indian Planning in Honour of Professor Bhabatosh Datta, ed. Amiya Kumar Bagchi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 75. For the implications of planning’s focus on the formal sector, see Taylor C. Sherman, “ ‘A New Type of Revolution’: Socialist Thought in India, 1940s–1960s,” Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2018): 485–504.

66   This national commitment to development also had colonial and transnational roots: David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): 247–88; Subir Sinha, “Lineages of the Developmentalist State: Transnationality and Village India, 1900–1965,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 57–90.

67   Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii.

68   Pranav Jani, Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 56.

69   Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–2004: The Gradual Revolution, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71–112.

70   Partha Chatterjee, “Development Planning and the Indian State,” in State and Politics in India, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 283–86.

71   Karl Ittmann, A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 170.

72   Ittmann, Problem of Great Importance, 171.

73   Ittmann, Problem of Great Importance, 170.

74   Government of India, First Five Year Plan, 522.

75   Sunil Amrith, “Political Culture of Health in India: A Historical Perspective,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 2 (January 13–19, 2007): 117.

76   Government of India, First Five Year Plan, 522.

77   Amrit Kaur to Brock Chisholm, January 25, 1952, WHO Archives, Second Generation files (WHO.2), GH/12, cited in Amrith, Decolonizing International Health, 96.

78   Sanjam Ahluwalia and Daksha Parmar, “From Gandhi to Gandhi: Contraceptive Technologies and Sexual Politics in Postcolonial India, 1947–1977,” in Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy, ed. Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 131–32.

79   Amrith, Decolonizing International Health, 96.

80   Amrith, Decolonizing International Health, 97.

81   Ahluwalia and Parmar, “From Gandhi to Gandhi,” 131–32.

82   Amrith, Decolonizing International Health, 97.

83   The opposition came from the Vatican, Roman Catholic–dominated countries, and Communist countries. Bashford, Global Population, 361–62.

84   Ahluwalia and Parmar, “From Gandhi to Gandhi,” 133.

85   Rama Rau to Sanger, December 11, 1951, MSP, series III, subseries 1—Correspondence; Suitters, Be Brave and Angry, 45.

86   Ahluwalia and Parmar, “From Gandhi to Gandhi,” 132–33.

87   Stopes was critical of the rhythm method and was in contact with the FPAI about her contraceptive sponges. Marie Stopes to Elfriede Vembu, June 1952, Marie Stopes Papers, Wellcome Library, London, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Hong Kong Correspondence 1952–54, PP/MCS/A.315.

88   Stone himself shared some of these doubts about the effectiveness of the rhythm method. Stone to Sanger, March 1, 1952, MSP, series III, subseries 1—Correspondence.

89   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 259.

90   Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford note the strange bedfellows among feminists, eugenicists, and neo-Malthusians in “Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Feminism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.

1   Information Service of India, “The Family Planning Program in India,” in The Population Crisis and the Use of World Resources, ed. Stuart Mudd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 157.

2   S. K. Khan, “Report of Honorary Family Planning Education Leaders, 25 August 1960,” All India Women’s Conference Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi (hereafter cited as AIWC Papers), subject file 430.

3   Gyan Prakash notes the mainstream view of the Emergency as an aberration and highlights the importance of understanding this period within a broader historical sweep. Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

4   I use the term subaltern to reference nonelite women, who were marked as different from the middle-class family planner by virtue of class, caste, religious, and/or tribal/Adivasi identity.

5   Government of India, Planning Commission, The First Five Year Plan (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1952), 124, quoted in Nirmala Buch, “State Welfare Policy and Women, 1950–1975,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 17 (1998): WS19.

6   Durgabai Deshmukh, Chintaman and I (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private, 1980), 60.

7   Deshmukh, Chintaman and I, 37.

8   Government of India, Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan (Delhi: Government of India, 1956), 533.

9   Deshmukh, Chintaman and I, 38.

10   Address by Durgabai Deshmukh, in “Report of the 23rd Session of the AIWC” (Poona, May 2–5, 1953), 34, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi; Resolutions of Group II on “Future Work of the Conference,” in “Report of the 23rd Session of the AIWC” (Poona, May 2–5, 1953), 41, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

11   Avabai Wadia, The Light Is Ours: Memoirs and Movements (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 2001), 520–21.

12   Branch Reports, in “Report of the 23rd Session of the AIWC” (Poona, May 2–5, 1953), 99–124, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

13   Avabai Wadia, “Report of the Work of the Family Planning Association of India,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Planned Parenthood (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, n.d.,), 359–61.

14   Padmini Sengupta, Women Workers of India (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1960), 274. For biographical information about Sengupta, see Barnita Bagchi, “Tracing Two Generations in Twentieth Century Indian Women’s Education through Analysis of Literary Sources: Selected Writings by Padmini Sengupta,” Women’s History Review 29, no. 3 (2020): 465–79.

15   Padmini Sengupta, “Report of 8 August 1959,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

16   K. Meenakshi Amma, “Report for the Month of April 1960,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

17   P. L. Gupta, “Report for July–September 1959,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

18   Krishna Agarwal, “Report of Work by Mrs. Krishna Agarwal in the Indore Region,” AIWC Papers, reel 43, subject file 146.

19   “Report of the Family Planning Association of India from January 1961 to December 1963,” USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division Records, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA), RG 286, entry P458: subject files 1961–1967, container 8.

20   Archana Venkatesh, “Women, Medicine and Nation-Building: The ‘Lady Doctor’ and Development in 20th Century South India,” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2020).

21   Prem Lata Gupta, “Women’s Role in Promotion of Family Planning and in Raising the Status of Women in India,” in Bharatiya Grameen Mahila Sangh and Central Institute of Research and Training in Public Co-operation, “Status of Women and Family Planning in India” (unpublished report, n.d.), 2–7.

22   “Role of Voluntary Organizations in Family Planning,” AIWC Papers, subject file 989.

23   Aleyamma George, “Speeches Delivered at the 31st Annual Session of the AIWC (December 1961),” AIWC Papers, reel 42, subject file 131.

24   Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–95.

25   Emily Rook-Koepsel, “Constructing Women’s Citizenship: The Local, National, and Global Civics Lessons of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 3 (2015): 160–61.

26   Rook-Koepsel, “Constructing Women’s Citizenship,” 156.

27   “Consolidated Report of Family Planning Education Work in the Year 1960 February to 1961 April,” AIWC Papers, reel 43, subject file 146.

28   Visakha Dixit, Report, AIWC Papers, reel 43, subject file 146.

29   Aroti Dutt, Report, AIWC Papers, reel 43, subject file 146.

30   K. Meenakshi Amma, “Report for the Month of April 1960,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

31   “Consolidated Report of Family Planning Education Work in the Year 1960 February to 1961 April,” AIWC Papers, reel 43, subject file 146.

32   Hem Sanwal, “Report on the Work of January and February 1960,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430. Emphasis mine.

33   Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 139. This was the case for the state’s major development initiative in the 1950s, the Community Development Program. Kim Berry, “Lakshmi and the Scientific Housewife: A Transnational Account of Indian Women’s Development and Production of an Indian Modernity,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 11 (2003): 1055–68.

34   Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), 278.

35   Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 1–11.

36   Rama Rau, An Inheritance, 278–79.

37   Visalakshi Narayanswamy, Report of the Family Planning Work, in “All India Women’s Conference Report” (Jan–Dec 1966), 57, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

38   A. R. Adhav et al., “Methods of Communication in Family Planning in a Labour Area in Bombay City,” Fifth All India Conference on Family Planning (Patna, January 17–22, 1964), USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division Records, NARA, RG 286, entry P458: subject files 1961–1967, container 8.

39   K. Meenakshi Amma, “Report for the Month of April 1960,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

40   P. L. Gupta, “Report for July–September 1959,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

41   A. R. Adhav et al., “Methods of Communication in Family Planning in a Labour Area in Bombay City,” Fifth All India Conference on Family Planning (Patna, January 17–22, 1964), USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division Records, NARA, RG 286, entry P458: subject files 1961–1967, container 8.

42   Hem Sanwal, “Report on the Work of January and February 1960,” AIWC Papers, subject file 430.

43   Rebecca Jane Williams, “Revisiting the Khanna Study: Population and Development in India, 1953–1960” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2013); Mahmood Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste and Class in an Indian Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

44   “Family Planning Seminar,” February 28, 1966, AlWC Papers, subject file 842.

45   Sushila Nayar, “Inaugural Address,” in Proceedings of the Seminar on IUCD Nov 29–Dec 1, 1966, ed. Somnath Roy (New Delhi: Central Family Planning Institute, n.d.), 10.

46   Bharatiya Grameen Mahila Sangh and Central Institute of Research and Training in Public Co-operation, “Status of Women and Family Planning in India” (unpublished report, n.d.).

47   Benjamin R. Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chaps. 2 and 6.

48   Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 221–22.

49   Nayar, “Inaugural Address,” in Roy, Seminar on IUCD.

50   The Population Bomb: Is Voluntary Human Sterilization the Answer?, Hugh Moore Fund NY (n.d., ca. 1960), Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter cited as RAC), record group 5, series 1, subseries 5, box 80, folder 670.

51   Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 1.

52   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 258–61.

53   Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “From Population Control to Reproductive Rights: Feminist Fault Lines,” Reproductive Health Matters 3, no. 6 (November 1995): 152–61; Elena Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).

54   Planned Parenthood–World Population Division, Population Council Collection, RAC, record group IV 3 B4. 5, box 107, folder 1997.

55   Edward M. Humberger, “Population Program Management: The Ford Foundation in India, 1951–1970,” April 22, 1970, Ford Foundation Archives (hereafter cited as FFA), Ford report 003673; Douglas Ensminger, “The Ford Foundation’s Early and Continuous Concern about Population and Family Planning,” Oral History, November 1, 1971, FFA, FA744, B.1. All citations of Ford Foundation materials refer to the Ford Foundation Archives, which I consulted at the foundation’s headquarters in New York City. These materials have since been deposited with the Rockefeller Archives Center.

56   Mohan Rao, From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (New Delhi: Sage, 2004), 35.

57   Rao, From Population Control, 32–33, 37.

58   Ashwini Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 115–17.

59   Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 115–18.

60   B. Chatterjee and Navrekha Singh, “A Guide to Voluntary Action in Family Planning,” April 1971, FFA, Ford report 003679.

61   Chikako Takeshita, The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 14–15.

62   Takeshita, Global Biopolitics, 16.

63   Alan Guttmacher, “Opening Address,” in Intra-uterine Contraceptive Devices: Proceedings of the Conference, April 30–May 1, 1962, ed. Christopher Tietze and Sarah Lewit (Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica Foundation, n.d.), 7.

64   “Conference Discussion,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 123–24.

65   “Conference Discussion,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 124.

66   “Conference Discussion,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 125.

67   Adaline P. Satterthwaite and Clarence Gamble, “Intra-uterine Contraception with Plastic Devices Inserted without Cervical Dilation,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 86, 88.

68   Don Jessen, “The Grafenberg Ring: A Clinical and Histopathologic Study,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 43–44.

69   Margaret C. N. Jackson, “The Grafenberg Silver Ring in a Series of Patients Who Had Failed with Other Methods,” in Tietze and Lewit, IUCD, 37.

70   “Conference Discussion,” IUCD, 133.

71   “Conference Discussion,” IUCD, 122.

72   “Conference Discussion,” IUCD, 128.

73   Bernard Berelson, “Application of Intra-uterine Contraception in Family Planning Programs,” in Intra-uterine Contraception, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference Oct 2–3, 1964, ed. A. L. Southam and K. D. Shafer (Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica Foundation, 1965), 13.

74   B. L. Raina and M. W. Freymann, “Intra-uterine Contraception in India,” in Southam and Shafer, Intra-uterine Contraception, 44.

75   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 215–16.

76   Nayar, “Inaugural Address,” in Roy, Seminar on IUCD, 7.

77   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 217–20.

78   Will Johnson, “New Technology for Indian Family Planning,” FFA, India Program Letter 137, Ford report 001127 (1966), 4–6.

79   Govind Narain, “India: The Family Planning Program since 1965,” Studies in Family Planning, no. 35 (Nov 1968): 2.

80   Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, “Family Planning in India,” Journal of Sex Research 3, no. 4 (1967): 273.

81   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 225.

82   Rama Rau, “Family Planning in India,” 272–73.

83   Narain, “India,” 2.

84   Rama Rau, “Family Planning in India,” 272.

85   “Report of the 35th Session of the AIWC” (Balasore, Orissa, 1966), 12, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

86   “AIWC Central Skippo Committee Annual Report for Dec 1965–November 1966,” in “Report of the 35th Session of the AIWC” (Balasore, Orissa, 1966), 59–62, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

87   For example, “Report of the 37th Session of the AIWC” (Chandigarh, 1968), 59–60, Margaret Cousins Library, Sarojini House, New Delhi.

88   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 217–25.

89   Narain, “India,” 2.

90   Narain, “India,” 4. India’s abortion law was liberalized in 1971, as part of the overall push for population control.

91   B. N. Purandare, in Roy, Seminar on IUCD, 33, 35.

92   Harry L. Levin to Moye Freymann, October 13, 1965, Population Council Collection, RAC, record group IV3B4.3a, box 65, folder 1148.

93   Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review 32, no. 4 (December 2006), 657.

94   Emma Tarlo, “Body and Space in a Time of Crisis: Sterilization and Resettlement during the Emergency in Delhi,” Violence and Subjectivity, ed. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, and Mamphela Ramphele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 242–70.

95   L. C. R. Emmet, “Family Limitation of [sic] Tea Estates,” in Roy, Seminar on IUCD, 66.

96   Dandekar argued that raising the age of marriage might be beneficial in itself but should be delinked from population control motivations. Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India, 114–15.

97   Kumudini Dandekar and Surekha Nigam, “What Did Fail? Loop (IUCD) as a Contraceptive? Administrators of Loop Programme? Or, Our Ill-Conceived Expectations?” Economic and Political Weekly 6, no. 48 (1971): 2394.

98   R. A. Gopalaswami, “Introduction to the Memorandum on ‘Administrative Implementation of Family Planning Policy,’ ” in Report of the Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Planned Parenthood (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, n.d.), 288.

99   Family Planning Board, Government of Madras, Family Planning Manual (n.p., n.d., ca. 1956).

100   Everett M. Rogers, “Incentives in the Diffusion of Family Planning Innovations,” n.d., FFA, Ford report 06616.

101   Marika Vicziany, “Coercion in a Soft State: The Family Planning Program of India: Part 1: The Myth of Voluntarism,” Pacific Affairs 55, no. 3 (1982–83): 386.

102   Rao, From Population Control, 39–40; Vicziany, “Myth of Voluntarism,” 388.

103   Marika Vicziany, “Coercion in a Soft State: The Family Planning Program of India: Part 2: The Sources of Coercion,” Pacific Affairs 55, no. 4 (1982): 562–67, 580.

104   Sreemanta Banerjee, “Female Sterilization in Population Control Programme,” USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division Records, NARA, RG 286, entry P458: subject files 1961–1967, container 5.

105   Berry, “Scientific Housewife.” For feminist critiques of this approach to agrarian development, see Ester Boserup’s pioneering work, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970).

106   “India’s Family Planning Program in the Seventies,” Part 1, May 1970, FFA, Ford report 001599.

107   Vicziany, “Myth of Voluntarism,” 387.

108   Rebecca Jane Williams, “Storming the Citadels: Family Planning under the Emergency in India, 1975–1977,” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 2 (2014): 471–92.

109   Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 145.

110   Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India, 111.

111   Williams, “Storming the Citadels,” 485.

112   Davidson Gwatkin, “Political Will and Family Planning: The Implications of India’s Emergency Experience,” Population and Development Review 5, no. 1 (1979): 38; Williams, “Storming the Citadels,” 486.

113   Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, 148.

114   Vicziany, “Myth of Voluntarism,” 386–87.

115   While the government funded and performed the majority of procedures, the FPAI, with financial support from the IPPF and under the leadership of Avabai Wadia, became a major nongovernmental provider of the procedure, sterilizing over 80,000 people in 1976.

116   Vicziany, “Myth of Voluntarism,” 386–87.

117   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 326.

118   Prakash, Emergency Chronicles, 303.

119   Williams, “Storming the Citadels,” 476–82.

120   Williams, “Storming the Citadels,” 476–77.

121   Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, 176.

122   Vicziany, “Myth of Voluntarism,” 386–87.

123   By 1994, 96 percent of all sterilizations done in India were on women, a ratio that Cecilia Van Hollen ascribes, in part, to the aftermath of the Emergency. Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 144. Deepa Dhanraj similarly connects high rates of female sterilization to legacies of the Emergency. Something Like a War (Women Make Movies, 1991).

124   35.7 percent of married women between ages fifteen and forty-nine use sterilization as their method of family planning; this represents approximately 62.4 percent of contraceptive use among women. Government of India, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, “National Family Health Survey-4, 2015–2016: India Fact Sheet” (Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences), accessed May 22, 2018, http://rchiips.org/nfhs/pdf/NFHS4/India.pdf.

125   Dhanraj, Something Like a War.

126   Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold, 159.

127   Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, 176.

1   Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Methods of Family Planning (1964), Field Office Files, Ford Foundation Archives (hereafter cited as FFA), Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, reel 4026, grant 64-303.

2   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 104–5.

3   Foucault, History of Sexuality, 20.

4   Eunjoo Cho, “Making the ‘Modern’ Family: The Discourse of Sexuality in the Family Planning Program in South Korea,” Sexualities 19, no. 7 (2016): 802–18; Susan Greenhalgh, Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

5   Penelope Deutscher, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1: Re-reading Its Reproduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 119–37.

6   Manon Parry, Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 82–86.

7   For example: Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Mary E. John and Janaki Nair, eds., A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); Nivedita Menon, Sexualities (London: Zed Books, 2007); Sanjay Srivastava, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).

8   An important exception is J. Devika, Individuals, Householders, Citizens: Family Planning in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008).

9   A. R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012).

10   Arvind Rajagopal, ed., The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 324.

11   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 37–46.

12   Arvind Rajagopal, “Introduction: The Public Sphere in India,” in Rajagopal, Indian Public Sphere, 3.

13   Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (New York: Routledge, 2016), chap. 4.

14   J. H. Hutton, Census of India, 1941, vol. 1, Report (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), 20. Hutton is quoting the census superintendent of Madras.

15   Charu Gupta, “Redefining Obscenity and Aesthetics in Print,” in Rajagopal, Indian Public Sphere, 108.

16   Ilvazhkkaiyin irakaciyankal [Mysteries of wedded life] (Madras: Vanam, 1927), cited in Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce, 116.

17   Rajagopal, “Introduction,” in Rajagopal, Indian Public Sphere, 11–12.

18   William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 81–82.

19   Parry, Broadcasting Birth Control, 85.

20   Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, For a Healthier Tomorrow: Family Planning (Calcutta: Lalchand Roy, 1968), n.p.

21   Srivastava, Passionate Modernity, 2.

22   Douglas Ensminger, “The Ford Foundation’s Early and Continuous Concern about Population and Family Planning,” Oral History, November 1, 1971, FFA, FA744, B.1.

23   “Signs, Murals Proclaim India’s Program,” Population Chronicle 1 (August 1969), FFA, reel 1995, grant 64-303, section 4.

24   M. K. Gandhi, Self-Restraint vs. Self-Indulgence, 3rd ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1928), 15.

25   Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes, “Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, Modernity, and the Appropriation of Global Sexual Science in Western India, 1927–1953,” in A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960, ed. Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 173.

26   Gandhi, Self-Restraint vs. Self-Indulgence, 31.

27   “Gandhi and Mrs. Sanger Debate Birth Control,” Asia (November 1936), 700, Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries, Northampton, MA, series III (subseries 5—Family/Miscellany, Transcriptions of Conversations and Interviews).

28   Sanjam Ahluwalia, “ ‘Tyranny of Orgasm’: Global Governance of Sexuality from Bombay, 1930s–1950s,” in Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, History of Sexual Science, 353–73.

29   Botre and Haynes, “Understanding R. D. Karve,” in Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, History of Sexual Science.

30   Ishita Pande, “Time for Sex: The Education of Desire and the Conduct of Childhood in Global/Hindu Sexology,” in Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, History of Sexual Science, 291.

31   Advertisement for Contrafant tablets, Marriage Hygiene 1, no. 2 (November 1934): 184.

32   Karppatci, allatu cuvatina karppam [Contraception, or control over pregnancy], 2nd ed. (Madras: Vasan, 1931 [1st ed. 1929]), 16, 16, 8. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

33   Devidasan [pseud.], Karppatatai [Birth control] (Chennai: Cutan, 1929), 3 (translation by D. Aravindan).

34   Devidasan, Karppatatai, 49.

35   Devidasan, Karppatatai, 4.

36   Devidasan, Karppatatai, 55, 56.

37   Devika, Individuals, Householders, Citizens, 47–55.

38   Many texts follow this structure, including Kalaniti, Katal rakaciyam: Karppattatai vilakkankalaik kontatu [The secrets of love: Means of birth control explained] (Chennai: Malivu Nulakam, 1960); Citalakshmi Kuyilan, Karppamum piracavamum [Pregnancy and childbirth] (Chennai: Tamil Puttakap Pannai, 1955); Kutumpa kattuppatu, Ovvoru nimitamum 25! [Family planning: Every minute 25!] (n.p., n.d.).

39   Menon, Sexualities, 11.

40   For example: George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

41   Menon, Sexualities, 11.

42   Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Methods of Family Planning (1964), Field Office Files, FFA, reel 4026, grant 64-303.

43   Kalaniti, Katal rakaciyam, 70–71.

44   T. S. Janakakumari, Kuzhantai ventam enral? [What if you don’t want children?], 2nd ed. (Karaikudi: Selvi, 1963), preface.

45   T. S. Janakakumari, Kuzhantai ventum [You want a child], 2nd ed. (Chennai: Star, 1964), 3, 44.

46   Dr. K. Satyavati, Family Planning (Birth Control), 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Satyavati Family Planning Center, 1955).

47   Satyavati, Family Planning, 109.

48   Karppatci, allatu cuvatina karppam, 7, 10.

49   Ca. Pasyam, Pale Tankam: Kutumpak kattuppatu virivakkappattatu [Well done Thangam: Family planning explained] (n.p., 1961), 6.

50   Nilanjana Chatterjee and Nancy E. Riley, “Planning an Indian Modernity: The Gendered Politics of Fertility Control,” Signs 26, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 831–32.

51   “Planitab,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Fifth All India Conference on Family Planning (Patna: Family Planning Association of India, 1964), n.p.

52   K. A. Abbas, dir., Three Families (Government of India Films Division, 1963); Enough’s Enough (Prasad Productions, 1973).

53   “Volpar,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Fifth All India Conference on Family Planning, (Patna: Family Planning Association of India, 1964), n.p.

54   “Protecto,” Journal of Family Welfare 1, no. 5 (July 1955): n.p.

55   Parry, Broadcasting Birth Control, 90.

56   Friends of Vellore, Slides Set 7 (Family Planning, Boxes 1–2, 1965–1975), Friends of Vellore, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, MssEur F219/18/44a, 44b.

57   Devika, Individuals, Householders, Citizens, 92–95.

58   As I have argued elsewhere, this attention to the conjugal couple was itself the product of legal, economic, and social changes in late colonial India. Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

59   Ashwini Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

60   Frank Wilder and D. K. Tyagi, “India’s New Departures in Mass Motivation for Fertility Control,” Demography 5, no. 2 (1968): 776.

61   For example: “National Poets Set the Limit at Two Children,” Centre Calling: A Monthly Newsletter of the Department of Family Planning 4, no. 4 (April 1969): 3.

62   Family Planning Board, Government of Madras, Family Planning Manual (n.p., n.d., ca. 1956), 42 (emphasis mine).

63   A. B. Shetty, “Foreword,” in Family Planning Board, Family Planning Manual.

64   Kutumpa kattuppatu titta kaiputtakam [Family planning instructional handbook] (Chennai: Kutumpa Kattuppatu Tittak Kalakam, 1962), 33. (Translation by D. Aravindan.)

65   Kutumpa kattuppatu titta kaiputtakam, 1. (Translation by D. Aravindan.)

66   Pasyam, Pale Tankam, 1.

67   Pasyam, Pale Tankam, 5.

68   Pasyam, Pale Tankam, 16.

69   Pasyam, Pale Tankam, 21.

70   Central Board for Workers Education (India), We Two Our Two (Nagpur: Shivraj Fine Arts Lith Works, n.d.), n.p.

71   We Two Our Two, n.p.

72   We Two Our Two, n.p.

73   We Two Our Two, n.p.

74   Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 264.

75   Les Clark, dir., Family Planning (Walt Disney Productions, 1967).

76   “The Population Council: The Disney Film on Family Planning,” Studies in Family Planning 1, no. 26 (1968): n.p.

77   “Our History: Timeline,” Population Council, accessed November 15, 2015, www.popcouncil.org/about/timeline; “The Population Council: The Disney Film on Family Planning,” n.p.

78   “The Population Council: The Disney Film on Family Planning,” n.p.

79   Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 176.

80   B. Chatterjee and Navrekha Singh, “A Guide to Voluntary Action in Family Planning,” April 1971, FFA, Ford report 003679, p. 10.

81   Chatterjee and Singh, “A Guide to Voluntary Action in Family Planning,” 10.

82   Wilder and Tyagi, “India’s New Departures,” 775.

83   Centre Calling: A Newsletter of the Department of Family Planning 1, no. 3 (December 1966).

84   Wilder and Tyagi, “India’s New Departures,” 776.

85   Wilder and Tyagi, “India’s New Departures,” 774.

86   Frank Wilder to James F. Farnham, August 12, 1969, Field Office File, FFA, reel 3847, grant 64-303.

87   For example: Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44; Kimberly McKee, “Reproductive Futurity and the Adoptive Family,” Adoption and Culture 7, no. 2 (2019): 180.

88   Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), Nook ed., 13.

89   Shannon Winnubst, “Review Essay: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010): 181–82.

90   Eithne Luibhéid, Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 150, 174.

1   IPPF and the Population and Sustainability Network, Climate Change: Time to “Think Family Planning”; An Advocacy Toolkit for Family Planning Advocates (2016), www.ippf.org/sites/default/files/2016-11/Climate%20Change%20Time%20to%20Think%20Family%20Planning%20Advocacy%20Toolkit%20Final.pdf.

2   NITI Aayog, “NITI Aayog to Draft Roadmap for Achieving Population Stabilization,” accessed May 7, 2020, https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1596946.

3   Devi [pseud.], interview by Archana Venkatesh, June 19, 2014.

4   Jade Sasser, On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 89.

5   IPPF, Climate Change.

6   “Fighting Climate Change with Family Planning,” Sierra, May/June 2012, 49.

7   Sasser, On Infertile Ground, 50.

8   World Bank, “Fertility Rate,” accessed May 6, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN; World Bank, “CO2 emissions,” accessed May 6, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC.

9   Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11.

10   Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, 11.

11   IPPF, Climate Change.

12   NITI, “NITI Aayog to Draft Roadmap.”

13   World Bank, “Fertility Rate”; NITI Aayog, “Total Fertility Rate,” accessed May 6, 2020, https://niti.gov.in/content/total-fertility-rate-tfr-birth-woman.

14   “International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action,” 20th anniv. ed. (New York: UNFPA, 2014), www.unfpa.org/publications/international-conference-population-and-development-programme-action.

15   Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “From Population Control to Reproductive Rights: Feminist Fault Lines,” Reproductive Health Matters 3, no. 6 (November 1995): 152–61.

16   Mohan Rao and Sarah Sexton, eds., Markets and Malthus: Population, Gender, and Health in Neo-liberal Times (New Delhi: Sage, 2010).

17   Betsy Hartmann and Mohan Rao, “India’s Population Programme: Obstacles and Opportunities,” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (October 31, 2015).

18   Sharmila Rudrappa, Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 172.

19   Vidya Krishnan, “Doctor Freed in Bilaspur Sterilisation Deaths Case,” Hindu, February 21, 2017, www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/sterilisation-deaths-in-chhattisgarh-doctor-freed/article17336215.ece.

20   “Independence Day: Full Text of PM Modi’s Address to Nation,” Business Today, August 15, 2019, www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/independence-day-pm-modi-address-nation-full-text-speech-15-august-red-fort/story/372903.html.

21   Rajani Bhatia, Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 26. Some scholars use the term populationism to underscore the legacies of population control alongside its contemporary formations. Anne Hendrixson, Diana Ojeda, Jade S. Sasser, Sarojini Madimpally, Ellen E. Foley, and Rajani Bhatia, “Confronting Populationism: Feminist Challenges to Population Control in an Era of Climate Change,” Gender, Place and Culture (2019): 1–9.

22   NITI Aayog, “Sex Ratio (Females/1000 Males),” accessed May 11, 2020, https://niti.gov.in/content/sex-ratio-females-1000-males.

23   Ashwini Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019): 138–40.

24   T. V. Sekher, “Ladlis and Lakshmis: Financial Incentive Schemes for the Girl Child,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 17 (April 28, 2012): 59.

25   The interviews were conducted in June and July 2014 by Archana Venkatesh, then a PhD student at Ohio State, who worked collaboratively with me on designing the research. They took place with women living in two subdivisions, Uthokkottai and Gummidipoondi, of Thiruvallur District. Interviews were conducted in Tamil, and translated to English by me. I use pseudonyms throughout.

26   NITI, “Total Fertility Rate.”

27   Devi, interview.

28   Darshini [pseud.], interview by Archana Venkatesh, July 9, 2014.

29   Kasturi [pseud.], interview by Archana Venkatesh, June 16, 2014.

30   Veena [pseud.], interview by Archana Venkatesh, June 16, 2014.