Small Families in Print Culture

During the early twentieth century, visions of the modern family using birth control were intimately linked to a proliferating culture of print. Increasing numbers of publishing houses and printing presses produced material in English and in Indian languages for a growing reading public.⁹ Although literacy rates were low, representing just over 12 percent of the Indian population in 1941, these literate classes became the readership for newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets that circulated in urban centers and in smaller towns.¹⁰ This surge in popular publishing, in India as elsewhere in the colonized world, was part of a growing culture of print capitalism that underpinned the rise of nationalism.¹¹ But national identities were not the only modes of identification forged by the new markets for print, nor did print materials displace older modes of communication or community.¹² Rather, while commercial publishing used nationalist ideologies as a legitimating paradigm, the new newspapers and books also engaged with topics that were not always, or necessarily, tied to the production of national subjects. Moreover, markets in print were also linked to other markets, specifically to a growing consumer economy, whose products began to be advertised in newspapers and magazines.

Birth control was among the topics addressed within this new market for print. Unlike in Britain or the United States, colonial law in India did not explicitly prohibit the dissemination of birth control information, and such material was part of a thriving marketplace of “contraceptive commercialism” during the 1920s and 1930s.¹³ Thus, as one contemporary observer in Madras noted in 1931, “Books on the subject [of birth control] are to be found in any bookstall or publisher’s list and whether they are read as mild pornography or for serious guidance, it is unlikely that they can fail to exert some influence.”¹⁴ As this quote suggests, the print culture of birth control skirted the boundaries of respectable and nonrespectable sexualities—suggestive at once of a titillating “pornography” and of “serious guidance” for married couples.

This boundary was an important one for publishers, since although contraceptive information was not forbidden, colonial authorities sometimes did prosecute sexually explicit texts on the grounds of obscenity. To avoid prosecution, as Charu Gupta notes in her study of Hindi sex manuals, authors and publishers “camouflaged themselves with the language of sexual science” while simultaneously highlighting erotic elements through color pictures and in book advertisements.¹⁵ Indeed, the birth control manual perfectly allowed this combination of a science of sex with its eroticization. Such manuals implicitly disavowed nonnormative sexualities in favor of heterosexual marriage and reproduction, while claiming to reveal the “truth” of sex through the scientific investigation of reproductive anatomy and physiology. Thus, the title of one popular Tamil birth control manual, Ilvazhkkaiyin irakaciyankal (Mysteries of wedded life), served as both invitation and admonition to readers while situating birth control as a necessary component of modern marriage and family life.¹⁶

While the commercial publication of birth control manuals continued to thrive after independence, the media landscape shifted with the Indian government’s official commitment to family planning. The state entered into existing markets in print by publishing pamphlets and books and also utilized newer media such as film and radio to spread its family planning message. State involvement rendered birth control information part of a technocratic field of “communications,” to be practiced by experts and studied for its effectiveness in persuading couples to use contraception. State-sponsored family planning communication became one component of a larger drive to marshal media in service of education and information to serve the state’s development goals.¹⁷

Working with commercial advertisers and with voluntary organizations like the FPAI, the Indian government during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s launched media campaigns, promoted films, designed posters, sponsored radio programs, and in multiple other ways sought to fill public spaces with family planning messaging.¹⁸ Thus, by 1968, about six hundred family planning programs were broadcast on the radio each month.¹⁹ All movie theaters in the country were expected to screen family planning films in advance of features, and five hundred audiovisual vans brought media to rural areas. Ten thousand billboards and fifty thousand bus boards were part of this proliferation of imagery as well.²⁰ The state’s massive intervention did not exhaust the spaces of sexuality discourses—which, as Sanjay Srivastava notes, also developed outside the realms of state control and regulation.²¹ However, the government’s entrance into the field of family planning radically shifted the terms of “contraceptive commercialism” that characterized the interwar years, edging it away from the liminal spaces between respectable and nonrespectable sexualities and more firmly into the field of development. That is, family planning messaging represented itself as a kind of public service. Postcolonial family planning manuals drew from the ideological and material resources of the state and claimed to uphold the ideals of the Five Year Plans.

Even while the government of India thus became a purveyor of birth control discourse, foreign funders were also eager to be involved in India’s family planning experiments. For example, the Ford Foundation made its first population control grant to investigate “how to communicate and educate people about family planning.”²² This became a momentous beginning to Ford’s many efforts in developing family planning propaganda in support of a “small-family norm.” Foreign funders like Ford worked alongside the government of India to produce a range of media, such as flip books to be used by family planning extension workers, posters to be hung on clinic walls advertising their services, and pamphlets that “motivators” could share with their clients. Sometimes the messaging was more outlandish. Locomotive engines, for instance, were painted with family planning messaging. Even an elephant was pressed into service, and it traveled to villages dispensing government-subsidized contraceptives and pamphlets with its trunk.²³ Some of the Indian family planning program’s most iconic messaging was produced in this period of the mid-1960s, notably the inverted red triangle and the stylized “four faces” of husband and wife with son and daughter. In sum, the contexts for visioning the small and happy family—rendered modern through its size and use of birth control—changed significantly over time. Yet across these changes, as we shall see below, the normative ideal of the small family promised its adherents a better future—characterized by modern sexualities, economic prosperity, and a commitment to planning.

Sexuality and the Small Family

The questions of how to modernize sex and the appropriate relationship between sexuality and modernity occupied public discourse across the twentieth century. For family planners, any claims about modernizing sexuality had to grapple with Gandhian thought, which famously rejected birth control in favor of a “married brahmacharya,” which Gandhi defined as follows: “When a man has completely conquered his animality, involuntary incontinence becomes impossible, and the desire for sexual gratification for its own sake ceases altogether. Sexual union then takes place only when there is a desire for offspring. This is the meaning of what has been described as ‘Married Brahmacharya.’ ”²⁴ Gandhi’s claims drew upon classical Indian thought that marked brahmacharya as both a lifelong celibacy observed by ascetics and a stage of life practiced by young men. It was linked to notions about the conservation of semen, a practice thought to give spiritual power. Gandhi was one among many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century leaders who, as Shrikant Botre and Douglas Haynes note, “espoused brahmacharya as a vehicle for renewing Indian masculinity and militancy.”²⁵ At the same time, Gandhi drew women into the practice, noting in his famous debate with Margaret Sanger that woman was not “prey to sexual desire to the same extent as man. It is easier for her than for man to exercise self-restraint.”²⁶ By suggesting that husbands and wives could practice brahmacharya through a control and transcendence of sexual desire, Gandhi opened up the practice to a much larger group of people and offered an alternative to contraception. Thus, rather than recommending controlling reproduction via birth control, he called for an “education of the passions,” which would enable married couples to limit their children while also gaining spiritual strength for the national struggle.²⁷

Supporters of family planning, however, rejected these Gandhian notions of brahmacharya as outmoded and unscientific and claimed instead to offer a modern science of sex. Indian eugenicists and sexologists such as R. D. Karve, A. P. Pillay, and N. S. Phadke were at the forefront of this modern revisioning of sexuality, which they claimed was in line with the “natural” functions of the human body. In a quest to modernize sexual ideology and practice within India, they engaged with transnationally circulating sexology research that challenged existing social and sexual norms.²⁸ In particular, they attacked brahmacharya as an unnatural practice that caused physical and psychological damage.²⁹ In some cases, as Ishita Pande demonstrates, promoters of sexual science developed a “chronological view of brahmacharya” that marked it as a life stage before marriage that “ensured the preservation of semen and strength for conjugal sex.” This notion of brahmacharya as a kind of adolescence helped to situate sex—alongside work—within modernized clock time, linking sexuality to the chronological rhythms of contemporary capitalism.³⁰ Naturalizing sexual activity as part of a life stage that followed brahmacharya also opened space for discussion of birth control within heterosexual marriage.

Birth control was an essential technology in the modernization of sexuality, sexologists argued, because it enabled the expression of sexual desire within marriage while meeting economic imperatives to control reproduction. This argument became the basis for contraceptive advocacy during the interwar decades and gathered increasing momentum in the context of economic depression. For instance, an advertisement for Contrafant tablets pulls together twin motives of sexuality and economy to suggest that “the necessity of preserving the health and beauty of women and the increasing economic depression requires every man to adopt methods of birth control” (figure 5.2).³¹ Here, contraception is represented as a rational choice made by men to limit reproduction without limiting sexual expression when faced with economic constraints. At the same time, the pills promise to promote the “health and beauty of women,” perhaps gesturing toward pleasurable sexuality within heterosexual marriage. Contrafant, in short, was invoking a modernized sexuality that was at once pleasurable and subject to economic needs and rationalities.

Like the advertisers of Contrafant, many authors of birth control manuals in the interwar period similarly positioned contraception as a sexual solution to economic scarcity and crisis. One example is the Tamil manual Karppatci, allatu cuvatina karppam (Contraception, or control over pregnancy). Like writers of many other such manuals in the 1920s and 1930s, the anonymous author begins with a justification for writing about birth control—and, by extension, sexuality. Although many readers might assume that discussing sexuality was “vulgar or disgusting,” in fact sexual intercourse was a natural, even “divine” aspect of human experience. This attitude toward sexuality was not new, the author hastens to add, but had been recognized by long-standing Tamil tradition. However, in recent times, married couples had lost touch with this divinity because of concern that their expression of desire would lead to the birth of many children and consequently the impoverishment of their families. The manual thus offers birth control as a solution to the problem of sex in an era of scarcity. Contraception would enable husbands and wives to experience the “domestic pleasure” (inpam) that came from sexual intimacy while also allowing them “to have fewer healthy children who can be cared for properly.”³² Birth control would bring together traditional Tamil appreciation for reproductive sexuality within marriage and the insights of Western scientific research on preventing conception. Readers would thus be able to link a timeless and natural experience of sexuality to a distinctly modern approach to both reproduction and economic life.

The pseudonymous author Devidasan makes a similar argument about birth control, natural sexuality, and modern life in the Tamil birth control manual Karppatatai (Birth control, 1929). According to Devidasan, heterosexual expression was a natural part of human relationships: “Men and women were created to live together and their body structures were also made for the same purpose. It is very necessary for man and woman to have intercourse after they attain puberty.”³³ Implicitly disavowing nonheterosexual intimacies, Devidasan identifies marriage as the necessary institution to contain this sexual expression, noting that anyone who “wants to enjoy conjugal happiness should get married.” Thanks to birth control, however, this “natural” (hetero)sexuality need not result in uncontrolled reproduction. Karppatatai develops this argument most dramatically in an illustration within the book. The drawing depicts a woman standing on the edge of a cliff over an ocean marked “poverty.” Menacing her in the foreground is a demonic figure representing “wrong customs and habits.” Threatened by these “wrong customs”—presumably conventional sexual norms involving marriage and widowhood—she risks a plunge into poverty. The woman’s only salvation is an airplane marked “birth control” that has landed nearby.³⁴ Associated with that other quintessential modern technology, the airplane, birth control saves women from the demonic customs that prevent the expression of a natural sexuality and from the poverty that results from unregulated reproduction.

Both manuals, published just a few years apart, make monogamous marriage the linchpin of their arguments about modern sexuality and birth control. For instance, Karppatatai locates all sexual expression within the marital relationship, which Devidasan argues is good for the body, the mind, and the “development of the soul.”³⁵ He supports these claims through references to Western sexual science, noting research from various European countries suggesting that abstinence leads to physical and mental debility and even early death. Rendering brahmacharya a life stage to adopt until marriage, he insists it is “against nature and human disposition to remain abstinent after marriage.… The feeling of love for each other is very natural and marriage is meant to enjoy that feeling.” Sexual expression, in turn, strengthens the marital relationship: “There is natural and mutual attraction between male and female.… [Sex] strengthens love in the process.”³⁶ Karppatatai thus evidences an openness to discourse about sexual desire but also regulates sexual expression more closely in terms of time and life stage, such that a temporary period of brahmacharya gives way to normative heterosexual intimacy. The anonymous author of Karppatci makes a similar claim, noting that heterosexual marriage is the locus of human sexual expression.

These arguments about modernizing sexuality via birth control transformed the terms of public discussion about marriage during the 1920s and 1930s. Marriage reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries privileged romantic love as a force to improve marital relationships. A few decades later, in the context of growing movements for eugenics and a science of sexuality, they increasingly looked toward sex as the impetus for change. As J. Devika observes, reformers began to insist that sexual pleasure was necessary to sustain monogamous marriage; sexual satisfaction became a measure of marital success.³⁷ This argument created space for the supporters of birth control, who claimed that contraception could enforce heterosexual monogamy by locating the pleasures of sexual intimacy within marriage itself. Birth control thus became the bedrock both of modernizing marriage and of scientizing sex.

With the establishment of state-directed population control after 1952, family planners began to advocate what they termed a “small-family norm” as a sign of these modern marital, sexual, and scientific ideals. They claimed that small families were attuned to both the economic needs of the nation and the “natural” bodily and sexual needs of its citizens. Family planning manuals published during the 1950s and 1960s thus began to cast the small family as a site of aspiration. Families who had a small number of children, they suggested, had successfully reconciled otherwise competing claims between the expression of sexual desire, which was necessary for a happy marriage, and the need to limit children, which was necessary for economic progress at the familial and national levels. Whether published commercially or by the government, family planning manuals during the first few Five Year Plans tended to follow a similar pattern to make their case for the small family. They often begin with a discussion of reproductive physiology, followed by a social and economic argument about the need to control reproduction. Having situated the question of modern sexuality this way, they offer birth control as a solution to the problem of aligning sexuality with economy. They typically conclude with a description about various contraceptive methods.³⁸

This growing dominance of a small-family norm in Indian family planning contributed to a centering of heterosexuality that Nivedita Menon identifies as critical to modern nation-building projects. In her terms, the nationalist production of the “naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens” went hand in hand with the “delegitimation of homosexual desire.”³⁹ In India as in other national contexts, the production of heterosexuality thus depended upon marking homosexuality as “deviant.”⁴⁰ Normative heterosexuality was produced upon this foundational distinction from the homosexual; the small-family norm, I argue, was a key site for its elaboration. That is, proponents of the small family insisted that not any and all heterosexual desires represented a modernized, nation-building sexuality. Rather, they valorized the regulated reproductive sexuality of the married couple, while rendering all behaviors and intimacies outside of this norm both antinational and antimodern. Representations of the small family thus became co-constitutive with discourses of normative heterosexuality. The small-family norm helped to elevate heterosexuality as serving the interests of national development. At the same time, the turn to national development—as expressed in heterosexual monogamous marriage—helped to separate discussion of sex and birth control from its associations with obscenity and situate it more respectably within nation and family. In this sense, the small-family norm shaped the contours of a modern, respectable, and nationalized heterosexuality in the twentieth century.

Menon notes further that nationalist respectability went hand in hand with a process of desexualization, particularly for women. Postcolonial discourses marginalized women’s desire, rendering them “respectably desexualized.”⁴¹ While this was certainly true in many cases, attention to family planning complicates this history. By the 1960s, through its programs of population control, the Indian state had emerged as a chief purveyor of sexual discourse. Rather than desexualizing its citizens to render them respectable, family planning discourse aimed to produce a specific sexual subjectivity that could align “natural” behaviors with national planning goals. Thus, the promise of the small family was not that it offered a desexualized and therefore respectable form of conjugality. Rather, it reinvigorated conjugality by rendering sexual desire respectable only within heterosexual marriage. This was the promise offered by the government’s Methods of Family Planning (1964), discussed at the start of this chapter, which informed its readers that after vasectomy, “men enjoy sex just as they did before.”⁴² Similarly, the author of a commercially published volume, Katal rakaciyam (Secrets of love, 1960), assured his audience that the best methods of contraception, including vasectomy, would not diminish male pleasure.⁴³ In both these cases, husbands are the subjects of heterosexual desire within the small family, and wives are rendered the objects of their passions. This was, indeed, the most common framework of sexual discourse within my archive of midcentury family planning manuals.

Nevertheless, a few texts did address female desire explicitly. Among several Tamil examples is the oeuvre of T. S. Janakakumari, a woman author who published prolifically on subjects of birth control, sexuality, and fertility. Her 1959 book Kuzhantai ventam enral? (What if you don’t want children?) begins with the assertion that “in today’s conditions, it is enough for everyone to have three or four well-educated children.”⁴⁴ The book rehearses the statistics of Indian population growth, infant mortality, and familial poverty to argue that birth control is immediately necessary for the country. Having established this rationale for contraception, Janakakumari devotes most of the book to explaining the male and female reproductive systems. She describes how conception occurs and how it can be avoided via the rhythm method, various barrier methods, medicinal means, and surgical sterilization. The text is addressed to both women and men, and its discussion of female anatomy explicitly includes mention of female sexual arousal. Similarly, in her Kuzhantai ventum (You want a child, 1960), which was addressed to couples concerned about infertility, Janakakumari stressed the “human instinct” of heterosexual desire among women alongside men. Of course, this desire is always contained within marriage and is “central to the marital relationship.”⁴⁵ In Janakakumari’s work, therefore, both men and women appear as desiring subjects, and their desires are best understood within a framework of knowledge about reproductive anatomy and physiology. Having thus rooted sexuality in biology, Janakakumari suggests that it finds social expression via heterosexual monogamous marriage.

Another example of attention to female sexuality comes from Dr. K. Satyavati’s Family Planning (Birth Control).⁴⁶ Written in English by a “lady doctor” identified as a “sterility and fertility specialist,” Family Planning opens with a neo-Malthusian view of population, then turns to sexuality. Like other manuals of the time, the text is premised on the notion that heterosexual desire is a natural, universal physiological response among all people. Family Planning naturalizes female sexuality in particular through reference to women’s reproductive anatomy and physiology. Unusually among the texts I have considered from this period, Family Planning even mentions female orgasm and sexual satisfaction. However, Satyavati’s acknowledgment of female desire is not by itself a critique of patriarchal sexual norms; there is no liberatory history of sexuality that can be read from Family Planning’s attention to orgasm. Instead, the text valorizes marital heterosexuality as both natural and pleasurable through its condemnation of women’s sexual expression outside marriage. For instance, when discussing sterilization methods, Satyavati insists that a wife who undergoes tubectomy to meet familial and national economic goals stands in stark contrast to “widows and prostitutes” who do so for other reasons. In Satyavati’s terms: “Sometimes widows and prostitutes want to get themselves sterilized for enjoying sexual relations safely. Such people cannot be entertained.”⁴⁷ In other words, sterilization for controlling reproduction within marriage is admirable; the same procedure for sexual pleasure outside marriage is not. The text’s insistence on the naturalness of female sexual expression thus collapses when confronted by the social constraints of widowhood or the long-standing division of women into “wives” and “prostitutes.” Her support for female sterilization hinges on this distinction. Sterilized wives stand as exemplars of sexual modernity who enjoy both sexual pleasure and the benefits of national development. This modernizing sexuality left little room for the “widows” and “prostitutes” who peopled its margins, an implicit threat to the married heterosexual couple.

Economy, Prosperity, and the Small Family

The small and happy family, envisioned as modern through its sexuality and reproductive regulation, stood in contrast to large families, imagined as poor, sad, and backward. The association of large families with poverty has a long Malthusian genealogy, as we have seen. Malthus himself made this connection, as did his late nineteenth-century disciples, including Annie Besant and the Madras Malthusian League. Less explicitly Malthusian thinkers in the late nineteenth century—including M. G. Ranade and Behramji Malabari, discussed in chapter 1—warned of the risks large families posed to the nation and its economy. By the interwar decades, birth control discourses consolidated these claims into visual images of large and small families. In contraceptive manuals and birth control advertising, the large and poor family came to represent a dystopian vision. Marked as the opposite of the modern and well-regulated small-family norm, large families with multiple children signaled both sexual and economic disorder. With uncontrolled bodies and finances, the large family exhibited not modernizing progress but rather its aimless and timeless lack. By contrast, the small family measured its progress in clock time and life stage, signaling its happiness through its economies of both sex and finance. With the advent of state-sponsored family planning, images of the small family consolidated a range of discourses about family life into representations of parents and their two or three young children. Yet, as we shall see, this image of the small and prosperous family did not necessarily resonate with its intended audience, who may have understood both “family” and “prosperity” differently.

During the interwar decades, in the age of eugenics and concerns about the health of the Indian “race,” birth control activists highlighted physical weakness alongside the poverty of large families. Consider, for instance, the birth control manual Karppatci, allatu cuvatina karppam (Contraception, or control over pregnancy, 1931), discussed above. The book’s cover image is a drawing of a husband and wife, obviously poor and hungry, surrounded by their numerous children. Their poverty, which is evident from their torn clothing, thin bodies, and sorrowful expressions, stems from their “excess” of children, who huddle sadly around parents incapable of providing for their needs. Thus, from the outset, the reader of Karppatci encounters birth control as a remedy for familial poverty and bodily decline. The written text continues this theme, recommending that readers use birth control to “reduce the financial difficulties of the family, and to keep the mother in good health so she can care for the family properly and maintain feelings of affection [anpu] toward the husband.” Birth control would thus ameliorate “poverty, disease, and suffering … the most important goal is to have fewer children who can be properly cared for.”⁴⁸

Many texts and images made explicit comparisons between the large and impoverished family and its smaller, more prosperous counterpart. This approach became increasingly common in both state-produced and commercially published texts after the First Five Year Plan. The Tamil pamphlet Pale Tankam: Kutumpak kattupatu virivakkappattatu (Well done Thangam: Family planning explained), for example, offers a visual contrast between planned and unplanned families (figure 5.3).⁴⁹ The drawing of the planned family with few children shows a husband leaving the home on a bicycle, presumably on his way to salaried employment. His wife stands by with an older daughter and younger son, both of whom carry books and are headed to school. All are well dressed. The husband’s dhoti, the wife’s sari and the flowers in her hair, the children’s school uniforms, and the family’s tile-roof house all indicate prosperity and intergenerational upward mobility. Members of the family each have distinct responsibilities based on age and gender, which are also linked to a specific organization of time. We glimpse this family, apparently in the morning, as they head off to their respective occupations. The unplanned large family, by contrast, has five children, all of whom are apparently boys. The mother comforts one crying child while others play in the dirt. The children do not wear school uniforms, and the mother’s clothing indicates her poverty. The husband is seated on the verandah, presumably without salaried employment, and their house has a thatched (not tiled) roof. The organization of time and labor that drives the small family seems absent here; this glimpse of their lives could have occurred at any moment and indicates their aimless lack of modern progress.

Thus, the small family, which uses family planning, is clearly poised to benefit from a modern economy. Its modest prosperity, as Nilanjana Chatterjee and Nancy E. Riley note, does not imply a Westernized or wealthy lifestyle but rather highlights the developmental promises of the Five Year Plans.⁵⁰ The larger family, marked as unplanned, remains outside this promise of modernity and progress. Contraceptive advertisers adopted this kind of contrasting image to market the economic rationalities of birth control. One example among many is an advertisement for Planitab Contraceptive Ovules, which appeared in the souvenir volume of the FPAI’s fifth All India Family Planning Conference in 1964. The text proclaims, “It is the number that upsets your budget” (figure 5.4).⁵¹ The references to numbers and budgets evoke broader national population trends, but the imagery also links to individual families. Viewers see a drawing of a wife facing her husband while he gazes upward, preoccupied by “fooding [sic], clothing, education, housing, etc., etc.” Meanwhile, in a separate drawing, we see contrasting visions of a happy family with two children and a squabbling family with many children. Planitab is offered as the solution to the husband’s worries and preoccupations about the material necessities of daily life and is “reliable, simple, [and] inexpensive.” Contraception is thus one purchase a married couple can make in the present in order to enable a lifetime of future material consumption. By adopting economic rationality to plan their reproduction, the advertisement suggests, all families can become prosperous in a modernizing India. Such comparisons circulated in films as well. For instance, the Indian government production Three Families (1963) features a large family, a family with two children, and a couple that decides in favor of family planning. The FPAI sponsored a similar film, Enough’s Enough (1973), which emphasizes the disadvantages faced by a large family in comparison with a small one in terms of food, discretionary spending, and living space.⁵²

Texts like these highlighted the happiness, alongside the prosperity, that families might achieve through their small size. For instance, an advertisement for Volpar contraceptive paste and foaming tablets, directed at physicians, raised an alarm about large numbers. Underneath a graph with a sharp upward trajectory outlined by the text, “How many mouths to feed” is the following conclusion: “An increasing number of patients agree that the planned family is the most likely to be the happy family in the twentieth century economy.”⁵³ Another advertisement, this one for Protecto Jelly, envisioned what this familial happiness might look like (figure 5.5). Viewers see a well-dressed and smiling husband and wife, both facing a laughing infant, whom the mother carries. Their two older children—a boy and a girl—face away from the viewer toward their baby sibling and parents. Together, this family forms a social unit entirely sufficient unto itself; all members gaze happily at each other in a circle of emotional fulfillment and joy. Accompanying text urges readers to use Protecto as a “reliable, safe, hygienic, easy to use method of birth-control.”⁵⁴

The comparison between small/prosperous and large/poor families challenged conventional understandings of children and wealth; it introduced different economic rationalities to underpin its heteronormative ideal. Children, especially sons, had conventionally been a marker of prosperity, and we find traces of this popular mentality in proverbs, song, and classical literature. Moreover, for poor families, having many children could be a strategy of economic survival, since both boys and girls contributed to the family’s support from a young age. By contrast, the small-family ideal imagined children not as economic assets but as liabilities. These children did not work in the fields, care for their younger siblings, or perform household labor. They attended school. However, for many poor families, this vision of a middle-class, school-going childhood may have been unattainable or even undesirable, regardless of their size. Many villages lacked even a primary school, and children’s access to education was mediated more by class, caste, and gender than by the size of their families. Consequently, family planners’ assertion that prosperity followed the small family—one that by definition was “poor” in children—was at odds with popular understanding. For some people, the dissonance between these representations of small and large families and their own experiences may have made family planning discourses unintelligible. According to one study that investigated a family planning poster campaign, for instance, many in the targeted audience identified with the image of the large family with undernourished children. Perhaps they saw themselves more in that representation than in the images of a smaller and wealthier family.⁵⁵

The image of the small family may have differed from many people’s experience in another way, insofar as it assumed a nuclear family structure composed of husband, wife, and their minor children. This unit was the basis of a proliferating visual imagery across urban and rural landscapes, such as one Tamil poster proclaiming that “a small family is a happy family” that hung outside the doors to the government’s Family Planning Center in Vellore during the mid-1960s.⁵⁶ In the genre of Indian calendar art, a husband and wife, marked as Hindu and modestly prosperous, stand side by side facing the viewer. A young son stands in front of his parents, while the wife holds her baby daughter; both children gaze out to the viewer. This vision of the small family displaced other notions of family composition and familial relationships that may have privileged multigenerational households composed of extended kin. Relegating these other family forms to the realm of “tradition” and nostalgia, representations of the small family erased other household members—grandparents, uncles and aunts, other kin—to imagine a domestic life centered on the relationships between the conjugal couple and their young children. This small-family norm also ignored families and households whose composition was not patrilineal, thus contributing to a broader marginalization of heterogeneous family forms as a condition of “modern” family life.⁵⁷ Happiness and prosperity were not be found within these extended and variable kin networks, family planners implied, but within the warm affective bonds of a smaller group. In particular, they were rooted in the attachments—both emotional and sexual—between husband and wife.⁵⁸

The children of the small family were invariably represented as one boy and one girl; if a third child was present, as in the advertisement for Protecto, it was typically a baby of indeterminate gender. On the one hand, this vision of a small planned family implied that the gender of the child was less relevant than the number. In a social context of widespread son preference and disparate sex ratios in some regions, perhaps this claim suggested, subversively, that a daughter—equally with a son—was also a descendant and heir. Given the history of debate about the childhood of girls in modern India,⁵⁹ this proliferating imagery may have helped to counter a long-standing demographic and representational absence of the girl child. Indeed, some designers of such images noted that specifying only two or three children was a “bold and risky step” since it pushed against Indian traditions that valued sons, regardless of the number of children; they took the risk because they feared the demographic consequences of a fourth child.⁶⁰

On occasion, state-sponsored publications acknowledged the demographic impact of son preference, noting that it might lead to large families since parents would have multiple children in hopes of bearing sons.⁶¹ However, representations of the small family generally sidestepped any direct confrontation with son preference and the devaluing of girl children. The state discourses of family planning during the 1950s and 1960s did not challenge the patriarchal ideologies and institutions that encouraged parents to value sons over daughters. In the imagery of the small family, son preference was not even explicitly mentioned, let alone questioned or rejected. Moreover, within the archives, I have not found a single representation of a small family from this period that includes children of only one gender. Thus, family planners avoided asking whether a family composed of parents and their two daughters was also a small and happy family. This unasked question, and its implied refusal to engage with the ideological and economic structures that underpinned gender disparities, lurked behind the image of the small, happy family.

Planning Families for the Future

Underpinning the small family’s economic rationality and sexual modernity was a commitment to planning itself. Planning signaled the small family’s orientation toward an imagined future, marked as wealthier, more modern, and more joyous than the present. In this sense, the discourse of the small family was deeply embedded in, and contributed to, a larger narrative about national development, which claimed that the future would be better than the past and present through the mechanism of planning. While the Five Year Plans signaled this orientation toward future progress on the national and global stage, the individual family’s planning signaled a future orientation on the part of ordinary citizens. Planning, moreover, implied a specific relationship to time and a willingness to defer present desires to meet future needs. In other words, the discourses of family planning promised a better future to those families who delayed or prevented childbearing in the present. Significantly, this “better future” was invariably defined in and through consumption. Family planning discourses oriented the small family toward markets, suggesting that reproductive regulation would eventually allow access to the pleasures of consumer capitalism. With market-based consumption thus imagined as a sign of modernizing progress, planning one’s children became the necessary precondition for entry into more prosperous futures.

Government family planning manuals called upon citizens to plan their family lives as a service to the nation. For example, the Madras government’s official Family Planning Manual (1956) called for readers to remember that “family planning is no longer a matter of purely private interest to married couples. The welfare of the nation as a whole will be promoted or retarded by what every married couple does or fails to do about family planning.”⁶² The suggestion of “no longer” implies that, although the decision to use contraception may once have concerned only husbands and wives, it was now vital for national development. As the text argues, this urgency was due to an imbalance between birth and death in India, resulting in population growth and causing food shortages, rationing, and unemployment. Under these circumstances, it was a patriotic duty to regulate reproduction: “Whether you do or fail to do your duty is not merely a matter of concern to you and your children. It is a matter of vital concern to that larger family to which we all belong—‘The Indian Nation.’ ”⁶³

The Madras government’s Tamil handbook Kutumpa kattupatu titta kaiputtakam (Family planning instructional handbook, 1962) takes these claims further. Since the country was unable to “grow food crops corresponding to the ever-increasing population,” citizens needed to recalibrate the balance by regulating their reproduction: “By controlling the population explosion, each couple is contributing to the welfare of the country, and to implementing national development schemes, thereby discharging their duties for their country.”⁶⁴ Family planning is thus the sign of responsible citizenship, a “duty” that citizens owe to the nation in the wake of independence. However, this position of the responsible citizen-planner was not equally available to everyone; heterosexual monogamy was its necessary precondition. Husbands in particular were the rational agents of planning. Addressing them directly, the manual exhorts men “to make every effort to ensure that your wife gets pregnant only after a minimum period of three years after the birth of your first child; you should plan things accordingly.”⁶⁵ The husband’s plans within the space of the home thus paralleled the Five Year Plans within the space of the nation.

Even more than in the exhortations of government manuals, the call to plan for the future unfolded most fully in stories about families. Didactic in their approach, these narratives invited readers to imagine the life course of a single family over time. The texts were relatively formulaic and tended to revolve around similar plot points. Beginning with a couple’s marriage or birth of the first child and continuing through to a decision about whether or not to use contraception, the stories concluded with a vision of the family’s prosperous or impoverished future. These narratives about family life echoed the message about small/prosperous and large/poor families discussed above. But unlike an image—which usually pictured a family at one moment in time—stories about families explored the relationship between past, present, and future. Asserting that choices in the present moment affected future happiness, these stories valorized husbands and wives who weighed the present delights of many children against a future of scarcity or plenty. With a more explicit focus on change over time, these narratives crafted a more thorough commitment to the future.

One example of these narratives is a didactic Tamil short story mentioned above, Pale Tankam: Kutumpak kattupatu virivakkappattatu (Well done Thangam: Family planning explained, 1961). Written by Ca. Pasyam, the story was published commercially as a short pamphlet—but, as we shall see, its themes adhere closely to the government-sponsored family planning manuals of that era. Pale Tankam narrates the early married life of Thangam and Murugan, whose names mark them as Hindu (likely caste Hindu). Pasyam represents them as ideal subjects and agents of national development. Murugan is a salaried worker in a bicycle factory, signaling his position in the modern industrial sector rather than in a “traditional” occupation in agricultural labor. His wife, Thangam, is described as beautiful, literate, and good at managing household expenditures. She is an educated housewife and companion to Murugan. The two newlyweds live blissfully together, since “Thangam was Murugan’s life’s breath [uyir].”⁶⁶

When Thangam becomes pregnant, she and Murugan have a sober discussion about the shape of their future family. Murugan, as the gentle pedagogue, suggests to Thangam that having only a few children will benefit both the children themselves and the couple’s own loving relationship. Contrasting his goals with an impoverished neighboring couple that has many children, Murugan suggests that “we should always live together as one. Let’s have just one or two children. Only then will we be able to pay attention to them and raise them well.”⁶⁷ He goes on to enumerate the same reasons for family planning that were common to public discourse in this period: having fewer children would be good for both infant and maternal health; it would enable the family to be prosperous; it would contribute to national development. Murugan also teaches his wife about government programs that offer free sterilizations at state-operated family planning centers.

Throughout, Thangam is positioned as a somewhat recalcitrant subject. With visions of a large family, she has doubts about each of Murugan’s arguments. Nevertheless, he insists that family planning will be good for couples, families, and the nation: “Each family should plan their size to having one or two children based on their income. Only then can the family prosper.… Husband and wife will live without fights. Each couple should plan their family for the betterment and growth of the nation.”⁶⁸ Thangam finally agrees to this alignment of familial happiness, economic rationality, and future-oriented planning. At the end of the story, Thangam and Murugan become so confident of their choices that they persuade their prolific neighbor, Velayuthan, to inquire with a doctor about birth control methods. Their conclusions are summed up in an illustration captioned, “Family planning is important for implementing the Five Year Plan for national development” (figure 5.6).⁶⁹ The image shows a well-dressed family composed of husband, wife, daughter, and son; in the background is their tiled-roof house and fertile agricultural land.

In Pale Tankam, family planning and national planning thus occur in tandem, merging sexual with economic rationalities to produce a better future. For Thangam and Murugan, a modernized sexuality enables a modern economy; their careful sexual and economic planning enables their future prosperity. This was the seductive promise of the small-family ideal. Moreover, like other texts, Pale Tankam makes Murugan the chief agent of such planning; Thangam’s role is to understand and acquiesce. Murugan’s reward for enacting this patriarchal authority is not only a grateful and loving wife but a future with a tiled-roof house, plenty to eat, and happy children. Pale Tankam does not dwell on this future, perhaps leaving readers to imagine the joy and wealth that may flow from the couple’s decision to limit childbearing.

Another narrative, the English-language We Two Our Two, makes these futures more explicit. This is an illustrated comic book published by the Central Board for Workers’ Education (India) and financed by the UN Fund for Population Activities. Intended for an Indian working-class audience, the book was likely published in the late 1960s. We Two Our Two explores the pleasures and rationalities of consumption-oriented family planning. The color-illustrated comic book tells the story of Ram, the first-person narrator, and his wife, Rashmi. When the narrative opens, Ram has just completed a training course and secured employment in his town’s textile mill. The accompanying image—the first in the book—shows Ram touching his widowed mother’s feet and receiving her blessing upon obtaining a position in the industrial workforce. We see Ram and his mother inside their home, a bare but clean room furnished only with a table and single chair. Through an open door, the viewer glimpses a factory with smokestacks, signaling Ram’s future employment. Soon thereafter, Ram marries Rashmi, described as a “coy little girl from a neighboring village.”⁷⁰

Rashmi gives birth to their first child, a son; signaling the modernity of the couple’s choices, the birth takes place in the hospital. Ram’s mother welcomes her grandchild with the words, “This is the will of God!” As the child grows, Rashmi “thought of lending her helping hand to our income” and takes up a “small job” in a local welfare center, while Ram’s widowed mother cares for their son. Soon, Rashmi becomes pregnant again, leaves her job, and gives birth to a daughter. With two children and only one income, Ram and Rashmi struggle to manage their finances; in order to buy milk for their daughter, they are forced to forgo small luxuries, such as toys for their son. One night, Rashmi shares her worries that a possible third child may shatter their dreams: “What about our ambition of having our own small house? Shall we never be able to save for the future?”⁷¹ She is concerned, as well, that they will be unable to provide three children with nutritious food, take care of their health needs, and send them to school. Thus, although Ram and Rashmi are presented as an ideal working-class couple, their finances do not allow for a third child. Even Ram’s steady employment in Indian industry and Rashmi’s “supplemental” income through welfare work can barely support two children.

As Ram soon recognizes, family planning offers a solution to the family’s financial precarity. In a visit to his union office, he encounters his friend Rahim, who introduces him to the idea that couples can plan their children. Ram is marked as Hindu, and it is significant that he learns of family planning through the Muslim Rahim. In keeping with the text’s broader claims that all Indian workers need to practice family planning, Rahim emerges as an elder confidant, already experienced in life and ready to guide the Hindu protagonist. There is no discussion by either Ram or Rahim about religious objections to family planning. The decision is entirely economic, and planning is framed as a universal and modern common sense across religious boundaries. In the meantime, Rashmi has also learned of family planning from a neighbor and suggests to Ram that “our future is in our own hands.” This is the moment that Ram and Rashmi make an explicit commitment to the family’s future as a reason and impetus for family planning. Ready to seize their destiny, they visit a family welfare clinic, where they learn of methods from a doctor. The image accompanying this text highlights an IUD alongside various foams and creams. Ram and Rashmi decide to adopt family planning methods. Although Ram’s mother has been an important figure in their story so far, they do not consult her. Rather, the choice involves only the conjugal couple, represented as the sole agents of planning. They “organize better our privacy” by hanging a curtain between themselves and their children’s sleeping mats, and “make changes … to adopt family planning.”⁷² Without referencing sexuality explicitly, the text nevertheless suggests that the reorganization of sexual intimacy—an essential component of the logic of planning—represents the couple’s commitment to the future of their family.

The benefits from Ram and Rashmi’s decision to align their family’s finances with its reproductive futures are immediate. Rashmi is less tired, and the children thrive. Soon, the family can engage in discretionary spending and begin consuming modern commodities. On Ram’s birthday, he “had a surprise when Rashmi presented me [with] a small transistor radio.” The accompanying image suggests the significance of this gift. Ram is surrounded by his joyful wife and children, all looking happily at the radio, which occupies the center of the drawing. Meanwhile, Ram is able to purchase an even bigger gift: “On the next anniversary of our marriage I told her about my acquiring a small house through the trade union housing cooperative society.” On the advice of Rahim, Ram also purchases an insurance policy that will provide for his daughter’s marriage. One of the final images of the text shows Ram and Rashmi as a happy, companionate, and prosperous couple drinking tea together in a new home. In the background, we see the material evidence of their financial success. A stove, a water drum, the teapot and cups, and pots and dishes populate their kitchen. The transistor radio occupies pride of place on a counter (figure 5.7).⁷³ The image seems full of these modern conveniences, in contrast to the bare room that held Ram and his mother’s lives at the start of the text. Via limiting their family when young, the Ram and Rashmi in middle age can now provide for their children, consume modern products in their household, and enjoy leisure time in each other’s company.

We Two Our Two offers a vision of the prosperous working-class family that entirely sidesteps fundamental social or economic transformation. Though Ram is employed in the industrial workforce—arguably the most “modern” of occupations in postcolonial India—his wages alone are insufficient to maintain his family. When faced with a tight budget after the birth of his daughter, Ram never raises the question of higher wages. Though he is portrayed as a union member, the union offers no support in this regard either; it serves only as a welfare organization, enabling Ram to purchase a house and insurance. If the working classes have no power over their wages in We Two Our Two, what can they control? For this text, the answer is deceptively simple: workers can plan their own reproduction in accordance with their financial goals. The visit to the doctor, the reorganization of Ram and Rashmi’s sleeping arrangements, and their decision to buy a house, radio, and tea set instead of having more children all signal their commitment to rationalizing their reproductive sexuality and financial decisions in the present to usher in a more prosperous future. More than Ram’s employment, it is this planned alignment of reproduction with finance that produces the family’s modest prosperity at the end of the text.

Ram and Rashmi’s economization of their family life, which weighs each reproductive decision in light of its future financial costs, marks their commitment to planning and to future prosperity more broadly. Foregoing reproduction enables the family’s entrance into a world of market-based consumption, companionship, and joy. On one level, this vision of a future-oriented small family was central to the imagination of a specifically Indian modernity, especially during the reign of developmentalist ideologies in the mid-twentieth century. Ram and Rashmi thus emerge as ideal citizens who plan with an eye toward progress. On another level, We Two Our Two also participated in a transnationally circulating discourse that valorized small families as a necessary step toward modernity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to which I turn next.

Universalizing the Small Family

During the 1960s, in light of fears about a planetary “population bomb,” discourses of the small family were not only national but also aspired to global circulation and relevance. Population controllers claimed that the future of the planet hinged upon millions of people around the world adopting a small-family norm and limiting their childbearing. The image of the small, planned family thus became ubiquitous. In many countries, as Matthew Connelly notes, “posters, films, flip charts, and folk performances depicted the ‘unplanned’ family as unclean, unhealthy, violent, and ugly.”⁷⁴ Meanwhile, the planned family was not only small but more beautiful. Surrounded by consumer goods, this family benefited from better housing, health care, and education. Consequently, the image of the small family we see in texts like We Two Our Two represented a distinctively “Indian” small family, but one that also resembled the aspirations of family planners in many other parts of the world. Moreover, beyond its seemingly endless repetition across population control programs globally, the discourse of the small family also claimed a universalizing impulse. Supposedly relevant across national boundaries and achievable by anyone, the small family functioned as a universal sign of modernity and progress and signaled that a population had conformed to global norms. Yet, as this section will show, these universalizing aspirations of the small-family norm also grappled with national, racial, and class difference and were haunted by fears of failure. While maintaining that everyone would benefit from limiting their families, family planners worried that the rationalities of planning were not, in fact, understood by all people. Pushing for the economization of family life, they also despaired that some people could not translate relations of kinship and affect into economies of consumption and future planning. These anxieties shaped the attempt to universalize small-family norms in the era of the population bomb.

The animated film Family Planning (1968), a Disney Studios venture with the Population Council, made these universalizing ambitions explicit.⁷⁵ According to the Population Council, the impetus behind Family Planning was to create a “universal film on a topic of universal concern,” and a color cartoon was “one of the most familiar, most popular, and most effective materials for mass exposure.” The ten-minute film was the most expensive of the kind for its time and aspired to reach “men and women of reproductive age in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”⁷⁶ To this end, it was translated into twenty-five languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Tamil.⁷⁷ In hopes of appealing to people across the “Third World,” the Population Council and Disney sought characters that would resonate with all viewers.

The film introduced as its protagonist a “common man,” described by the Population Council as a “composite of men from major regions of the world.”⁷⁸ Despite this claim to represent all people, one critic notes that the result was a “curious ethnic mix: [the common man] speaks with a Yiddish inflection, looks Italian, and has an Indian wife dressed in a sari.”⁷⁹ The common man and his wife are introduced to family planning with the help of Disney’s cartoon character Donald Duck, whose charts help to explain the problem of population growth and who offers birth control as a solution. An authoritative narrative voiceover explains that family planning is a “new kind of personal freedom” and offers guidance to the common man and his wife. The film follows them as they envision their future as taking two paths, and the resulting narratives may be familiar to us by now. The large family is poor and hungry. By contrast, the small family engages in the pleasures of consumption, from abundant food at family meals to a transistor radio for the family’s enjoyment. Eventually, the common man and his wife are persuaded to choose their family’s future prosperity by adopting family planning methods. As the narrator concludes, “Every couple has the opportunity to help build a better life not just for themselves, but for people everywhere. And all of us have a responsibility toward the family of man, including you.”

While the narrative voiceover thus claims a universal applicability, we have seen that the Population Council aimed for an audience of Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans. The film itself marks its characters as not white and not North American or European. The common man’s difference from “First World” audiences is also measured by gender norms; throughout the film, his wife is too shy to ask questions of the narrator and whispers her queries to her husband instead. Moreover, the common man’s prosperity is measured by a radio, not a television, suggesting his distance from the wealth and consumption practices of US families. In this sense, the film modeled a vision for “modern” families in the Global South, a vision of modernity that gestured toward universality but was also marked by its difference. While every family could plan for its future by planning reproduction, these futures themselves diverged. The prosperity of the small family, held out as a seductive promise to couples everywhere, hinged on national and class difference. The “common man” in the “developing” world could aspire, at best, to a radio. As Donald Duck explains in the film, an error of planning—an extra child—could erase even this goal. Thus, while all people (or men, in the language of the film) were expected to orient themselves to future consumption and to a market economy, only some men could experience their full rewards. The others must content themselves with a more modest prosperity, a difference that is ever present but never addressed within transnational discourses of the small family.

Despite appeals like Family Planning, population controllers were concerned that the rationalities of planning would not, in fact, translate to the “Third World” in general or to India in particular. They feared that failure would be the inevitable result of their efforts. Specifically, organizations like the IPPF, the Ford Foundation, and the Population Council expressed anxiety that the small-family norm was too novel and too “modern” to bridge the differences between India and the West. Even as they aimed to jump-start a demographic transition through a reorganization of family life, they worried that Indian families were simply too different—too backward, too mired in tradition—to adopt this ideal. Two Ford Foundation consultants summed up these fears in 1971, nearly two decades after the organization had begun funding family planning in India: “Family Planning in India is still somewhat of an alien creed. This is because a small family is not entirely a question of numbers; it carries with it a particular way of life which includes the diminishing authority of the wider kin group with a corresponding increase in the authority of the immediate parents; emancipation of women from the drudgery of child-bearing accompanied very often with their social employment and consequent financial independence and greater scope for companionship between man and wife.”⁸⁰ However, the consultants lamented, the conditions that provoked such changes in the West were lacking in India, where “concepts such as ‘emancipation of the individual’ ” were making only “hesitant progress.”⁸¹ Perhaps India, then, would always lag behind the West’s march toward modernizing families, sexualities, reproduction, and economies. For transnational population controllers, the small family, while repeated across India’s print and visual landscape, still seemed elusive.

Within family planning communications—a technocratic field devoted to population control messaging that emerged in the 1960s—debates ensued about whether Indians could truly be convinced through “rational” argument to adopt a small-family norm. These debates grew especially fraught by the middle of the decade when, as we have seen, the Indian government put family planning on a “war footing.” Two of the leading communications experts working in family planning at the time, Deep K. Tyagi and Frank Wilder, raised these concerns explicitly. Tyagi was assistant commissioner for media in the Indian government’s Department of Family Planning; he worked closely with Wilder, who was hired by the Ford Foundation as consultant to the government of India in mass communication for family planning. Together, Tyagi and Wilder pioneered some of India’s most iconic family planning imagery. They developed the symbol of the inverted red triangle, which would eventually mark all of the state’s family planning efforts, from signs posted on dispensaries to the armbands of family planning extension workers.

The team also produced the famous “four faces” symbol, which represents the “stylized front-view faces of a smiling mother and father, a son and a daughter.”⁸² Accompanying text usually included the message “Have only two or three children … that’s plenty!” (figure 5.8).⁸³ The “four faces” relied upon the small-family norm; the image represented the ideal members of a properly constituted small family. At the same time, as Tyagi and Wilder argued, the four-faces symbol sidestepped the aspirational claims of other images. Rather than figuring the small family as a site of desire in a rational economization of family life, it represented an explicit call to limit childbearing: “Does the small-family-happy-family message transmit the specific action to be taken? Can fertility programs succeed if people are left to ‘Have Only Those Children You Can Afford?’ And are these not rather elusive concepts for a villager whose personal aspirations do not parallel those of the educated program administrator or the foreign communications advisor?”⁸⁴ Tyagi and Wilder aimed to move away from “elusive concepts” that idealized the small family toward a “direct exhortation to have a specific number of children.” More complex messages, including those that asked people to plan their families or explained various contraceptive options, were liable to be misunderstood. These messages missed their mark, Tyagi and Wilder insisted, due to the “great intellectual distance between message-maker and audience.… By definition, the message can be got across only within the audience’s frame of reference.”⁸⁵ Defending this approach to US readers, Wilder added that the “massed human misery on a Calcutta street” made it impossible for the Indian government to spend time educating people in general about the need for family planning or its various goals and methods. Rather, he called for a “forceful message” such as “You Don’t Need Another Child Now” or “Postpone the Next Pregnancy, and Never Have a Fourth.”⁸⁶

Tyagi and Wilder’s more “forceful” messages turned away from evoking the small family as a vehicle of upward mobility for all Indians. This message was deemed irrelevant—or wasteful of time—for an audience marked as irreducibly different from the middle-class Indian bureaucrats or the foreign consultants who developed the government’s family planning propaganda. The middle classes, it was assumed, were already aware of the need to regulate their fertility, but the masses of rural and urban poor would not, or could not, follow the same logic. They would not be seduced by the promise of middle-class lifestyles, and the idea that small families were necessarily happier and more prosperous was simply outside their “frame of reference.” This distinction echoed what we have seen already in the implementation of family planning programs, discussed in chapter 4. Population controllers insisted that temporary methods—condoms, diaphragms, pills—were best suited to the middle classes, which were presumed capable of choosing them. For the masses of ordinary people, however, population controllers pushed permanent methods like surgical sterilization. Similarly, as population control entered a “war footing” in the mid-1960s, the small-family ideal was entrusted only to some. They might occupy the position of the citizen-planner, capable of inhabiting the economic and (hetero)sexual rationalities that focused on the future. For the rest, whom transnational population controllers represented as Indians-in-the-mass, family planning became a state-sponsored injunction. Thus, even as the small-family norm was held forth as a universal ideal, it was marked by national, race, class, and caste difference. “Have only two or three children … that’s plenty!” offered this vocabulary of distinction; it marked the vast difference between those who could be persuaded to choose to have a few children and those who must be told to do so.

Conclusion

The small family represented a seductive and aspirational ideal. It promised a life of happiness and prosperity to those who adopted its normative sexualities and economic rationalities. By reorganizing bodies and lives, the small-family norm offered nothing less than a modern family alongside a modern Indian future. Consequently, the discourse of the small family was far more than just a call for reproductive regulation. It also required transformations on multiple levels, from reorganizing time to rethinking kinship to reorienting toward consumption and markets. It called forth new logics that put heterosexuality in service of familial well-being and national development and imagined a global economy composed of such rational subjects. Yet, although they yoked the conjugal couple to a vision of the future that they claimed was universally applicable, representations of the small family were also troubled by questions of difference and haunted by fears of failure. Family planners expressed concern that subjects marked as too different from the planner would never adopt these new rationalities of family life.

The small-family ideal thus marks a point where the history of heterosexuality intersects with the history of development. In the era of the Five Year Plans, national development required particular kinds of subjects, whose sexuality was expressed through heterosexual monogamy in marriage and whose economic rationality was expressed through the use of birth control. These ideal subjects of development were, at base, committed to planning for the future by aligning their reproduction with an imagined national and familial futurity. Scholarship in queer studies has theorized these connections that link reproduction to heterosexuality and imagined futures, arguing that heterosexuality becomes normalized because of its supposed contributions to reproducing the future. Homosexuality is marked as “deviant” because of its supposed failure to do so.⁸⁷ Within this heteronormative ideal, the figure of “the Child”—as abstraction—represents a “reproductive futurism,” which, in Lee Edelman’s terms, justifies the abjection of the queer subject as incapable of working toward the future. In other words, the figure of the child emerges as “the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value,” such that all those who do not participate in heteronormative reproduction are marked as opposed to the future itself.⁸⁸ The discourse of reproductive futurism that Edelman identifies is, arguably, the product of specific Western and modern contexts.⁸⁹ However, as Eithne Luibhéid suggests, as an analytic framework it may be expanded to include not only queer but also other marginalized subjects and historicized beyond a general abstraction of “the Child” to account for how systems of racism, geopolitical inequalities, and gender violence position different subjects differently in relation to an imagined futurity.⁹⁰ For Luibhéid, therefore, Edelman’s “reproductive futurism” is manifest differentially across time, place, and history. It can illuminate the heteronormative politics underpinning claims to the future at specific moments, within specific systems.

The discourse of the small and happy family, as I have argued, relies upon a set of claims about heteronormative reproduction and the future. As in the case of texts like We Two Our Two, reproduction is exclusively responsible for creating the future envisioned by the Five Year Plans. Rather than socioeconomic transformation, the text calls for regulation of reproduction; appropriate reproduction breeds appropriate futures. This discourse of the small and happy family thus leads us to ask: what constitutes reproductive futurism in an antinatal regime? In other words, how might the future be imagined when it is secured not through valorizing reproduction but through limiting and even demonizing it? Within the population control mandates of the Five Year Plans, whose reproduction is understood to produce the future, and whose is seen as opposed to futurity itself? As we have seen throughout this book, the call to limit reproduction was always differential. Modes of reproductive stratification fueled the drive to curtail the childbearing of some people, not of others. As upper-caste and middle-class Indians aimed to differentiate their own sexual-reproductive practices and futures from those marked as lower caste or class, Western population controllers stigmatized Indian reproduction itself as incapable of working toward the future. The vision of the small and happy family aimed to contain these tensions, gesturing toward a prosperous future secured by having only two (or perhaps three) children. However, despite its claim of universality—everyone could be part of a small and happy family—this vision of the future was always limited. Only some people were rendered capable of receiving its affective and financial benefits, while others were subjected to exclusion in its name.