ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the years I spent writing this book, I have accrued many debts. Grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Archive Center funded the research for this book. Support from Ohio State University, including in the form of research leaves and funding from the Departments of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies helped to make research and writing possible. I have relied on the generosity of librarians and archivists in India, the US, and the UK. I especially want to thank G. Sundar at the Roja Muthiah Research Library for enabling me to work with material I never expected to find, and Bethany Antos at the Rockefeller Archive Center for her patience and diligence in securing images. I am grateful, as well, to all those who shared their oral histories as part of this project, and I thank Archana Venkatesh for conducting these interviews with such care and commitment. Research assistance from Adriane Brown and Haley Swenson was invaluable in the early stages of this project.

My research in India would have been impossible without the kindness and support of friends. I especially thank Jyoti Thottam for so generously welcoming our family to Delhi. I am grateful to Padmini and S. P. Venkateshan, and to Sharada and M. Ganeshan, for, as always, making Chennai home. Support from Naazneen (Munni) and Vishal helped to make work possible.

To write this book, I relied upon the intellectual generosity of many colleagues. As I began my research in Delhi, advice and support from Janaki Abraham, Charu Gupta, Janaki Nair, and Mohan Rao proved to be invaluable. I am also grateful to everyone who was willing to listen to me talk about the project, who commented on rough drafts and conference presentations, and who encouraged me to believe that this was, indeed, a book. My gratitude goes to Sanjam Ahluwalia, Srimati Basu, Indrani Chatterjee, Geraldine Forbes, Douglas Haynes, Pranav Jani, Robin Judd, Guisela Latorre, Thomas (Dodie) McDow, Durba Mitra, Rahul Nair, Shailaja Paik, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Barbara Ramusack, Haimanti Roy, Jennifer Siegel, Mrinalini Sinha, Birgitte Soland, Renae Sullivan, Ashwini Tambe, Mary Thomas, Archana Venkatesh, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. I am grateful to the participants in the seminar “Women, Nation-Building, and Feminism in India,” whose comments on my work helped me think through the 1950s, and postindependence historiography more generally. I especially thank Anjali Bhardwaj Datta and Uditi Sen for their insightful feedback. Susan Hartmann and Katherine Marino were kind enough to read the entire manuscript and provide their detailed feedback. I thank you so much for your insights, support, and generosity. Sarah Grey gave careful attention to my writing, for which I am deeply grateful. And finally, what a pleasure it has been to complete this book alongside my writing group friends and colleagues: Elizabeth Bond, Theodora Dragostinova, Tina Sessa, and Ying Zhang. Your work and commitments inspire my own.

In preparing the manuscript, I appreciate the support I have received from everyone at the University of Washington Press. Special thanks to Hanni Jalil for her patience in working through my questions, to Elizabeth Mathews for the careful copyediting, to Eileen Allen for the index, and to Larin McLaughlin for her editorial acumen and enduring interest in this book. I also thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their generous and helpful advice. And closer to home, I thank Savita Jani and Meenakshi Jani for their invaluable bibliographic assistance.

This book would have looked different without my students at Ohio State. During the years I spent writing, my students, especially in courses on reproductive justice, South Asian history, and transnational feminisms, have pushed me to think in new directions, and to bring my research into dialogue with the here and now. I am truly grateful to each of them. My colleagues at OSU have fostered the spaces where this kind of thinking can happen. For creating such an energizing and hopeful workplace, my gratitude goes to current and former WGSS colleagues, especially Jill Bystydzienski, Lynaya Elliott, Elysse Jones, Jackson Stotlar, and Shannon Winnubst. My work has been sustained, as well, by the fierce feminist board and staff of Women Have Options. Thank you for pushing me to keep asking questions, even when they are not comfortable, and for continuing to expand the boundaries of reproductive justice in our community.

This book is, ultimately, about life—how it is measured and valued, and how this calculus shapes our society and politics. I write these acknowledgments in the midst of a global pandemic that has made these calculations even more explicit, in a push to reopen “the economy” regardless of its human cost. At this moment, when the lives of those most marginalized and vulnerable are made expendable in the pursuit of profit, the brave insistence that Black Lives Matter, both in the US and globally, is all the more inspiring in its call for a different world.

In closing, I wish to thank all those friends and family who remind me of the joy, hope, and possibility of life outside of a grim economic calculus. In the last stages of writing the book, I am full of gratitude for the friends who shared walks and socially distanced chats in parks and yards, for all those on the cousins Zoom calls, the support and solidarity chats, and the virtual family get-togethers that enlivened the days of quarantine. I thank family near and far, especially Vandana and Mahendra Jani, for their affection and support these many years. My parents, Nagarathna and Venkatachala Sreenivas, make all things possible, and I am deeply grateful for all they have given me. I am not sure that Meenakshi and Savita remember a time when I was not working on this book, and in the many years it has taken me to write it, they have grown into the kind of inquisitive and thoughtful readers I would be grateful to have. Your optimism, kindness, and commitments to justice give me hope even in the darkest of times, because they remind me to turn on the light. Finally, my enduring gratitude to Pranav, whose companionship and love has sustained this book, as it has my life.