For those who weren’t able to join us for this event, here’s the recording and transcript. Enjoy!
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Mytheli Sreenivas
> > Lhost: Hello, everyone and welcome to the November event in the Conversations on South Asia series here at Dartmouth College. I’m Elizabeth Lhost, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and a lecturer in the Department of History here at Dartmouth, and I’m also one of the series co-organizers for this year.
It is my distinguished pleasure to welcome you all to this event featuring Mytheli Sreenivas’s Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, which was published with the University of Washington Press earlier this year. And event attendees can use the promo code w139 to receive a 30% discount when ordering the book directly from the press. We’re very grateful to have them make this available to attendees of the event. The book is also available as an open access text, which was made possible by generous support from a Project TOME grant. Very exciting to see more works coming out with open access editions for students and scholars who are unable to purchase books. Professor Sreenivas also informs me that, after some pandemic related delays, Reproductive Politics is now available for purchase in a South Asian edition through Women Unlimited. And we have a special link that we will put in the chat very shortly to share with all of you to buy that book directly from the publisher.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts the series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College for supporting this program, and I’d especially like to thank Bruch Lehmann and Britny (Town) Marsh for their support with logistics.
Momentarily, I’ll hand over the platform to my colleague Professor Douglas Haynes, who will be introducing our panelists and moderating the Q&A today. But before I do that, I would like to thank our two Bodas Fellows Sri Sathvik Rayala and Bryanna Entwistle, who are working and have been working behind the scenes to make sure the program runs smoothly today, so please join me in acknowledging their contributions.
I would also like to announce that the complete schedule for the conversation series is available on our website, which is sites.dartmouth.edu/southasiastudies and you’ll see a link to the conversation series on the left hand side. And I’d also like to announce that our next event featuring Nicole Karapanagiotis’s Branding Bhakti will take place on Tuesday, December 7 from 12:15 to 1:15 PM Eastern and registration is available at the link dartgo.org/conversations-karapanagiotis, and we’ll also put that in the chat so that you can access it pretty easily.
Finally, for those of you who can never quite get enough of South Asia events in your lives, Professor Haynes has also asked me to announce that on Thursday, this Thursday, just two days from now, he will be hosting a conversation with Kavita Sivaramakrishnan on India’s second COVID wave with reflections on a longer history of epidemics and erasures. So we’ll post information about that event in the chat so that those of you who are interested may attend.
And now, without further delay, on to our panel discussion. Today, we have joining us the author Mytheli Sreenivas, and two discussants. Each panelist will provide roughly ten minutes of comments and reflections on the book, beginning with the author. And then we’ll open up the floor to questions and comments from the audience. When submitting your questions, please use the Q&A feature in the Zoom webinar to submit your questions and now please welcome my colleague Douglas Haynes, who will be introducing our distinguished speakers.
> > Haynes: Thank you, thank you very much. I’m very pleased to be moderating this this event, about a book, I read, several months ago, not just in preparation for this occasion. Besides all the thanks that Elizabeth has already mentioned, I want to thank Elizabeth herself for organizing this event and for all the work she’s done in putting together this Conversation on South Asia series, which I think is really a unique contribution to South Asian studies, not just at Dartmouth, but actually globally. And, and I hope we are able to keep it, keep it going in the years, in the future future years.
Today, we’re pleased to have with us Professor Mytheli Sreenivas, who is an Associate Professor at Ohio State University. Her work focuses on women’s and gender history, and more recently on the history of sexuality and reproduction. Her first book, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India, is the most critical work on the history of conjugality in modern South Asia, and it showed how the advocacy of the conjugal family became central to the constitution of modernity and nationalism in South Asia. And it certainly has been extremely valuable in my own work, which deals with conjugality in advertising.
Her second and latest book, the Reproductive, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, the subject of today’s discussion, we’ll hear plenty about that. But it has immediately established itself as the most important study of the history of birth control and reproductive politics in India.
She’s also published numerous journal articles and book chapters, including works on conjugality and reproduction, but also very broad historiographic essays. We have with us two very appropriate commentators to reflect on this work, and we will go in this order.
The first is Amna Qayyum, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. Her primary field of study is twentieth century global history, with a particular focus on decolonization and the Cold War in South Asia and the Muslim world. Her research and teaching interests include the histories of gender, science and technology, development, and Islamic thought. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Demographic States: The Global Biopolitics of Authoritarianism in South Asia,” offers insight into how postcolonial sovereignty intersected it with and disrupted global bio, bio-political projects by situating Pakistan and Bangladesh as critical participants in the production of global demographic knowledge and practices and recently she’s also advised the Government of Pakistan on Covid-19 related human security.
After after comments from Amna, we’ll have comments from Carole McCann, who is a Professor and Chair of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore with an affiliate faculty appointment in the doctoral program in Language, Literacy and Culture Doctoral Program. Professor McCann’s work involved, involves, among other things, transnational feminist theory, transnational feminist science studies, and population/reproductive politics. She has published two books, including Figuring the Population Bomb and Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945. I’m sorry, that’s, that was two books. And she also co- co-edits the Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, and she’s joined the editorial team for the 2021 edition. So I’ll be very interested in hearing what Dr. Qayyum and Professor McCann have to say about this, this compelling work, but first we turn to Professor Sreenivas to hear ten minutes of summary of her own, her own work, and then thoughts on her work.
> > Sreenivas: Thank you so much, and thank you so much to the organizers of the Conversations on South Asia series, especially Elizabeth Lhost for organizing this talk and for being so supportive. I’m also really grateful to Carole McCann, Amna Qayyum, and Doug Haynes for engaging with the book, and I look forward to your comments and conversation.
Following Elizabeth, I’ll also start with a land acknowledgment. You know these events seem like they’re happening everywhere and nowhere. But I want to acknowledge the place from which I speak, which is Columbus, Ohio, which occupies the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Pottawatomie, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandot, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. As an employee of Ohio State, I want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land.
And so, turning to the book itself, as, as Professor Haynes mentioned, I was asked to talk or introduce the book a little bit for folks who may not have, have read it and broadly speaking, it has its roots in how I experienced and learned about India as the child of Indian immigrant parents, back in the 70s and 80s. Overpopulation was my family’s answer to nearly every question I asked when visiting India during my childhood summers, from why the buses were more crowded than what I was used to to why poverty seems so visible to me as the child of American suburbs.
In short, overpopulation was the go-to explanation for why India was the way it was. But more insidiously, it was an explanation that suggested inevitability. How else could India be given its population size?
Revisiting these childhood memories as a historian, I began to wonder about the history of this hegemonic idea that had been my explanation for India for so long. And I started reading some work both in population history and in feminist critiques of population control policy, including, of course, Carole McCann’s work on the gendering of demography. And from here, it was a short step to recognizing, as others have before me, that population was always also a reproductive question. So human numbers are about how many children are born, how many die, and all the social, cultural, corporeal, and gendered practices that are associated with these births and deaths.
Population, in other words, is a reproductive justice issue. Indeed, much of the foundational feminist work on women’s and gender history in South Asia has engaged with reproductive questions, though they’re not always named as such. So, there is importantly, and, of course, the historiography of birth control, including the foundational work of Sanjam Ahluwalia and Sarah Hodges. There’s also a wider range of research that examines reproductive politics, so the controversies around child marriage and widow remarriage, the scandal around Mayo’s Mother India, the reform of Hindu laws of marriage and inheritance are just some of those examples. So, this was the conceptual space from which I wrote the book.
A question about the hegemonic idea of overpopulation, a recognition that the history of population must also be a history of reproductive politics and a connection between this work and the broader field of South Asian Women’s and Gender Studies. My goal was to write a history of modern India that put reproduction at its center. I believe that many of the core questions we ask about the 19th and 20th centuries, about colonial rule and anti-colonial thought, about inequality and hierarchy, about economic development, about decolonization and post-colonialism, are also questions of and about reproductive politics.
With that goal in mind, for the rest of my time today, I’ll highlight a few interventions that I see the book making. And I’ll talk about each of these in brief and just list them first off. They’re about the question of chronology for a modern history of reproductive politics, the centrality of India to obstensively global change, the place of feminist activism and population control programs that were effectively anti-women, the intersection of histories of heterosexuality with histories of economy and development and, finally, the implications of this history for our current moment of climate crisis and resurgent populationist discourse.
So, my first point is that we need our histories to have longer time horizons. We tend to see population and reproductive politics as mid-20th century concerns. They seem to arise from transnational population control networks and the national developmentalist state, both in India and elsewhere in South Asia and across the Global South. However, I argue in the book that reproduction as a modern political question was first asked and answered in the process of imperial consolidation in the late-nineteenth century. In other words, Malthusian fears that India was an overpopulated place took hold alongside the conditions created when the Indian colony became part of global systems of food and finance, of agrarian production and capitalist markets ushered in by the British Empire. These fears of overpopulation became entrenched in Indian political culture, even though the population itself was not increasing in the late-nineteenth century.
This brings me to my second point about the book’s findings, which concern the place of India in the global history of reproductive politics. Histories of population and reproduction, even those taking a transnational approach, often tend to center the West. The result is that the rest, even if understood to be important, become, in effect, sort of local spaces, where global—that is Western forces—are enacted. Within such analyses, India becomes a preeminent site for global population control measures or—at most—a sight of collaboration between Western and Indian elites. However, in working on this book, I came to see something different, that is, India was not simply a local place for global politics, reproductive politics was enacted. Instead, I argue that historical conditions in India prompted a reproductive politics with global aspirations to take shape. This was true, for instance, in the mid-twentieth century when the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in Bombay with the goal of taking the transnational birth control movement in more explicitly Indian directions. And I start the book with an anecdote about that, and for the founders, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Margaret Sanger, this meant a focus on population control as the rationale for contraception. There are a lot of other examples, but in short, I’m interested in how Indian conditions helped to define the meaning and purposes of reproductive control transnationally.
This brings me to a third point of intervention. The history of reproductive politics implicates and is deeply implicated in histories of feminism. Many scholars and activists have made clear that the history of birth control was not a simple sort of trajectory from subjection to freedom in any part of the world. Instead, advocacy for contraception, abortion, and maternal and child health sprang from a variety of motivations, for instance Malthusianism and eugenics, sexual radicalism and anti-patriarchal thought, anti-capitalism and socialism, casteism and anti-caste politics. Feminist activists contributed to all these streams of thought about reproductive control. Consequently, there’s no direct line connecting feminist contraceptive advocacy to a progressive politics.
So, my book aims to build on this understanding to show that organized Indian feminists, who’re often overlooked in the history of state-led development, actually, played a pivotal role in putting family planning on the state’s agenda during the early post-colonial decades. And they did so by making it an essential form of economic development to be conducted by middle class women for their subaltern sisters. Recognizing this makes visible a certain kind of paradox. How is it that avowedly feminist activists helped pave the way for state-led population control programs that would ultimately disregard the reproductive health and autonomy of women, especially of Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim women, who are already the most marginalized.
I try to work through some of these thorny questions in the book, and I’m happy to talk about that more in the Q&A. So, the last chapter of the book considers images of the small and happy heterosexual family as they proliferated across public culture from the 1920s to the 1970s. This is my attempt to investigate the sexual politics of India’s family planning machine and, more broadly, to ask about the co-constitution of histories of heterosexuality and economic development. And that chapter takes a lot of inspiration from recent work on Indian sexology and Professor Haynes’s own work has been absolutely pivotal here on sexuality and advertising. I’m interested to identify a politics that mobilized heterosexuality to naturalize certain modes of planning, certain orientations towards time, structures of sexual intimacy and economic rationality, and visions of future consumption. And I have a few examples of these images that I can share in the Q&A as well.
So lastly, the book’s epilogue learns from the words of rural women in Tamil Nadu, women who have historically been the targets of state-led population control, to consider what this history might mean for the current re-energizing of a populationist discourse in the context of climate change. So I’ll pause for now and turn it over, I think to Amna.
> > Qayyum: Mytheli, thank you so much for getting us started and giving us such a rich sort of overview in just ten minutes of the book. Also, many thanks to Elizabeth and Doug for the invitation and for giving us a chance to gather here today, and I’m looking forward to being in conversation with Mytheli and Carole over the course of the hour. So, in the interest of time, I think we only have about an hour, so I’ll get started on my comments.
So, I won’t go into summarizing some of the book’s key takeaways because I think Mytheli has done that so well. But I will signal briefly to some of its main historiographic interventions, which I think we should keep in mind as we discuss the work. So, the first is the ambitious temporal arc of the book as Mytheli mentions, spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s. And this, as Mytheli rightly points out in the book, many projects on population and reproduction, including the one that I’m currently writing, they start with post-war or mid-century histories. So, the book is not only a call to arms for us to write histories of reproduction which cross the temporal colonial-postcolonial divide, but it also expertly shows us how reproduction emerges as a terrain on which to enact a framework of politics across this period from famine to child marriage to, obviously in the post-colonial period, national development. So the book also makes a compelling argument for us to think about what family planning means for different actors who are engaged in supporting it. So, from the straight-up link between population and economic development, to different, differing valences of liberation and welfare.
And Mytheli, I would love for you to speak a little bit more about this difference between family planning as liberation versus women’s welfare and what this does is about differences within elite women and their conceptions of the political economy of reproduction. And I guess with that, uh, I guess I’ve already started on my questions and comments, so I have a few more that sort of bunched together, but please feel free to engage with the ones that you think are more productive.
So, my first question is about the ethical and the religious, and I really, really enjoyed reading chapter five about the happy family and the rich detail and, in particular, engagement with the visual sources and thinking about the normative aspects of family planning. And because this is a book which crosses that sort of colonial-postcolonial temporal divide, what struck me most were how debates and re-configurations around Brahmacharya figured in reproductive and birth control thinking. And from what it seems, is that by in the post-war period, they get wedded to the small family norm, and the focus on sexual ethics is increasingly replaced by ideas of consumption and modernization within the soft small family unit. So I’m wondering if you could reflect on this change that happens in the post-war period in the ethical and religious case made for or against family planning. So is family planning mostly about political economy, or are there figures who continue to make a case for it in ethical terms? And I’m thinking here about the Pakistan case which I’m working on and I focus on sort of Islamic modernists who are actively writing about family planning as an ethical project. So I wonder if there are any similarities that we can also draw on from India. And while we are on the subject of religion, also wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the religious and caste dimensions of the postcolonial population control project. So your book and Sanjam Ahulwalia’s book talks about how Muslim and Dalit reproduction was vilified under late colonialism, but what happens to this in post-1947? And what does this tell us about citizen formation in Nehruvian India? So is it vilification of reproduction now packaged along class lines or is religious and caste identity still overtly or covertly targeted in these projects and how?
And then another set of questions has to deal with your work on the global color line, which you bring out so powerfully how Indian actors, including demographers, involved in this project of creating and resisting the notion of a global color line constructed through you know demographic axes of knowledge and mediating debates over migration, among other things. But I wonder if you could speak a little bit and I guess, this is going to be a recurring theme in my questions, about what happens to the global color line in the post-war period. So at their core, mid-century population control is a racializing project, but I’m wondering if we can think through the valences in which racializing forms of knowledge are deployed in different ways in the post-war period.
And I’ll stop there, one final question about labor. So you bring out a very wide range of actors: feminists, demographers, sexologists, everyday citizens. But I’m wondering if we could think a little bit more about physicians and doctors as well, and how they negotiated their space within a state-led population control project. What relationship did they share with it, and is there a way in which, if we think about labor, so physicians, health visitors and others, we can think about the relationship, rethink some of the relationship between the citizens, the state and population control?
So I think we’ll stop there, and we can have more time for Q&A, and I think should I hand it over to Carole now, yes okay.
> > McCann: Thank you. Thank you very much, and I want to start as well by thanking Elizabeth and Mytheli for and Doug for inviting me to be part of this, and I’m looking forward to the conversation with all of the participants, as well as the panelists.
I think this book provides a really rich analysis of India within the history of the modern population-imaginary, and that’s an imaginary that I would define that constructs human reproductive impacts on past prosperity is the central problem of the modern world. The ability and obligation to regulate the natural forces of population come to signify the modernity of nations and individuals. And the book’s interrogation of this flawed narrative I think deepens our understanding of the role of numbers within the colonial imagination by situating the calculus of life and death and imperial fiscal management, anti-colonial politics, national development planning, and feminist engagements with them. In so doing, I really do think the book effectively reframes the historiography of mid-20th century family planning population control and feminisms, both by expanding the scope of that history and by placing India at the center of that history. And I should situate my remarks by noting that I am not a student of South Asian history. My engagement with India comes through my interest in demography and in numbers as the language with which modern stories of human reproduction and its impacts are told.
My own work focuses on the epistemic and effective commitments population statistics and the work those statistics do in shaping women’s lives, social worlds and futures, and national futures. I argue that understanding the cultural work of population figures is a vital importance for reproductive justice movements, because population statistics are really tricky tools for social justice movements, because they, while they can reveal inequities, they also conceal the politics that brings statistics to life. And I’ve written about demography’s statistical practices that animated the mid-20th century population crisis and how that configured women’s naturalized bodies as the cause of population excess and thus the site of regulation and that those practices underpinning family planning programs build a binary of contraceptively competent and incompetent women and that that structures so much of feminist engagement around the question of family planning and population control and birth control.
And as part of my work, I do, I have critiqued Western demographic research on Indian population dynamics, perhaps, in fact, committing the, the biases that Mytheli points out in terms of focusing on the West. But that is the perspective I bring to my reading of this book. And from that perspective, I particularly appreciate the expansive archive that Mytheli has compiled. It appropriately centers India and the full range of population’s concerns: death, movement, and birth. And I say it in that order because I think that’s the order in which it captured the attention of imperial governments, anti-colonial actors, and postcolonial nations. Histories of statistics note the 19th century was about quantifying mortality and the value of life and, and, but mostly they ignore the role of India and famine management and epidemic management in that history.
Early 20th century, as Mytheli points out, a history of migrations ignores the South Asian voices that spoke against the drawing of that color global color line. And the mid-20th century population discourse made a fetish of fertility rates and changed human reproductivity. Fertility rates were and often still are conflated with growth rates as if routine death and migration no longer mattered, only the natural excesses of women’s bodies mattered. But the Malthusian spectors of mass misery want war and death haunt mid-20th century futurities.
By beginning of the late 19th century, I think the book really illuminates the long history of the framing of the question of reproduction in India in terms of economic scarcity and want. It really helps us understand that deeply inflected imperial, how deeply inflected and by imperial logics the preoccupations with costs and the value of India’s population are.
And from my point of view, it’s critical to trace the impact of that sedimented imperial logic in the enumeration and aggregation practices by which we convert human events of birth, death, and movement into national rates of mortality, fertility, and migration.
I won’t belabor that point, which I have a tendency to do, but I want to, I want to focus on what I think of as a major contribution to the project of excavating the political inflections of population numbers that is, that the book makes through its really nuanced analysis of the affective and political commitments to national well being, pride, and progress, but both by India’s political leaders and feminist family planning advocates. You know, as she notes, family planning was a means to bridge tensions within the national planning process. It enables claims of poverty alleviation without challenging structural inequities, promoting women’s development without challenging patriarchy, and together these smooth the tensions producing politics of dehumanizing women in terms of population control, and I think the careful analysis of the conjuncture, conjunctures and complexities of Indian feminists in this history is, is really very important.
One point I would want to question, while I agree that and use the same, the 1952 founding of International Planned Parenthood Federation, as that that India is central to shaping the population policy, I also wonder if the analysis leads us to give insufficient weight to the crowds of American demographers and funding that and the weight of that on shaping the definition of and the solution of India’s population problems in the, from the 1950s to the 70s. And I’d be really happy to talk about that, because I think it’s important to consider how we can both center India as a shaper of global policy and fully account for those neo-colonial interventions.
To conclude, as my interest always comes back to how feminist might navigate the terrain of population politics towards justice, I want to highlight that final provocation of the book that I think warrants much further discussion on our part. The epilog brings the human scale back in through the contrast between the promise of future prosperity and family planning programs, contrast it with the precarity of the present that oral history participants cite as underpinning their reproductive decisions. I think that notion of the precarity of the present has the potential to draw our attention back to the structural inequalities and patriarchal constraints that population statistics, population control, family planning discourses alike allied. And in so doing, I think you can open space to effectively challenge the current, the terms of current reproductive politics under late stage capitalism, and I really hope we can talk more about that.
Thank you. Doug. Oh sorry.
> > Lhost: I was gonna say Mytheli, I’ll give you a minute to respond to some of those questions and comments briefly if you’d like while we gather questions and answers from the audience and for those of you who are in the audience, you can submit questions through the Q&A feature.
> > Sreenivas: Great, I will try to keep my comments pretty brief and hope to cycle back to many of these questions, but first of all, thank you for such a rich sort of engagement with the book and some really wonderful questions for me to keep thinking through, and I think for us to think through together, so thank you for that. Um I think there’s a, as Amna herself pointed out, there’s a number of questions that you raised that are essentially around what’s the relationship between the colonial and the post-war or postcolonial and what changes and what are points of continuity, and I think that’s a really excellent question on a whole, whole number of levels. I’m not going to take up all of those levels, but I sort of welcome for their conversation on that, but I think one one place to think about it has to do with the question that you raised about religious, caste, and class dimensions. And this is something that I’m really kind of curious to keep thinking about because the late colonial period, as many people have shown, I mean certainly Sanjam’s work but also Charu Gupta’s work and others, you know have really sort of made clear that the kind of communal demography that characterize the 1930s and 1940s, has a long life into into sort of postcolonial India and what I was interested in, and we see that long life now right with the, with the really like, I don’t know it was it was communalized before I don’t even know what to call it now, right. I mean it’s sort of like, I don’t know, hyper communalized in the current moment and context right and the sort of current vilification of Muslim populations, in particular, but Dalit populations as well, and I think, so I’ve been wondering about this, in part, because the explicit discourse and rhetoric that I found from the 1950s and 1960s tended to avoid the kind of, the kind of language that we see reemerging from the 1980s and especially 1990s. And I’m trying to figure out what to do with that, like there were these moments that appear once in a while, and I talk about them, where I find them, in the book, you know where some of the the women family planners who go out to talk about you know sort of talk family planning to rural women will sometimes get frustrated and make these kind of side comments about who’s accepting and who’s not accepting family planning. But yet a lot remains I think sort of unsayable in these discourses, and I, this is sort of more of a question than an answer, but I’m sort of not just thinking about pre and post-47 but thinking about this moment of the 1950s and 1960s and national development discourses and what it, what it opens up and what, what it leaves unsaid or kind of under the surface, just as a thought.
And because I said I would keep my my things brief, I’ll just come to one other point that comes from from Carole’s comments having to do with the place of sort of American demographers and their commitments in these policies, which I would absolutely, I would absolutely agree with and kind of reflecting back on the book, I think, part of, part of the longer chronology, I hope, sort of allows me to situate the American presence, which was my goal, in terms of recognizing that these politics come from a set of collaborations and not only, right, from from a kind of an American intervention.
But, that being said, I think there’s a lot of room for something that I’ve been thinking about in some future writing and I’m hoping some maybe collaborative writing if folks are interested in in these questions, I am really wanting to be able to situate this shift in the 50s and 60s within a more effectively transnational frame that sort of looks at multiple places over time and and thinks through what a truly transnational history of this process might look like that sort of locally grounded.
So I just want to put that out there for folks who are interested. That’s certainly a project that I would really like to engage in, but I’ll pause there for now, if there are other questions.
> > Haynes: Okay, I don’t think we have questions, yet, but I had, I have reading this book, I had a, had a number of of questions. I guess the one I would like to ask is is about the epilog which Carole mentioned and and where you bring in the oral interviews and, and I wondered whether you know how does the question that really occurs to me is how, how does one engage the perspective of the subaltern and subaltern women in this, in this process and clearly the adoption of reproductive technologies does become more widespread, but a sense is that maybe it has very little to do with the discourses, the elite discourses that you, you talk about through much of your book and so how do we get at how ordinary people are perceiving the issue of reproductive technologies and, and other aspects of the birth control process. So this seems to me the real, a real gap that we have in our in our understanding of the politics.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you for that. Um I spent a lot of time, when I was writing this book kind of like worried about this exact question because you’re absolutely right. These are a set of elite discourses that operate in a particular space with you know so that some of these, you know, Indian demographers are far more likely, of course, to be talking to American and other demographers than they are to be actually kind of engaging with sort of grassroots or folks on the ground.
So yes, I think that gap remains, and I think the reason that the epilog exists, was in part to recognize that gap, but I think the, the thing that enabled me to write the epilogue was to, was to stop looking to these alternative voices for critique or an alternative perspective. Which is not to say that these alternative perspectives don’t exist, I really think they do, but rather to kind of stop asking the oral history work to sort of solve my archival problems. Right and to say, well, no way there, there must be like, there must be a critique and as someone once pointed out to me like earlier earlier in the work, you know, it’s a tall order to ask for such a thing, because, of course, if you have been confronted by this discourse, potentially for your whole life, and you are constantly told that your reproduction is the problem, and you’re constantly going back to the medical sort of institutions, right, you’re constantly, every time you encounter a doctor or health care practitioner you’re getting the same message it really does become a taller to ask for something different, and so.
I, once I stopped that search and instead tried to listen to a little bit more of these voices, it at least enabled me to think about how the sort of the, the end product, in other words, the sort of reproductive control, right, the that’s evidenced in sort of the big demographic data about declining fertility rates in India now, that that big story doesn’t necessarily mean the winning out of the sort of ideologies of modernity and consumption that are underpinning family planning discourse, that there’s a lot of room between those two which I was, I was trying to get up.
> > Haynes: We have at least, we have a couple questions in the Q&A now from [inaudible] Bhandari. He says, thank you for this wonderful session I was wondering if you could comment on how much of these reproduction policies were an attempt by the postcolonial state to sanitize history and mythology by proposing the main the main ideal was a heterosexual couple, with emphasis on reproduction, whereas mythology show the richness of sexualities and love and sex for passion as well that’s, the first question. And, and in the second question is that goes beyond perhaps goes beyond the focus of book, but how would you explain, forced sterilization drives as by Sanjay Gandhi, were these policies and politics foreshadowing the, these brutal interventions so.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you for, for both of those um, and the second one is maybe easier for me to answer than the first, but on the question of the forced sterilization under the Emergency, one of the arguments in the book is, is trying to, is one that all of the structures and ideas that, that were enacted in the Emergency predated the Emergency. So, although it is true that the Emergency Period was much more draconian in its sterilization policy, and it turned towards male sterilization, think that’s significant, nevertheless, all of the you know the, there was already an existence of sterilization camps prior to the Emergency. There were sort of targets and quotas prior to the Emergency, so all of the things that we associate with that already sort of pre-existed it. And so I think what I’m interested in is how the Emergency sort of rightfully you know gets sort of figured as the sort of worst forms of population control, but often leaves all of the other structures and ideological underpinnings sort of off the hook. And in fact helps to normalize, I would argue, female sterilization in its wake, which we still see in the disparate rates of male and female sterilization across South Asia.
So yeah, I think that the heterosexuality question in regard to sort of like sanitizing is super interesting, and I really want to think about that, think about that a little bit more. I don’t really have an answer. I don’t know if actually Doug does. When I’m sort of thinking about sort of earlier histories of sexology and sort of cleaning up certain myths and ideas about Brahmacharya, but I do think that one of the sort of interesting points that you know Ishita Pande makes, for example, in thinking through how certain ideas like Brahmacharya get sort of reconfigured in the space of the modern, right, and she argues about Brahmacharya becoming a life stage, which I think is and Doug talks about this as well, and I think this is sort of maybe one way to go right. I don’t think what’s happening is a sort of a total rejection of those earlier visions, but how they get sort of categorized into these modern spaces, so that they can neatly fit that way, right, so like Rama and Sita, for example, becoming sort of the ideal monogamous couple, sort of rewritten along those lines.
> > Haynes: We have a couple more more questions. Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m trying to see if there’s two different questions or one.
So one question from Sushant Kumar is, is the role, about the role of scientific authoritarianism or scientism on behalf of the pre, pre and post-independent state institutions in shaping Indian population policy. So, I guess it’s a question area that is being posed here. Could so could you talk about that, and we have another question after that.
> > Sreenivas: Sure um. Yeah, so I think, I think this probably touches on Carole’s work as well, in regard to demography, so please feel free to chime in, but I think what, I think what I was interested in was thinking through the sort of scientific certitudes around development and the way in which population figures as a variable within demographic or population discourses and as Carole also pointed out sort of some of the affective connections that are made to that vision.
So the book, you know, doesn’t spend a huge amount of time sort of talking about sort of science, with a capital S per se, but what I am more interested in is how do people, how does that vision, right, that sort of a set of ideas about demographic transition theory, for example, as an idea that all societies are supposed to pass through this demographic transition and that it’s possible to do top-down interventions to accelerate that transition, I’m interested in how that becomes figured in public discourses as like an ideal to have attachment to, right. How do you have pride in the notion of controlling population, right? How does that have the small happy family become the site of desire that is, that acts as if that the sort of the scientific discourse sometimes acts as if that’s not happening, but I think is actually, you know, central to sort of translating these claims on the ground. And one of the things that I’ve been struck by just in sort of talking about the book with, with folks both inside and outside of sort of academic context is how often people have said to me well this, this helps me to understand, especially those who are maybe not historians, this helps me to understand like why I grew up with the ideas that I did, and I think that speaks to this question of like the kind of affective attachment to the small family that has its roots in a particular kind of science set of scientific authorities, but that that, that becomes real in people’s lives through these other set of mediations.
> > Haynes: From Muhammad Ali Imran. He says, I was wondering if the panelists could speak more on if and how post-partition, these national development discourses have diverged. I think he means between India and Pakistan in particular. Correct me if I’m wrong. How do you mediate geopolitical definitions and perhaps divergent yet co-constituent, constituted histories in understanding the sexuality and reproductive rights, especially in the case of Pakistan, India?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, I wonder if that’s a question that Amna and I would have to answer jointly.
The first thing that occurs to me is like well you know go to her talk later because it’s um because that’s where I’m hoping to learn more about this. So I, you know, I don’t know the answer to that question because I, it’s not something that I was able to particularly focus on. I guess, I could sort of start us off, though, in terms of thinking about where, if the earlier history of this book which focuses on the 19th century and pre-1947 are making a claim that I think is relevant for thinking about South Asia, more broadly, right, which is that the neo-Malthusian idea about population in South Asia or in colonial India takes hold well before there is any rise of population, so that any population rise is always sort of ready, always has a ready framework within which it can be situated and explained and intervened in. That I think is a history that is probably shared. I think there is a sort of a, I wonder about the questions of divergence that emerged, for example, between sort of the other set of demographic debates about West Pakistan and East Pakistan and the role of that you know in 1971. I think there’s sort of huge, huge places or moments that could push towards a kind of a divergent response.
But I don’t know, I don’t know if Amna, you know, you want to speak to that at all. Not to put you on the spot.
> > Qayyum: I will, I can just put in a comment or two because it’s, it’s a, it’s a really good question, and it’s something I’m working through throughout the project. I think one of the places where we do see divergences is, which I sort of alluded to earlier, is sort of the ethical dimensions of population control, and I think in Pakistan because the locus of sovereignty is not just you know in a straight-up relationship between sovereignty and national development, Islam also emerges as a locus of sovereignty given sort of Pakistan’s peculiar formation. Population control, then, is not while it might be about economic development, there’s also a case that is deeply normative or ethical that is being constructed in Pakistan for it, which then leads to it being sort of politicized and resisted by multiple actors. So I’ll put the ethical in there, and I’ll leave it for that, and this is something you know we can talk about more in our shared conversations later.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah and, if I can just come back on one piece of this, on the ethical question, because I know you raised it before, and I didn’t address it. I’m also thinking about what are, your questions are sort of prompting me to think what are the ethics of development itself, right, and so to not situate those as necessarily as as separate sets of discourses and questions and, and going back to my affective attachments point, right, what kind of attachments to the nation as a site of the development process, I think, become, is, this is, there’s an attempt to mobilize that set of affective attachments as opposed to, not opposed but, but in a way that I don’t see the kind of trends that you’re suggesting here about an ethical attachment that’s perhaps exists outside of or beyond the nation state in the national space. So maybe that’s just another, another point that we might want to think about.
> > Haynes: A kind of related set of questions is why did, why did the convergences remain in many cases and do, why are there, why are there continued overlaps despite the different ideologies of the, of the state?
We do have several questions now, so from Haley Swenson. I’m just going to ask the first one here. So climate and disease seemed to be the chief concerns of the colonial, colonial proto-population control project. Can you speak to the way the precarity of the present creates or makes difficult opportunity for an alternative to population control rooted in both climate and reproductive justice?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you and hey Haley, um I think yeah, and this also relates to I think Carole’s points earlier about precarity and sort of thinking about that in relation to this, so. For those who are not constantly following the climate change in population discourse, I will just sort of put out a little background, which is that the resurgence of, you know, so, so in the 1990s, in large part due to feminist organizing and activism, the language of population control sort of fell out of favor, as probably many people know, and was sort of substituted with claims around reproductive health and health and rights. And you know Mohan Rao and others have talked about how that transition occurs at this moment of simultaneous, the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberal capitalism globally and so that the promise of the rejection of population control is never really fulfilled.
That’s all by way of saying that, but that the ideologies sort of remain and have kind of come back now, in the context of climate change and, once again, we find that those who are at the, at the margins and who are rendered most vulnerable are also those rendered both responsible for or are seen as responsible for climate change and rendered as responsible for fixing it. You know Kalpana Wilson, who just did a brilliant talk, I went to last week sort of outlined the stakes of, of how this, how this happens in the context both of the rise of authoritarian nationalisms that in the Indian context sort of demonized Muslim women, in particular, but are very much part of sort of global development discourses that sort of use the claim of climate change to call for greater contraceptive usage by women in the Global South so.
All that by way of saying, so anyone who looks at these histories, I think will have to, I guess I’ll set back and say so there’s a question of crisis, right, that, that in the 1960s, the claim of a population bomb, right, became the crisis that enabled all kinds of you know coercive interventions in people’s bodies and especially women’s bodies. And so now again we’re confronting a crisis, this one, a real one, of global climate change and what I see as the sort of real importance of not, the failures of the population bomb were that it was neither true nor did, did the the control measures that were designed to deal with it, were they successful on their own terms, which was lowering fertility rates. And I think that’s a good and important story for us to remember, now that if you’re sort of truly to confront climate crisis, we can’t look to these sort of like false stories about who’s responsible for causing it or who’s responsible for fixing it and that, that, and there I think that addressing the question of precarity of people’s lives and livelihoods as being the crisis of climate because, as opposed to their fertility, I think, becomes the sort of central intervention that that we need to make.
> > Haynes: Elizabeth, we have time for one more question? Yes, okay for this comes from, there are several questions, there are a couple of questions, but I think we’re only going to have time for the first.
Aprajita Sarcar, as she says, I’m asking questions that come, are coming from my work. So, so thank you for the discussion. My first question is about archival traces. I have Durba Mitra’s book Indian Sex Life in mind when I ask how to work with excessive stress on the heterosexual nuclear family and the erasure of all other forms? As a second tied question, would framing the Indian nuclear family to be a product of Hindu aggrandizement limit its creative meanings?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, those are both really good questions for which I probably don’t have answers, to be honest. But I think, I guess on the, on the first question, you know, I guess I would sort of humbly say that when I was sort of working on my book, really all I felt I could do was to sort of make that history of heterosexuality visible um as opposed to a taken-for-granted norm. But also to think about one of the, one of the struggles I had in, in writing the book right is comes with this sort of universality that you’re talking about that makes it seem as if there is no history there.
But secondly that ironically, separates that history, from all the other things that we think are associated, in this case with colonial and postcolonial development. So, I guess my attempt was to to historic size, by putting those in conversation, right, that the history of economic development has to grapple with the question of heterosexuality and not sort of leave that as a, as an unquestioned assumption, so I, again I don’t think that fully answers the question, but I that’s, that’s sort of where I was, where I was starting from.
> > Lhost: I think now, unfortunately, we are at time, so I would like to ask everyone to join me in thanking our, our author and our discussants, and Professor Haynes for leading what has been a very stimulating and a wide ranging conversation. Just thinking about where reproduction goes, it takes us in so many directions from political economy to climate change and everything else going on these days.
So, I would like to just announce once more that our next event will be on Tuesday, December 7, and we’ll be talking about Branding Bhakti. And with that, I would like to thank Mytheli for agreeing to participate and for being a stellar author in terms of promoting and publicizing this event, in addition to putting together comments and participating. So thank you all for joining us today, and I look forward to seeing you again at the next event.
> > Sreenivas: Thank you so much, and just really quick, I know we didn’t get to all the questions, so please feel free to like shoot me an email or tag me on Twitter. I’m happy to keep talking okay.
> > Haynes: I hope you’re still able to see comments and the questions and, and in the, in the chat there before, before you depart so.
> > Lhost: I will, I’ll save the chat and I can send it to you, Mytheli.
> > Sreenivas: Oh, that would be great. Thank you.
> > Lhost: Yep, alright. Alright, thanks everyone.
> > Haynes: There were at least two questions I didn’t read. Thank you.
> > Sreenivas: Awesome, thank you. Bye.
