Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies

Within the scholarly fields of demography, development studies, medical anthropology and public policy, the history of reproduction has been dominated by preconceived and often ahistorical ideas about India’s supposed long-term trend towards “over-population.” When these scholarly fields have invoked histories of fertility and contraception, these histories have largely been made to serve as the “pre-modern” antithesis to a fully “modern” future. In contrast, Reproductive Health in India brings together historians to tackle the complex questions of reproduction in modern India. Taken together, the essays interrogate the very idea that reproduction is simply a linch-pin for effecting other social and economic transformations. Instead, these histories map out and ask questions of the institutions, discourses and practices by which women’s reproductive health came to hold meaning and play strategic roles in the multiple and at times competing agendas such as social reform, the medical sciences, cultural nationalism, and colonial public health.