Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

"Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic."

"[T]his book is of vital importance to scholars of postcolonial states, modernisation, and population control."

"[O]ffers a compelling view of colonial and postcolonial India, seen through the lens of the politics of reproduction."

"The thorough examination of a broad range of archival records backed by extensive engagement with critical theoretical frameworks makes the book a significant contribution to the scholarship on modern South Asia."

"Temporally, the book is a work situated in modern history, but its investigation of the concepts of "population" and "economy" make it a sharp commentary on the centrality of reproduction in global biopolitics today...What stands out in Sreenivas’s work is the animation with which the key actors of the period under study are brought to life."

"Sreenivas’s book is an important contribution to a growing body of scholarly work that thinks seriously with the transnational politics of gender and sexuality to reimagine this critical period of late colonial and postcolonial development."

"Sreenivas’ meticulous research at the intersections of demographic history, gender/sexuality/sexology, and contraceptive politics offers a complex history of population, nation, and economy in India. It makes a timely contribution to nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asian history, reproductive and contraceptive histories of India, and colonial and postcolonial gender and sexuality studies."

"As the world confronts climate catastrophe, and engages with questions of population, reproduction, and economy, Mytheli Sreenivas’ Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is an important and timely intervention. It sits alongside other important feminist interventions on population and development."

"The book is highly relevant to scholars; researchers in sociology, population sciences, demographic, and development studies and other social sciences; and feminist activists. It offers a compelling view of colonial and postcolonial India, seen through the lens of the politics of reproduction and the need for population control and planned parenthood for the development of human beings."

"The connections that this book makes are impressive, as is its ability to engage with a scholarship on reproduction and population not only from India, but most broadly, with global histories and historiographies."

"An enormously thorough, compelling, and sobering account of how feminist impulses came to be intertwined with state-led economistic thinking and coercive eugenic measures."