Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In this talk about her new book, 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. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This podcast investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.  

To tell this story, Prof. Mytheli Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development.  

Mytheli Sreenivas is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Host Nicholas Breyfogle is Co-Editor of Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, Director of the Harvey Goldberg Center and Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University.  

This podcast is brought to you by the Clio Society of the Ohio State History Department, in partnership with the Bexley Public Library and the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.  

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A transcript of this podcast is available at https://origins.osu.edu/listen/history-talk/reproductive-politics-and-making-modern-india