Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies

Abstract

This volume is one of the most recent additions to Orient Longman's impressive New Perspectives in South Asian History series. It is an important addition to the literature on the history of medicine in modern India. This literature is not very extensive and has struggled to emerge from the confines of ‘imperial medicine’ and its epidemic obsessions as outlined by David Arnold, Mark Harrison and others. This new volume, edited by Sarah Hodges, goes a long way towards illuminating how an ‘endemic problem’ like reproduction shaped the medical agendas of non-state actors in south Asia in the century preceding independence in 1947. The book's strengths are many and not hard to find. Hodges frames the chapters very effectively by articulating three overlapping but roughly chronological issues in reproductive history: the problem of medicalisation, a social history of factional conflict and cooperation, and emergence of questions of ‘national efficiency’. Beginning with the editor's introduction, the chapters trace the shifting emphases and concerns within the ideologies and agendas of reproduction and childbirth in colonial India, disaggregating the problems of who should have children, how they should have them, how many they should produce, and what end it all served. David Arnold draws attention to a lack of consensus, especially in the colonial government in the crucially important interwar years, about the ‘population problem’, its possible solutions and the demographic effects of improvements in health care. In the area of promoting contraception in particular, there was only a muddled, discontinuous interaction between the state, its own bureaucracies and professional groups, and volunteer groups.

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