Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (review)

This book in The History of Medicine in Context series concentrates on the colonial context of contraception in the Tamil-speaking part of Madras Presidency in British India. Viewing contraception through the Foucauldian lens of "biopolitics," Sarah Hodges argues that in colonial South India, the state apparatus was more detached than it was in much of the colonial world from activities designed to improve the personal health of the population, leaving the advocacy of and debates over contraception mostly in the hands of private citizens. In the interwar period, in British India, this detachment relegated contraception to appropriation by social activism, attached variously to nationalism.

All over India, it was the literate classes that were most engaged with birth control, so documentary evidence is ample and revealing, expressing educated urban middle-class desires for scientific modernity, international respectability, progress, and social improvement. But despite common themes, engagements with contraception varied significantly.

The biopolitics of contraception moved in various directions. Gandhi argued against contraception, and many nationalists rejected "alien" modern technology as they promoted public health, which they all agreed the colonial state had neglected. Meanwhile, most ordinary people had little exposure to new health techniques of any sort—and many continue that tradition today, as Hodges demonstrates in her epilogue.

Recent studies have also begun to reveal regional diversity. Urban high-caste reformers in North India sought to improve public health by reducing the population of poor low-caste people. In Bombay, private interests and public advocates endeavored to regulate the size of slum-dwelling households. Hodges finds that in South India, by contrast, the colonial context fostered a social activist pursuit of individual health and identity through modern technologies that were flowing through international markets. For its most vocal high-caste urban elite advocates, contraception served as a sign and a technology of control over conditions of individual self-fulfillment and advancement. In this light, contraception emerges as one element of South India's decidedly bourgeois social commercialization, and Hodges suitably devotes a chapter to techniques of marketing, sales, distribution, and evaluation.

By separating for this study historical conditions in one region during the interwar period, Hodges separates her subject from postindependence India and particularly from India's national preoccupation with population control. In doing so, she makes space for the specificity of a late colonial context and thus prevents her historical time and place from being buried in teleologies of demographic developmentalism. She also sets her approach apart from later feminist projects of female empowerment. Her project is not to read current contraception issues back into the past but, rather, to explore contraception as a feature of the late colonial context in South India. In that project, she succeeds admirably.

But in doing so, she makes "the colonial context" her subject as much as contraception; perhaps more so, in fact, because contraception acquires a history here only in a South India defined by colonialism. The relative weakness of the state's role in her story, and the prominence of international networks of marketing, science, medicine, and advocacy, suggest alternative ways to frame South India. The single context that she calls "colonial" might be disaggregate beyond a division among European powers. It seems truer every day now that South Asian regions have distinctive histories. They experienced the political and economic world environment before 1947 quite differently. British India might be usefully thought of not as one single colonial context but, rather, as many.

The distinctiveness of the biopolitics of South India before 1947 might emerge more clearly if trends before and after 1947 were connected. In her successful effort to avoid submerging her subject in Indian history after 1947, Hodges has also truncated South India's regional history. Soon after 1947, South India's political and economic trajectories began to express the bourgeois culture of self-improvement and commercialism that Hodges describes in the...