Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947 (review)

In Reproductive Restraints, Sanjam Ahluwalia tells how liberal Western birth-control advocates and the Western biomedical establishment sought to impose the Malthusian agenda on British India, and how Indian middle-class elite nationalists also adopted this agenda in order to push birth control on subaltern groups, including lower castes, Muslims, peasants, and disenfranchised women. Attributing India's poverty to the effects of overpopulation, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Edith How-Martyn, Mary O'Brien Beadon, and others tempered their feminism by "deploying racist, eugenicist, and class-specific logic in seeking to advance their program to determine and control fertility" (p. 57).While they condemned local indigenous medical practices as backward, barbaric, and superstitious, they never questioned the unequal distribution of wealth and power that British rule had imposed on India, nor did they question the ideology of racial discrimination that underlay their whole agenda of birth control.

Mohandas Gandhi, who regarded Western notions of birth control as an essential component of the British imperialist agenda, could see that population in itself was not a problem. The problem was imperialism: exploiting India's resources, oppressing its people, and keeping themin a state of perpetual poverty. According to Gandhi, the solution to India's backward state lay not in birth control but in a more equal distribution of resources and the end of British rule. The British Indian Medical Board claimed that recurring famines in India were the result of high birth rates. Gandhi countered that this was only a tactic for diverting attention from the real cause. A famine, Gandhi declared, was not a "calamity descended upon us from nature but is a calamity created by the [British] rulers" (p. 80).

Ahluwalia describes the ways in which the British sought to hegemonize the health care sector in colonial India by discrediting and displacing alternative systems of healing. Their greatest scorn was reserved for dais, or Indian midwives, who were condemned—even demonized—as superstitious and ignorant. Here, the author's move from the archives into the "field," to her interviews with the dais of Jaunpur village in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttaranchal, plays a crucial role as she develops hermain thesis. Contrary to the negative, exclusionary, and stereotypical colonialist, imperialist, feminist, and biomedical representations of dais, she found that Jaunpuri dais occupy a place of honor among villagers and are highly regarded for their skills and for their services provided to rural women during pregnancy and childbirth. Practices of midwifery handed down from generation to generation comprise a valuable tradition to this day because they are the least intrusive method of childbirth. A Jaunpuri dai by the name of Rukhma Devi from the Bhatoli village remarks that "we have no machines. . . .We people work with our hands" (p. 179). Indigenous dais are also knowledgeable about the medicinal properties of the local flora which they use in their practice. Ahluwalia writes that "Jaunpuri women embrace a more relational sense of self as opposed to modern autonomous individualism" (p. 181). Their worldview is in sharp contrast to the self-appointed, overbearing, and hegemonic worldview of those Western advocates of birth control who bestow uncritical confidence in the "technoscientific"management of reproduction.

While claiming to speak for "universal sisterhood,"Western liberal feminists even today seek to promote the same imperialist, colonialist, and racist agenda. Ahluwalia argues passionately for the need to "un-ghettoize" historiography, the grand hegemonic Western narrative of modernity. She writes of her hope that "what this work will allow us to do is to reevaluate the foundational assumption about birth control as necessarily empowering for all women across time and space" (p. 184). By effectively calling on the voices of the subaltern women of Jaunpur, Reproductive Restraints represents a major breakthrough not only in feminist studies but also in the studies of subaltern groups in general. It deserves serious recognition for presenting the voices from below, and for its scathing critique of the Western, imperialist, racist, elitist, feminist, liberal, nationalist, and subalternist...