Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies (review)

Although the topics of women and gender are recent entries in the historical scholarship on medicine in India, in a relatively short period of time they have become important foci and have raised several critical and fundamental questions. The primary concern in this regard has been to reinvestigate trajectories of the history of health and medicine in India with a gender-sensitive lens. The move has been not to understand and analyze the history of medicine in India simply as a history in which women are mute beneficiaries of medicine but rather to investigate women’s roles as active agents. Another important concern has been to examine how gender ideologies have been shaped by and have shaped the practice of medicine in India. Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, edited by Sarah Hodges, marks an important contribution to both of these debates. It is a collection of essays on the history of reproductive health in India, specifically during the late colonial period and the early post-independence years.

The articles in this book show how social reform, cultural nationalism, and changing gender relations brought about certain structural changes that in turn affected agendas on reproductive health in distinct ways. The importance of this book lies in excavating the dense social, cultural, and political histories that have surrounded commonly known reproductive health concepts and practices such as parturition or maternal welfare. As Sarah Hodges argues in the introduction, and as is further articulated by other authors, the “‘history of reproduction’ is a way of framing the history of the institutions, discourses, and practices by which women’s reproductive health came to hold meaning and play strategic roles” (p. 1). The main argument of the book is that spirit of reform, despite differences among actors and campaigns, motivated agendas around reproductive health. The authors identify three formative moments in the history of reproductive health in late colonial India that chronologically follow one another—“medicalisation of childbirth,” “social history of reproduction,” and “national efficiency.” The nine essays in the volume are organized into two sections: one dealing with “institutional histories of reproduction in India” and the other with the local and grounded “affective” histories of class, caste, and regional politics as they affected reproductive reform in different parts of India.

The essays in the first section focus on the contingencies that determined much of colonial reform in relation to the issue of reproduction in India. During its early phase, as these essays show, reproductive reform signified not so much a specific set of problems or solutions. Rather, reproduction became an important item within a broader debate around questions of modernity. David Arnold’s analysis of official colonial attitudes toward issues of reproduction and population within the Indian Civil Service, Indian Medical Service, and WMS; Barbara Ramusack’s study of diverse attitudes toward eugenics in India in the 1920s and 1930s; and Maneesha Lal’s analysis of how purdah became a sign of cultural backwardness and was argued as a cause behind specific diseases illustrate the above point through careful historical studies. Supriya Guha, Charu Gupta, and Anshu Malhotra, on the other hand, show how regional political histories of, for example, communalism or self-rule were concatenated with reproductive health reform, thereby highlighting the centrality of reproductive health in the framing of broader national politics. The crucial importance of the book lies in the fact that it not only analyzes ideas and practices around reproductive health within a particular historical context but also provides analytic tools for the understanding of similar issues in the present day.