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."—New Books Network

"[T]his book is of vital importance to scholars of postcolonial states, modernisation, and population control."—Economic and Political Weekly

"[O]ffers a compelling view of colonial and postcolonial India, seen through the lens of the politics of reproduction."—Population and Development Review

"The thorough examination of a broad range of archival records backed by extensive engagement with critical theoretical frameworks makes the book a significant contribution to the scholarship on modern South Asia."—Asian Affairs

"The connections that this book makes are impressive, as is its ability to engage with a scholarship on reproduction and population not only from India, but most broadly, with global histories and historiographies."—Sanjam Ahluwalia, author of Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947

"An enormously thorough, compelling, and sobering account of how feminist impulses came to be intertwined with state-led economistic thinking and coercive eugenic measures."—Ashwini Tambe, author of Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws