{"id":12448,"date":"2017-10-03T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T05:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=12448"},"modified":"2017-10-03T12:28:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-03T06:58:33","slug":"reproducing-caste-savarna-eugenics-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/reproducing-caste-savarna-eugenics-then-and-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Reproducing Caste: Savarna Eugenics, Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today Marie Stopes is better known for her eponymous clinics,<\/a> which provide contraception and safe abortion services in 37 countries around the world. In 20th<\/sup> century colonial India, however, she once thought it fit to promote contraception with a strong eugenic and neo-Malthusian slant. She was just one of many Western and Indian birth control advocates who maintained that overpopulation by excessive \u2018breeding\u2019 of the ignorant poor \u2013 not colonialism, capitalism, or systemic social discrimination \u2013 was the chief architect of generational poverty and other global ills.<\/p>\n

The solution? Reduce births from the \u2018unfit\u2019 and encourage them from the \u2018fit\u2019 in order to produce a bespoke, strong, and healthy nation-state. It is a sign of the times that Stopes\u2019 favourite contraceptive device that she actively marketed in India \u2013 a cervical cap by the moniker \u201cPro-Race\u201d \u2013 was met with a shrug, neither seen as offensive or too on-the-nose. Eugenics was more or less a mainstream idea among elites. This rhetoric is part of the reason why instead of the term contraception, \u201cbirth control,\u201d \u201cpopulation control,\u201d and the euphemistic \u201cfamily planning\u201d are common in discourse on preventing pregnancies. Modern contraceptive technologies emerged alongside the characterisation of people as populations to be governed and managed, some more than others.<\/p>\n

Spanning centuries and continents, the management of populations has nevertheless clung to a few common threads that show that while the term \u2018eugenics\u2019 was officially discredited, in practice the idea was not disbanded. Nationalism\u2019s overt narrative of unity is never far from tribalism and xenophobia. There is a judgment call being made, after all, as to who \u2018counts\u2019 as a member, and a palpable fear of small numbers: of becoming a minority. You know the rest of the story. The assumed beneficence of whiteness is set up as a foil to the darker, the stranger, the \u2018other.\u2019 Class crosscuts the caste and\/or race binary, as does religion. Important to the topic at hand, not only are caste, race, and religion entangled, but this relationship is also gendered. Powerful stakeholders regulate male and female populations differently in pursuit of a curated citizenry with particular numeric and genetic composition. As Mary John<\/a> puts it, the \u201cold problem\u201d of patriarchy interfering in women\u2019s relationship to their pregnancies has not changed \u2013 but, in the era of globalised capitalism, a host of new players and technologies is renegotiating this relationship in frightening ways, which raises the stakes for North-South feminist solidarity. While the primary focus in this essay is on caste, and savarna<\/em> eugenics in birth control discourse in India, I raise questions for feminists who are working on issues of stratified reproduction<\/a>[1]<\/u><\/u><\/a> in multiple locations. Even now, do we fully recognise the ways in which our work gives implicit assent to casteist and racist status quos?<\/p>\n

*********<\/p>\n

Population control retains outsize importance in India\u2019s health programme,[2]<\/a> and yet up until now the history of birth control movements in India has been under-researched. Feminist historians such as Sanjam Ahluwalia<\/a> and Asha Nadkarni<\/a> illustrate that the trajectory of contraception is \u201cmessy,\u201d full of internal fissures and contestations among activists, and a narrative not neatly contained within India. The transnational \u201csymbiosis\u201d among British, American, and Indian stakeholders on the issue of birth control provides a keen lens for understanding how many global power dynamics operate today. As Nadkarni and scholar Mrinalini Sinha<\/a> point out, public health policy \u2013 within which population control was paramount \u2013 formed the cornerstone of expansionist interests of early 20th<\/sup> century United States capitalism, eager to gain a foothold in flailing British colonial markets.<\/p>\n

The class-, race- and caste-based dynamics of early birth control advocacy set a troubling precedent that still haunts campaigns for safe and accessible contraception, abortion, and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). As with many issues, Indian nationalist leaders M.K. Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar harbored very different ideas about contraception. Ambedkar, a true intersectional feminist<\/a> before \u2018intersectionality\u2019 was even coined, was decidedly in favour. He framed his support of contraception not in Malthusian terms but as one key tool (not the single issue) in the holistic struggle for economic and social uplift of marginalised groups in India. He believed contraception access was central to women\u2019s autonomy and liberation from the intersecting oppressions of caste, patriarchy, and conventional family arrangements.<\/p>\n

Yet it was Gandhi\u2019s approval that both foreign and Indian feminist activists sought, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Rebuffed in their home countries, both Margaret Sanger (future co-founder of IPPF<\/a> and Planned Parenthood<\/a>) and Stopes were eager to prove the relevance and efficacy of contraceptive technologies, and zeroed in on India as ideal laboratory. It was politically strategic for them to recruit Gandhi to their mission, though they were completely unsuccessful. Gandhi opposed birth control as an extension of his belief that any sex outside of procreation was a sinful, animal indulgence. Ahluwalia observes that Gandhi \u201cstripped women of sexual desires and reaffirmed motherhood as the natural vocation for women.\u201d[3]<\/a> Ambedkar\u2019s programme was altogether too radical for the Westerners, especially his concern with uplifting Dalits which went against eugenicists\u2019 mandate to scientifically (re)produce their ideas of racial superiority.<\/p>\n

Indian feminists also had reason to be politically strategic. As women in an emerging nationalism movement, they were under tremendous pressure to embody both \u2018home\u2019 and the \u2018world,\u2019 navigating various requirements for ideal femininity. Advocates such as Lady Rama Rao, Rani Laxmibai Rajwade, Lakshmi Menon, Begum Hamid Ali, and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyaya cared deeply about India\u2019s independence but also felt strongly about birth control. They rejected an intersectional, anti-caste perspective to align with Gandhian nationalists, but due to Gandhi\u2019s apprehensions about sexuality the most outspoken proponents of contraception, such as Chattopadhyaya, suffered ostracism.<\/p>\n

These largely middle-class, upper-caste women activists were exceedingly cautious about challenging the institution of the family and reified the ‘sacred’ duties of motherhood even as they defended the need to space and limit pregnancies. In language that will sound familiar to contemporary SRHR advocates, after certifying their support for women\u2019s fundamental roles as mothers, they relied on a paternalistic script about concern for women\u2019s health that distrusted poor people to make rational decisions. Activists such as physician Muthulakshmi Reddi maintained knowledge of and access to contraceptive technologies should be kept out of the hands of the \u201cignorant lay public,\u201d strictly regulated by the medical establishment, and only granted to certain \u201cmothers and fathers\u201d who \u201cdeserve\u201d it.[4]<\/a> Ambedkar, in contrast, firmly believed that Indians of all backgrounds were capable of making informed, intelligent choices for themselves about contraception. In 2017, this is still a radical stance, as we struggle to wrest the right to be trusted with our own bodies from politicians who capitalise on regulating them.<\/p>\n

Their insistence that they did not intend contraceptives to \u201crock the familial boat\u201d[5]<\/a> was not merely a matter of political expediency. Historians remark that far from being victims, these women espoused an exclusive agenda that \u201cfailed to take into account the wide spectrum of reproductive experiences and needs of people, on whose behalf they claimed to be speaking.\u201d They evoked women as a homogeneous totality in order to further their own elitist hegemonic agenda, ignoring the liberating potential of contraceptives to instead propel the argument for birth control on grounds that these technologies provided \u201can additional modality of sexual-social control over people, particularly over the lower classes.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is difficult to say to what degree the upper-caste Hindu and ashraf<\/em> (\u2018high born\u2019) Muslim status of early Indian feminists impacted their approach to contraception relative to their elite class privilege. In spite of the fact that Hindutva emerged in the same historical moment, and likewise endorsed eugenic ideology and stoked Malthusian fears claiming Hindus were a \u201cdying race\u201d<\/a> due to overbreeding Muslims, Mohan Rao maintains that the feminist movement was \u201cutterly untouched by communal concerns\u201d even as they were \u201cunited by dysgenic fears that the poor were breeding more than the middle classes.\u201d[7]<\/a> Though Hindutva had not yet concretised into the political force it is today, much of mainstream Indian nationalism rallied around the idea of \u2018Hindu India\u2019 with a martial, Aryan past as a means of cohering a diverse group of peoples. Implicit in this trope was Brahmanism\u2019s discourse of \u2018purity\u2019 and \u2018pollution\u2019 that emphasises the need for upper-caste \u2018honour\u2019 and \u2018virtue.\u2019 Since \u201cwomen\u2019s reproductive capabilities are necessary for the reproduction of caste-lines<\/a>, Brahminism has severe implications on the sorts of decisions that women are allowed to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the extent to which these women activists participated, or longed to participate, in the cause for independence and nation-building, I find it doubtful that caste and religious considerations were totally absent from their vision of just who constituted the \u2018ignorant poor\u2019 whose births should be reduced. And as Ambedkar knew, caste, patriarchy, and capitalism are intersecting forces with porous borders. They bleed into one another and cannot be dealt with in silos.<\/p>\n

The uncomfortable bit about feminist historiography is that while in the process of punching down patriarchy\u2019s bogeymen, we sometimes uncover unsavory things about our own activist heroes. On the topic of Sanger\u2019s eugenic past, Gloria Steinem writes<\/a> that while we should judge early feminists according to their particular political and discursive context and not according to contemporary standards, neither do we need to condone racist and classist actions. She urges today\u2019s activists to mine these histories to detect what parallel errors we might (still) be making in our own work, and use this knowledge to swiftly redirect.<\/p>\n

We can thus understand, though not condone, why Western and Indian feminists alike rejected Ambedkarite intersectionality at the time. But acknowledging this complicated history does not explain why more than 70 years later population control, and not women\u2019s autonomous control of their bodies and fertility which may include contraceptive use of their choice, remains at top of mind for many nations and international development entities. Much like colonial India, today authorities often attempt to address \u2018unmet need\u2019 for contraception by any means necessary. Safety<\/a>, informed consent, and offering a wide range of appropriate methods are less of a priority compared with reducing numbers. Trusting \u2018Other\u2019 women with their own bodies is still not the norm, whether the issue is contraception, medical abortion pills, or other concerns. Indian women still bear the burden for contraception, 75% of which occurs via sterilisation. Mass sterilisation campaigns tend to target Dalit\/OBC\/SC, adivasi, and Muslim women, and mortality and morbidity at these camps<\/a> disproportionately affects women from these groups. Some suggest that targeting adivasi women in particular goes beyond reducing their fertility, but is part of a strategy to seize<\/a> indigenous lands for development. Along these lines, Nadkarni argues how the surrogacy industry has carried casteist eugenics forward and given them new life in relationship with neo-liberal global capitalism. This industry recruits women from marginalised caste backgrounds for their wombs, but only in service of reproducing babies for whiter and wealthier others. The state pointedly does not want these women\u2019s own genetic material passed on, and calls them to support a market that contributes to exacerbated inequality.<\/p>\n

The proposed Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 ostensibly aims to curb lax laws<\/a> and exploitation in India\u2019s commercial surrogacy industry. But among a host of other ethical problems<\/a> with the bill, in the emphasis on altruistic surrogacy by close relative<\/em> only<\/em>, caste and class again sully the issue \u2013 who is going to be able to afford the medical intervention for conception, the (legally required) insurance, the hospital birth? Those who are already privileged, and for whom social markers create no barrier<\/a> to health care.<\/p>\n

I could go on. There is no shortage of examples to choose from if the point is just to prove that neither caste nor race, and the eugenic anxiety that cuts through both, are dead.<\/a><\/p>\n

In line with Steinem, I\u2019d like to suggest the messy history of birth control as a launching point for raising uncomfortable questions about how we feminists might be inadvertently nurturing casteism and racism. The \u201cwe\u201d here is both open-ended and rather specific. Feminist movements in general benefit from knowing their genealogies \u2013 good, bad, and ugly \u2013 to inform strategising, especially as our opponents get wise and use our own techniques against us<\/a>. But I want to speak directly to white feminists in the U.S., and upper-caste feminists in India \u2013 not just because of the profound relationship of our countries when it comes to population control policy, and parallel coercion in the reproductive lives of people the state deems less desirable<\/a>. We are the ones who have the luxury of forgetting how present caste and race really are.<\/p>\n

Contemporary casteism and racism are not identical, and their specific histories should not be overlooked. Yet they come from related dynamics of white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy, to paraphrase bell hooks. If anything, recent developments in U.S.-Indian relations have revitalised<\/a> Indians\u2019 claims to whiteness mediated through elite Brahmanic Aryan-ness and anti-Muslim ethos, making our mutual address of these questions all the more urgent:<\/p>\n