ABSTRACT
In late colonial Madras, the main way that people got hold of contraceptive products and information was not through government clinics or from private doctors, but rather from chemists’ shops or ordered through the mail. Beginning in the early 1920s, from one week to the next in Madras’s popular Tamil and English press, it was difficult to avoid advertisements for contraceptive products or advertisements for books about birth control. This “contraceptive boom” in late colonial Madras was not confined to contraceptive measures and published information, but, as the tale below suggests, also included a burgeoning field of advertisements for these products. As a part of this flourishing environment of contraceptive information and products, many Indians wrote to British birth controller and Married Love (1918) author Marie Stopes in the 1920s and 1930s.The following is a fragment of a 1922 letter, selected from this copious correspondence:
As this correspondent bears witness, birth control was regularly embedded even in India’s quotidian commerce of the age.
