ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the career of contraceptive advocacy within the Self Respect movement-cuyamariyatai iyakkam-a movement of social uplift particular to the Tamil south that spanned the years 1926-1944. In looking at the career of contraception within the Self Respect movement, contraception travels to substantially new discursive territory in comparison to Chapters One and Two. In the preceding chapters, whether from the chambers of the Madras Legislative Council or the public meeting halls of the Madras Neo-Malthusian League, Indian birth control advocates operated within a unified discursive frame of maternalism that informed the wider context of south Indian social reform associationalism and formal political life of the 1920s and 1930s. Although they advocated birth control from different platforms, these birth control advocates shared a broad set of assumptions about the role that birth control should play in fashioning a modern India. Theirs was a maternalist biopolitics shared by educated elites across the globe that located contraception within a larger conversation that linked healthy motherhood to a healthy India. Above all, maternalism not only informed their contraceptive advocacy, it underwrote it. By suturing contraception to the project of nation-building in its broadest sense-not as part of an anti-colonial struggle, but as an articulation of national identity and pride-these maternalist contraceptive advocates claimed a new legitimacy for their invocations of sexual matters. Their contraceptive advocacy situated contraception as part of a new age of scientific innovations and progress. Practicing contraception, they insisted, would not unleash an epidemic of sexual promiscuity. Rather, the use of contraception would usher in a new, respectable age of sexual modernity that did not threaten Indian culture, but rather was particularly suited to Indian conditions. This maternalist mode of contraceptive advocacy was thus forged through the deployment of a modern, scientized and sanitized politics of respectability.
