ABSTRACT
Beginning in the early 1920s, mass produced forms of contraception became commercially available in the major towns and cities of Tamil-speaking south India. This book outlines the careers of contraception in south India, c.1920-1940. This region saw intense activity around contraception during this period. Madras was also home to multiple reform initiatives that engaged actively and creatively with the new set of emancipatory possibilities that contraception represented to a colonized population. In particular, this book examines the period during which Indians incorporated the arrival of modern, mass-produced and commercially available forms of contraception into on-going political and cultural debates and into emergent commercial cultures. Whether as members of south Indian associations like the Madras Neo-Malthusian League or the radical anti-caste, atheist Self Respect movement, as representatives in the late colonial Legislative Councils, or as erotic entrepreneurs who marketed mechanical contraceptive appliances alongside a host of sex books and potions to increase sexual appetite and pleasure, Indians incorporated contraception into an array of debates. Despite the diversity among Indians and their contraceptive agendas, one thing was constant. Contraception consistently figured in these conversations both as a way to ask as well as to answer a number of pressing questions specific to time and place. In particular, in their conversations about contraception, Indians in the Tamil-speaking south continually drew on and contributed to on-going debates about the nature of the relationship between health and governance-a relationship that was as much about asserting an engagement with a global scientific modernity as it was about contesting the social and political conditions produced by colonial rule.
