ABSTRACT
It is surely not accidental that when Indian fi lm actor Aamir Khan launched his prime-time television Sunday morning show Satyamev Jayate on 13 May 2012 to sensitize the public on social issues, the opening episode was on female foeticide and ‘missing girls’. This tells us something about how gender fi gures in the popular imagination as a social problem (compared to, say, poverty or untouchability). Second – and more germane to the specifi c focus of this volume – in contrast to the marginal location of female infanticide in the heated debates over the ‘women’s question’ during colonialism and social reform, or even the discovery of a declining sex ratio following Indian independence, adverse child sex ratios today have become practically synonymous with gender discrimination as such. There appears to be no more poignant image of what is wrong with Indian society than the millions of little girls that are not being allowed to be born. And yet, as we shall come to see, this by no means implies a commitment to a gender-just order. More to the point, it is conundrums and impasses, rather than breakthroughs and advances, that have been encountered repeatedly since skewed sex ratios came to light.
