Women’s family planning expertise and decolonisation in and from South Asia, 1950s to 1960s

Abstract

In the decades after Independence, family planning became an integral strand of postcolonial nation-building and international development in South Asia.  Women activists, usually with links to colonial-era social reform organisations, spearheaded national family planning initiatives and placed South Asia at the forefront of international birth control networks. These assertions of expertise were part of a broader process by which elite women carved out (an often maternalist) role in national public spheres as experts in the areas of social reform and state welfare. At the same time, in an international context, the claims of South Asian women and their organisations reflected a nationalist culture of resistance to Western campaigners who sought to speak on behalf of their non-Western ‘sisters’.  Using the records of women’s organisations and family planning associations in India, Pakistan and Ceylon, this paper will consider the ways the gender of family planning expertise was imagined, negotiated and asserted by South Asian women in the evolving national and international contexts of the 1950s and 1960s.