Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India
Asha Nadkarni
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0816689938
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism.
Nadkarni reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s 1927 Mother India warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, Nadkarni traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977.
By uncovering an understudied history of feminist interactivity between the United States and India, Eugenic Feminism brings new depth both to our understanding of the complicated relationship between the two nations and to contemporary feminism.
development projects but also signifying that perhaps the project of development is already rotten. Instead of calling the project of national development into question, however, the children themselves become the hitch in national progress. Such a reconfiguration allows Rama Rau, while describing the experience of concurrently planning a conference on family planning and a conference on child welfare, to write with no sense of irony: “It was important that the subject of family planning 4 i n
women are not just responsible for their own wellbeing, but for men’s and by extension society’s at large. This grave responsibility is more important than any individual woman’s wants and desires. As Mayo warns U.S. women, “When you feel the phrase ‘self-expression’ forming in your minds, take warning as you would of the flagman’s signal at a level crossing. For a death dealer is headed down your track.”56 Mayo’s “message to girls” is for them to sublimate their needs in order to remain true to
throughout her time in the United States. In a November 1928 New York speech titled “Better Understanding between India of the Old World and America of the New,” for example, Naidu announced, “‘Like the founders of your Republic . . . the Young India of today has proclaimed to the world a Declaration of Independence.” 85 Aligning the United States and India through their struggles against foreign rule, she attempts to disrupt Mayo’s appeal to an Anglo-American racial solidarity that would make
prevail in the postcolonial world. Both in terms of methodology and ideology, postcolonial nations wanted to chart their own paths. Nonaligned leaders skipped stages on the road to modernization, and (more troubling from the U.S. perspective) turned to the Soviet Union for development aid and as a model for accelerating modernization. Because of India’s continued commitment to nonalignment, the United States used development aid to India as one arm of a two-part strategy in South Asia, with
charting a new context for the relationship between the United States and India. Despite the thirty years that had elapsed since the publication of Mayo’s text, its sensational account of India still held sway in the United States, as Harold Isaacs reports in his 1958 study of U.S. opinions on India and China, Scratches on the Mind. In contrast to Mayo’s portrayal of India as the abject and threatening other, Markandaya and Mehboob Khan helped to humanize Indian strife through their sympathetic