Abstract
Critical scholarship on the Kerala model of social development has largely focused on Kerala’s high female literacy rate, high sex ratio (more female than male), higher life expectancy, lower maternal mortality ratio, the successful family planning programme and so on. For instance, feminist scholars have noted that women in Kerala carried the entire burden of contraception without a say in the fertility decisions that contributed to the success of demographic transition. Kerala’s experience of lower female work participation and the ‘feminisation of ageing’ have also been critically analysed. However, several of these studies have not interrogated the complex social and historical conditions and the discursive orientations that contributed to the perpetuation of the Kerala model of development.
The book under review fills this void by critically analysing the socio-historical processes and the discourses of social development that contributed to the making of the ‘Kerala Model’. Through a detailed historical analysis of four decades of Kerala’s family planning programme, this study critically enquires into how and why the ideology and practice of birth control and later the family limitation became widely acceptable to several castes and classes in Kerala. Using mainly textual sources such as the newspaper reports, magazines, public speeches, political pamphlets, government reports and writings, the author of this eminently readable book constructs the historical context of the public discourse on population problem and family limitation in Kerala. In doing so, the study establishes a series of connections between the acceptance and promotion of birth control, the emergence of modern Malayali families, the construction of gendered subjectivities and the promotion of new ideals of citizenship and Malayali nationalism.
One of the main arguments of the book is that the family planning programme in Kerala became successful due to the specific ways in which people in this region were integrated into the programme. This, according to the study, was done in three different ways: the interpellation of people as gendered self-disciplined individuals, as responsible householders and as patriotic citizens. The title of the book aptly captures these three aspects of the popularisation of the family planning programme in Kerala. In this context, the book disputes the generally held view that the spread of hegemonic eugenic ideas or the recognition of a population problem per se led to the adoption of artificial contraception by the wider public in Kerala. The first chapter of the book discusses the complex historical processes of the early 20th century, especially the community reformism in Kerala aimed at restructuring marriage, family and conjugality. It argues that the changed conceptions of sexual desire and gender performances formed important contexts for both the opposition as well as the wider acceptance of artificial contraception as a method of birth control.
Further, the book argues that in the 1930s, the social reform movements in Kerala strongly resisted the adoption of artificial birth control since it was perceived to be a threat to the sexual self-control of the modern individual whose energies were to be spent on improving procreation and production of the modern household. Using extensively the writings and speeches of Malayali social reformers, the author illustrates how community reformists of all kinds expressed their anxieties and fears about artificial contraception as triggering sexual profligacy among women and among those that lacked knowledge on sexual self-control. If educated Catholics objected to artificial contraception as a threat to self-discipline, the eugenics feared the reduction of population with the use of contraception, while the feminists who supported birth control restricted their advocacy to self-control in order to reinforce reformist ideas of women’s sexual passivity within the modern conjugality (pp. 35, 39–40). The book brings out quite well the convergence of various groups in opposing artificial contraception on the ground of sexual self-discipline and also their collective concern for the issue of population control (p. 41). This chapter also highlights how the promotion of artificial contraception among modern Malayali families from the 1930s was aided by certain major changes in marriage practices and new familial arrangements. The promotion of conjugal marriage as opposed to matrilineal ties, modern gender values and regulation of sexuality towards procreation, privileging of mental communion over sexual intimacy and the idealisation of the role of the modern woman as provider of pleasure within monogamous conjugality were discussed as important social changes that led to the wider acceptance of artificial contraception.
Quite surprisingly, one does not find any substantial discussion in the book of the eugenic discourse on population control which was strongly tied to the project of modernity, sexual control and power. The influence of eugenic notions of marriage and family and the promotion of ‘scientific knowledge’ on sexual matters requires some engagement to understand their later resonance in the wider acceptance of family planning progammes. In this context, one wonders what might have been the influence of Malthus on Malayali reformers who advocated population control. One does not find any reference to Malthus or to the later neo-Malthusian league that functioned from the Madras Presidency.
The second chapter discusses how the small family norm became part and parcel of the ideals and practices of the modern family and how the new constructions of Malayalis as ‘responsible householders’ and as ‘home managers’ enabled both the Malayali populace to lend support for the programme and the state to make interventions in promoting the family planning programme. Elaborating on the process of domestication in the early 20th century, Devika argues that the modern constructions of responsible parenting, father as householder and mother as home manager benefited the state to override the intervening institutions such as the locality, the extended family or community. This enabled the state to make a direct appeal to individuals to adopt the state family planning programmes. The convergence of new ideals of modern family and the modern nation that rested on the construction of ideal male subjects as responsible householders, providers and protectors of their families, women as agents for modernising the family and children as wealth producing subjects, according to Devika, benefited the agenda of the state family planning programme (pp. 99–101). The author convincingly argues that the construction of responsible parenthood contributed to refashioning the responsibilities of men towards the upkeep of both the family and the nation, and women’s role as producers of ideal child subjects for the nation. This in turn legitimised the intervention of the state in domesticity, especially in the form of state programmes for the well-being of mothers, child care and family planning programmes (p. 101). Devika cites an instance of how community development programmes in the 1950s set up ‘women’s camps’ at the block level and promoted the idea that the family planning programme was the ideal way of serving the nation. Further, she shows how the state promotion of family planning got tied to ideals of individual honour, decency, happiness and with the ideals of responsible parenting which were also promoted by community movements, by the Malayali new elites and later by the communists. Discussing the reasons for the growing popularity of family planning programmes among the poor, the author explains how in the 1960s, the conditions of poverty, new consumption desires, ideals of modern family and the failures of land reforms became responsible for the wider acceptance of the family planning programme (p. 123).
How did the development politics of Kerala tie up fairly neatly with the family planning agenda of the state? The third chapter of the book deals with this aspect quite extensively. In the 1960s, the severe food crisis, articulation of sub-national identity around issues of unemployment, declining migration and the perceived neglect of Kerala in the national budgetary allocations and so on, as the author observes, led to collective support for the idea of population control as a cure for the developmental crisis in Kerala (p. 139). The book argues that by the 1960s, developmentalism in Kerala became synonymous with population control and therefore, the state family planning programme was vigorously promoted as a developmental measure to counter the economic crisis. The author further elaborates on how in the 1960s and 70s, the family planning programme formed part of civil society activism for development and concludes that the family planning campaigns became important events for the shaping of developmental politics and civil society mobilisations in Kerala.
The book offers a scholarly account of social, cultural and political processes that went into the popularisation of the family planning programme. Through an extensive use of Malayalam literary sources and government records, it explains how the Malayali public as individuals, social groups and as political activists negotiated the discourse of family planning. It offers an insight into the microcosm of civil and political society activism around the issues of family planning and development in Kerala, and reveals how the politics of birth control offered an opportunity for Malayalis to foreground a distinctive politics of governance and development. It also tells us how the politics of birth control became an important site for the articulation of a new Malayali subjectivity, identity and developmentalism. However, the excessive emphasis on the ‘indigenous’ roots of family planning in Kerala tends to ignore the discursive history of population control policy and strategies of campaigns for family planning in post-colonial India which shared the same anxieties of poverty and governmentality. What kind of national linkages were forged for the campaigns of birth control in Kerala would also tell us the story of the constitutive presence of the nation-state and its ideology of governing the population even within the indigenous articulations of family planning. These are only minor critical observations about the book which is otherwise a significant contribution to the growing literature on population history, public health and development studies.