Breaking the Cycle: Part 1

In 1976, men across India were drastically changing their behavior. Some were abandoning the beds inside their homes to sleep in fields; others were skipping major festivals and public gatherings. Those who in the past had taken the train freely, without a ticket, were finding alternate routes. They were all trying to avoid government officials. On trains, inspectors were suddenly cracking down on ticketless passengers with heavy fines, but they would give fare dodgers a break on one condition: that they agreed to be sterilized.

Government workers, from train inspectors up to the top brass, were working to sterilize as many men as possible. Some even had monthly quotas for how many men they had to convince to get vasectomies. In turn, poor men in rural villages were doing everything they could to avoid government officials, because any such encounter might end with the villager on a dingy operating table where his genitals would be cut — whether or not he wanted the operation, whether or not he already had children.

Dr. Arvind Bhopalkar recalls losing count of the number of procedures he performed during this period. In 2015, the surgeon told the Indian Express, “We were told to do the operation on as many men as possible . . . a revenue department official, in his zeal for rounding up men, even brought a doctor’s father to us.” Bhopalkar would let unmarried men, and those who were married but childless, slip out without undergoing the procedure. “Doctors have hearts too,” he told the paper.

The mass sterilization drive of 1976 was one of the most infamous incidents of the 21-month period known as the “Emergency,” which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared the year prior, suspending the Indian constitution. Gandhi justified her decision to dissolve human rights protections by citing internal security disturbances and a need to uplift the underprivileged. She implemented welfare-style programs, gave land to those without property, and artificially lowered the price of some basic goods to make them more affordable. But these policies, ostensibly meant to help poor people, often included a coercive element. In some parts of the country, poor men and women were offered plots of land in exchange for getting sterilized, or for “motivating” others to do so.

In 1976 alone, the Indian government sterilized 6.2 million men. Permanent methods of birth control remain very popular in India, but today women bear almost the entire sterilization burden — 93% of it, according to the most recent government statistics. The Indian government has switched its gender focus, but many of the methods used in recent years to recruit women for tubal ligations were pioneered during these early male sterilization drives.

India’s sterilization campaigns for both men and women have been part of international campaign intended to control the nation’s population: long after Indian independence, these measures were — and continue to be — rooted in imperialist ideas, and in long-held Western attitudes about Indian manhood and womanhood. Nearly half a century after the aggressive campaigns of the 1970s, women are still dying in sterilization camps, undergoing procedures that they understand to be the only option, without fully knowing the risks or the alternatives.

Western conceptions of both Indian men and women were cemented during British colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indian men, Europeans said, were emasculated and weak, whereas women were the hapless victims of Indian society — yet also the symbol of its woes.

In the 20th century, American visitors furthered this rhetoric — and the writings of two very different American women typified Western attitudes toward Indian reproductive politics. The first was Katherine Mayo. When she traveled to India in 1925, she was already well-known for her polemic The Isles of Fear: The Truth About the Philippines, in which she argued that Filipinos owed the Spanish an enormous debt for introducing Christianity and “forms of European law” to the islands.

Mother India, the wildly popular treatise Mayo would write about her travels in the country, similarly argued that India’s only hope was in British colonizers and in Christian missionaries — but, as the title indicates, she made this argument through the figure of the mother. As Asha Nadkarni writes in Eugenic Feminism, the title invokes “the idealized figure of the nation celebrated by Indian nationalists, rewriting it as the pathologized reproductive figure of a diseased body politic.” Mayo painted Indian mothers as pathetically impoverished and diseased, unable to take care of their children, and depicted Indian sexuality as depraved.

A decade later, Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement, traveled to India with her own mission: promoting contraception. In essays and speeches, she was emphatic that birth control was something that Indian women actually wanted — badly. In a 1936 radio address, she said:

I turned to the social worker, “Ask this mother how many children she has,” and I pointed to a woman in a ragged sari squatting on the street and holding a baby in her arms.

“Six,” was the answer.

“And how many dead?” I asked.

“Five,” she answered.

“And how many more do you want,” I pursued.

She threw out her hands in a pathetic gesture. A look of fear came into her tired, lined face.

“Please God, no more!”

Sanger’s descriptions of Indian women were often clichéd — she described them as “tired” and “pathetic,” as well as gentle and childish. Though far less explicitly racist and contemptuous, this picture of India was not entirely different from Mayo’s. Both writers painted India as a place beset by an uncontrollable fertility that threatened disease, destruction, and war.