2025 Theses Doctoral

Intimate Contracts: Genre and Family Planning in Postcolonial India

Harekal, Kaagni

“Intimate Contracts: Genre and Family Planning in Postcolonial India” is a literary and cultural study of family planning in India. As the first of the newly independent former colonies to launch a state-sponsored family planning program, India’s attempt to address “the population explosion” culminated in the forced sterilization of over 8 million, mostly poor, lower-caste, and Muslim people under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975-1977).

In my dissertation, I see this family planning program as a negotiation between the state and capital to take control of the family as a unit of the social reproduction of the nation, which emerges in the context of development discourse, concerns about “the population explosion,” and Cold War politics. Using the Emergency as its animating center, my project examines Anglophone novels (Midnight’s Children [1981], A Suitable Boy [1993], A Fine Balance [1995]), popular Hindi films (the horror films of the Ramsay brothers [1973-1999], Hum Saath-Saath Hain [1999]), and government documentaries from India alongside government reports to argue that cultural production from the period and after deploys genre—understood as an aesthetic contract between a cultural text and its specific audience—to mediate the logics of family planning.

My dissertation examines family planning as both a system of medicalized interventions as well as a metaphorical, future-oriented apparatus of ‘planning’ to highlight how these ‘intimate contracts’ of genre reveal the ways in which family planning projects continue to live on in India, shaping the new Indian family, long after the Emergency. As I show, the medical and biological dimensions of reproduction are inextricable from their social and discursive dimensions. My dissertation posits that an understanding of family planning is essential to understand the formation of the new postcolonial Indian family at the turn of the millennium.