"Lady Doctors" and Family Planning in Late Colonial India

India is well known for having the first and most ambitious state-led family planning program in a democratic nation-state, beginning in 1951. In popular media and historiography, the focus has been on the role of elite male planners, doctors, and policymakers in the creation and dissemination of this program. My presentation looks at the precursors to this program in the 1930s and 1940s through the lens of Indian women doctors to argue that this group of women (considered elite because of their class and education) were crucial in the creation of India’s discourse around overpopulation as the main factor preventing national and social progress. By virtue of their gender and medical education, women doctors saw themselves as the only possible conduit to educate Indian women about family planning. In this way, they framed themselves as crucial to India’s development to modernity. In this, they were bolstered by state rhetoric: as improving the health and quality of life of a massive population became inextricably linked with reducing the vast numbers of people, women doctors were tasked with disseminating information about birth control to women and encouraging them to use contraception. Women doctors thus became crucial to debates around development, progress, and modernity in twentieth century India. By examining their work in clinics and hospitals, as well as their professional and personal conversations with one another in journals and memoirs, I argue that women doctors used these early conversations about overpopulation to situate themselves as the arbiters of Indian policymaking for women’s health in late colonial India – a role that they continued to occupy through the 20^th and 21^st century.