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ID: 152351

My wife had to get sterilised: exploring women’s experiences of sterilisation under the emergency in India, 1975–1977 / Scott, Gemma

Scott, Gemma	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Existing scholarship on the Emergency’s sterilisation programme largely excludes women’s experiences, echoing the Shah Commission of Inquiry’s focus on men’s complaints against the government in its published reports. This paper re-orients historical understandings of this programme to account for female sterilisation during 1975–1977. By reading the Commission’s extensive collection of archived files against the grain, I use the male-dominated archive to illuminate the gendered nature of this policy and its effects on India’s women. Against dominant perceptions that the Emergency’s sterilisation programme focused entirely on vasectomy, this paper discusses instances where women were critical in families’ attempts to negotiate the regime’s coercive measures. It also analyses the negative impacts of coercion on the ‘girl child’ and the consequences of the Emergency’s single minded focus on sterilisation for the Mother and Child Health programme. Through these discussions I argue that such measures exacerbated existing gendered biases. In doing so, this paper challenges dominant understandings of the Emergency’s sterilisation programme and explores women’s experiences.

Key Words

Women ; Family Planning ; Maternal Health ; Sterilisation ; Indian Emergenc

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ID: 161151

Women will have to fight this battle’: political prisoners under India’s Emergency, 1975–1977 / Scott, Gemma

Scott, Gemma	Journal Article
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During India’s infamous period of Emergency (1975–1977), Indira Gandhi’s government criminalised opposition and used preventive detention legislation extensively to repress dissent. Existing scholarship on this policy and on the Emergency more broadly pays little attention to women’s experiences. This paper draws on a unique collection of letters sent to and from female political prisoners in Maharashtra, exploring their experiences of incarceration under this regime. It offers new insights into the scale on which authorities detained women in this state and highlights ways that these political prisoners actively resisted Emergency rule. The paper also challenges the idea that the prison was an entirely repressive space for the Emergency’s detenues. These letters document attempts to exert agency over constructions of the prison space, highlight its permeable boundaries and reveal lively communities and cultures of resistance.

Key Words

Women ; Political prisoner ; Resistance ; Maharashtra ; Indian Emergency

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