The Practice of Femicide in Postcolonial India and the Discourse of Population Control within the Nation State

The selective killing of the female fetus in postcolonial India has received serious commitment from activists in the Indian women’s movement(s) but scant rhetorical and theoretical analysis. This omission in postcolonial feminist theory is curious given the fact that the Indian women’s movements were the first organized groups in the 1970s and 1980s to call attention to the use of new reproductive technologies for feticide and the selective breeding/nurturing of male fetuses in modern India. Our objective in this chapter is to attempt a rhetorical and discursive analysis of the violence visited on Indian women. Therefore, our discursive analysis begins by foregrounding the conjunctions between the discourses of femicide and the rhetoric of overpopulation, and examines the ways in which femicide is inscribed, rationalized, and co-opted into the rhetoric of population control in postcolonial India. We argue that the discourses of modernity, development, population control, and new reproductive technologies work together to claim the Indian woman’s body as object and to name femicide as informed choice and family planning. This women’s collective eschews the ahistorical, simplified, and colonialist explanations that trace present day femicide in an unmediated manner to nineteenth-century practices of female infanticide in colonial India. The telos of such explanations is a continuist history of femicide in terms of the anti-woman bias of Indian traditions. In refusing to see tradition as the overarching explanatory framework for female infanticide in the past and its resurgence as femicide in the present, we are in conversation with Lata Mani’s pioneering work on the practice of sati in colonial India. Lata Mani has