TheDaak review

By Oishi Gooptu

This paper explores how reproductive functions or the choice of giving birth, which is generally perceived as a private or apolitical choice, is, in reality, deeply controlled by state structures of discipline and governance. Drawing primarily on understanding of Foucauldian frameworks of discipline, biopolitics and governmentality, this argument posits that modern states do not directly encourage or restrict reproduction; rather, they actively govern the conditions and situations of childbirth, and align them with national needs. Building on this argument, this paper looks at Emma Tarlo’s Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (1975-77) to show how during the Emergency, forced sterilisations were presented as acts of civic responsibility and progress. The conclusion highlights how personal reproductive decisions often lack the recognition afforded to state-driven reproductive agendas for population control, which are framed as hallmarks of responsible, modern citizenship. Thus, ultimately, the paper raises a critical question: how truly autonomous are our decisions to give birth? 

INTRODUCTION 

Marx’s critique of political economy, as recovered by Burkett and Foster (2006), shows that capitalism operates as a historically specific organisation of social metabolism, not a neutral system of exchange. The usage of the term ‘metabolism’ here foregrounds production as a living, material process of intake, transformation, and waste, binding human labour and nature into a continuous but unstable interchange, rather than a closed economic circuit. Capitalist production reorganises the material interchange between humans and nature in a way that demands constant expansion of energy use, labour input, and material throughput (Burkett & Foster 2006, p. 118-119). Once accumulation is detached from renewable limits and anchored in fossil energy, the economy must grow or unravel (Burkett and Foster 2006). Political economy conceals this necessity by presenting growth as progress rather than compulsion.

Thus, the modern state economy and its industries are a metabolic system that thrives on perpetual growth. It feeds on life, demanding more workers, more consumers, more soldiers to sustain the conveyor belt of surplus labour and keep its institutions functioning towards ever-expanding goals. In this process, reproductive choices cease to be private or apolitical. They are reorganised as a systemic necessity, tied to the reproduction of labour power and population reserves required for accumulation, a concern already articulated by Engels and Marx in their analysis of labour, family, and social reproduction (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 274-275; Burkett & Foster 2006, p. 120-121). Although we live in an era that glorifies autonomy and individual choice, this freedom is merely an illusionary façade of this compulsion. What appears as a private choice is actually what Michel Foucault calls ‘governmentality’: a form of power that produces self-regulating subjects who internalise norms under the guise of liberty — much like Weber’s conception of legal-rational authority, where people obey not because they are intimidated or coerced, but because they understand the rule as being legitimate, beneficial, and a means to contribute to nation-building (Foucault 1991; Weber 1978, p. 215-216). Similarly, the rational management and optimisation of life and the human body through scientific and regulatory mechanisms is accepted and excused by individuals themselves, rather than imposed through overt coercion. This becomes vivid when examining reproductive functions, which have historically been a critical site of biopolitical management, where birth, fertility, and parenting are aligned with the needs of the state, whether for economic growth, demographic control, or national security. The case of India’s Emergency (1975-77), as documented by Emma Tarlo in Unsettling Memories, makes this biopolitical project strikingly visible. During this period, coercive sterilisations were justified through narratives of modernisation and national interest, with bureaucratic records and incentives turning reproductive control into an everyday administrative affair (Tarlo 2003). 

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 

Understanding ‘Discipline’

Discipline, in its most basic sense, refers to the routineised obligation to comply with authority in ways that sustain an existing order. This compliance may arise from direct command or secured through incentives and sanctions that render obedience sensible, necessary, and even desirable, thereby stabilising social arrangements without constant coercion. Discipline operates as a governing framework, but Foucault goes further by conceptualising it as a technology of power (Foucault 1995). It is a specific modality through which power is exercised on bodies, movements, and conduct. 

However, the central features to this conceptualisation according to Foucault (1995) are: first, discipline is productive rather than merely repressive. It produces docile yet useful bodies by increasing efficiency, coordination, skill, and obedience. Foucault explicitly links disciplinary power to the simultaneous maximisation of utility and docility, achieved at the lowest possible political and economic cost. Second, discipline emerges in response to the limits of sovereign power. The monarchical model relied on visibility, punishment, and ritualised obedience. This model became increasingly ineffective in the eighteenth century as populations expanded, migrated, and circulated across territorial and institutional boundaries. Discipline offered a solution by enabling power to manage multiplicity without relying on constant coercion or its spectacle. Third, discipline works through internalisation. The panoptic principle ensures that individuals regulate themselves because surveillance is permanent in possibility even when it is not visibly exercised. Power becomes effective precisely because it is discreet, continuous, and intelligible to those subjected to it .

This is the sense in which discipline acquires its ‘positive’ character. It promises order, productivity, improvement, and security rather than blatant domination. Historically, the most potent target of such methods are communities or individuals that are perceived as mobile, excessive, or disorderly; these include migrants, the urban poor, slum dwellers, and other surplus populations. 

Discipline functions as an ‘anti-nomadic technology’ (Foucault 1995). It fixes bodies in space, regulates movement, and renders populations legible and governable. Those who fall outside stable institutional frameworks become the primary objects of disciplinary intervention. This theoretical insight provides the bridge to Tarlo’s account of the Emergency and how it affected the people.

Governmentality and Biopolitics 

Foucault, in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics (1978 & 1979), states that historically, the government has always stood for a wide range of practices, from religious guidance of the soul to ruling over a territory and its inhabitants. But  18th century Europe saw a sudden surge in demographic growth and a constant shift of  population across geographic and institutional borders, posing a major challenge to traditional governance. The order of respecting the chain of hierarchy, which maintained the stability of a ‘disciplined society’, was thus shaken. The sovereign power of the monarchy, being broad, blunt, and with limited reach into the lives of individuals, made this model obsolete. So, there was a requirement to devise a form of power that would allow a few to govern many — to extract discipline from the public without coercion but through alignment. This change in the model shifted attention towards population management, which became a central concern for governance. This shift required the development of specific forms of knowledge, such as statistical analysis, as well as macroeconomic and bioscientific knowledge, to take care of the life and the well-being of its population. Welfare was carried out through systems that regulate health, reproduction, behaviour, insurance, medical care, and even urban planning, shaping how entire populations live and function. So, this form of power became a matter of ‘knowing’ the population in order to govern and discipline them. Foucault, therefore, calls this the modern state’s ‘biopolitics’. 

His original formulation of the term governmentality referred to these specific historical developments of the complex ways in which modern states exercise control over populations, not through laws or violence but by shaping how individuals govern themselves. He describes this mode of power as influencing the conduct of individuals and guiding their behavior from within, allowing power to operate through norms, institutions, and rationalities that define what is considered proper or desirable. In his conversation with Michelle Perrot, Foucault explains how the design of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon creates this condition (Foucault 1980,p. 154-155): 

In contrast to that you have the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.

He uses the example of the Panopticon surveillance, where individuals internalise the feeling of being watched and self-regulate themselves accordingly, even in the absence of direct supervision. Through such monitoring, bodies become passive, i.e., efficient, manageable, productive, and serving the interests of institutional power without explicit force. Thus, governmentality blends knowledge, rational techniques, and self discipline to ensure social order and control (Gutting et al. 2022). 

Within this framework, Foucault further argues that modern control of the body and its sexuality parallel the control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an object of scientific inquiry, where disciplines such as medicine, psychology, and psychiatry claim both knowledge and authority over it. For instance, doctors, psychologists, and therapists set standards for what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ sexual behaviour, and people, in turn, begin to judge themselves based on these standards. They monitor their thoughts, desires, and actions to see if they ‘fit’ the accepted norms, which acts as an incentive if they do. This produces not just an external control exercised by experts like doctors or therapists, but also an internal control, as individuals absorb these norms to conform. Thus, sexuality becomes a central factor of identity, health, and moral worth. A self-monitoring dynamic that mimics the logic of the Panopticon, providing the illusion that people can govern their own bodies and choices, especially in matters like fertility, health, and productivity, by making these concerns part of what it means to be a responsible and good citizen (Gutting et al. 2022). This phenomenon is deeply enmeshed with governmentality, as it promotes self-regulation aligned with the goals of the state and market, inscribing control into everyday life under the appearance of care, progress, and personal freedom. 

EXPLORING TARLO’S WORK WITHIN FOUCAULDIAN FRAMEWORKS 

Building on the above theoretical frameworks, this paper reads Emma Tarlo’s ethnographic account of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency which is of particular relevance here. The Emergency, declared by Gandhi’s government on June 25th, 1975 and lasting until March 21st, 1977, granted the state extraordinary powers to restore discipline, law and order, and boost economic progress. During that period, the government suspended civil liberties, curbed freedom of the press and public assembly, imprisoned opposition leaders, and demolished slums, which closely resembled authoritarian control. 

Tarlo’s work, however, centres on the memories and lived experiences of this period, especially focusing on certain events. By critically examining both popular and official narratives, she uncovers the  relationship between citizen, state, and market in India at that particular historical juncture. Her study particularly reveals how state violence was rationalised and normalised through the rhetoric of development, progress, and public welfare. She asks: Is this how the alleged victims of the Emergency remember it? What did they actually do when the Emergency regime launched these programs? She answers the questions by looking into the official files of the local administration in Delhi and stoking the memories of those who were forcibly moved from the inner city to the resettlement colonies (Chatterjee 2005). 

In her account, Tarlo focuses on two significant events: the sterilisation drive and slum clearance operations, which were launched during the Indian Emergency and became pivotal. She states how the government’s 20-point economic programme (1976) was bolstered by an equally ambitious Five-Point Programme led by the Youth Congress under the dynamic leadership of Sanjay Gandhi, the Prime Minister’s youngest son. Despite holding no official position, Sanjay emerged as a central force in shaping this agenda — advocating literacy (Each One Teach One), family planning for a secure future, ecological conservation through tree planting, dowry abolition, and caste eradication — each presented as markers of progressive, youthful energy under the Emergency regime (Tarlo 2003, p. 27-28). However, Sanjay drew particular acclaim for two reasons: his involvement with the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and his mission to ‘beautify’ the capital. This translated into mass tree plantation drives and the forcible clearance and resettlement of thousands from slums, which was justified as necessary for building a modern capital city. Above all, he was celebrated for pushing family planning, especially through the slogan ‘Hum Do, Hamare Do’ (We are two, let’s have two), framing population control as an essential economic imperative under his vision (Tarlo 2003, 28). 

The above situation, from a Foucauldian perspective, illustrates how the state’s agenda for development was framed through the rhetoric of ‘collective good’ and ‘progress’, presented as both rational and responsible. Because, as Tarlo (2003) observes,  slums were viewed as spaces of moral degeneracy and unchecked reproduction and population growth. Within this logic, sterilisation, particularly of men, emerged as the most ‘efficient’ solution to a looming demographic threat that was believed to be dragging the nation towards deeper poverty. It was projected as a civic duty — an act through which every Indian, regardless of class and wealth, could contribute to a more ‘prosperous’ national future. And in this equation, slum clearance became intertwined with population control. 

But this apparent universality concealed a systematic and uneven targeting of marginalised bodies. Tarlo states that these vasectomies were disproportionately imposed on so-called lower-caste and working-class men, reflecting upper-caste anxieties around the supposed excesses of the ‘undisciplined’ poor. Moreover, masculinity itself became a contested terrain. Although vasectomy was framed as a rational, civic-minded act, it directly challenged dominant ideals of male virility, particularly the association between reproductive capacity and manhood. Tarlo notes that men navigated this tension by redefining compliance as loyalty to the nation or, at times, pragmatically exchanging ‘honour’ for material survival. This showed how gendered bodies were not just coerced but negotiated, revealing the nuances of biopolitics across caste and gender lines. 

Moreover, Tarlo highlights how the state advanced its objectives by incentivising sterilisation, turning it into a bureaucratic operation of disciplining bodies. Vasectomy camps spread rapidly, offering incentives ranging from cash and ghee to electrical goods. Access to food rations, entitlements, and even promised resettlement housing hinged on proof of sterilisation. This reflects Foucault’s insight into power in modern governance, where individuals are conditioned to internalise state rationalities — here, conforming to state-imposed population goals to fit into the category of a responsible citizen. 

Further, in Tarlo’s account, the agenda of sterilisation did more than cultivate a sense of responsibility; it normalised the procedure to such an extent that even those who were subjected to it became what she calls ‘pragmatic opportunists’, creating a system of self-monitoring and even others. Many among the poor served as motivators, encouraging peers to undergo sterilisation in exchange for promised benefits. In some cases, these ‘subaltern producers of paper truths’ (Tarlo 2003, p. 119) mastered the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, manipulating documentary processes to secure entitlements for themselves (Chatterjee 2005, 201).

Tarlo reveals it as ‘the most frightening aspect of oppressive regimes; that is their ability to draw all kinds of people, through fear or greed, into participation’. (2003, p. 201) Furthermore, Tarlo’s account reveals certain bureaucratic absurdities and moral paradoxes that emerged during the period of the Emergency. In her chapter ‘Paper Truths’, she illustrates this through the strange requirement of the authorities that one must be ‘officially recognised as an ‘unauthorised occupant’ to gain entitlement to a resettlement plot (Tarlo 2003, p. 74; also see Chatterjee 2005). This allowed for conditions where sterilisation certificates were bought and sold, because documentary proof of having motivated others could entitle one to benefits. There was clearly no simplistic dichotomy between the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’ (Chatterjee 2005). The ‘sanctioned illegalities’ as Tarlo describes, i.e., purchasing these sterilisation documents or declaring false occupations to access resettlement mirrors Foucault’s idea that power thrives in the productive ambiguity between the legal and the illegal. In Prison Talk, he asserts that illegalities are not simply outside the law, but generated and tolerated by institutions to manage populations more flexibly (Foucault 1980, p. 39). Acts of evasion within surveillance are what further legitimise the existence of power, as they force power to negotiate with them. This paradox reveals how discipline is diffused, strategic, and often even opportunistic: people are incentivised to align themselves with bureaucratic truth, even when such truths are technically false (or what we understand as ‘productive ambiguity of power’ from Foucault 1980, p. 39-41). Rather than resisting the state, many individuals enter into a tactical relationship with it, manipulating its logic to survive; a key feature of biopolitical governance is that it focuses not on punishing individuals, but on modulating behaviour across populations (Foucault 1980, p. 138-143). 

CONCLUSION 

Contemporary shifts among younger and working populations toward delaying, limiting, or refusing reproduction are far from neutral personal choices; they emerge directly from tangible social, economic, and political realities. Despite being rooted in material conditions like financial insecurity, institutional demands, and evolving labour markets, these decisions are routinely politicised, moralised, and subjected to state scrutiny, often dismissed as selfish, emotionally deficient, or socially regressive. Yet paradoxically, the state itself has historically sanctioned comparable reproductive controls, like coercive sterilisation. This raises a critical question: can refusal to reproduce truly exist beyond state governance, or effectively act as a form of resistance? This contradiction reflects the state’s moral economy, which has long associated reproduction with ideals of responsible citizenship, economic productivity, and social order. As Puar (2007) rightly states that to reproduce is to contribute to national progress; to abstain is to disrupt demographic, economic, or ideological imperatives. Parenting is thus elevated to a moral act, while its refusal is cast as deviant. Yet this binary framing becomes unstable when the state itself engages in coercive reproductive practices, such as during India’s Emergency, a period when mass sterilisations were promoted as civic responsibility (Tarlo 2003). In these cases, refusal to reproduce was demanded, particularly of poor, urban, and marginalised populations, thus highlighting state-administered biopolitical policies deployed to discipline those seen as ‘excess’. 

This contradiction also shows that not all refusals to reproduce are equal. State-imposed reproductive policies and individual decisions may produce similar outcomes, but differ in motivation and moral interpretation. It is precisely this contradiction that subtly reflects what Foucault describes as governmentality and biopower: when a decision is made within a tightly woven fabric of institutional expectations, economic incentives, and moral norms, can it still be called choice ? 

What is often celebrated as rational parenthood which delays childbirth to build a career or improve financial security for raising children, is a predetermined framework provided by institutional discourse. Corporate fertility management schemes, state reproductive policies, and cultural stigmas surrounding childlessness govern reproductive decisions under the guise of freedom. This blurs the line between choosing not to reproduce and being made not to choose reproduction. 

Ultimately, what is taken to be an individual philosophical stance is inseparable from the structural conditions that shape and delimit it. For the case of reproduction, in some contexts, it reflects compliance with biopolitical logics; in others, it signals resistance to reproductive expectations imposed by state agendas. Regardless, its  politicisation demonstrates that reproductive choices are never merely private or apolitical — they are produced, judged, and moralised within broader power discourses. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burkett, Paul, and John Bellamy Foster. 2006. Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth. Theory and Society. Springer. 

Chatterjee, Partha, 2005. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi by Emma Tarlo: Review. American Anthropologist 107(3): 547-548. 

Foucault, Michel, 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press. 

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effects: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87-104). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 

Foucault, Michel. 1995. ‘Discipline.’ In Rethinking The Subject : An Anthology Of Contemporary European Social Thought, edited by James D. Faubion, 1st ed., 60–69. Routledge.

Gutting, Gary, and Johanna Oksala, 2022. ‘Michel Foucault.’ In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Stanford: Stanford University. 

Puar, Jasbir K., 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Tarlo, Emma, 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. London: C. Hurst and Co. (Publishers) Ltd. 

Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

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Oishi Gooptu is a final year master’s student in Sociology at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal.