Abstract
In this chapter, three feminist and Science and Technology Scholars discuss the idea of biological politics within the South Asian context. The concepts of biopower and biopolitics emerged within a western frame of Foucauldian theorisations on the technologies of power. As the introduction to this volume suggests, Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus have played important roles in navigating our conversations regarding bodies and populations in colonial and post-independent India. Yet, the chapter cautions against any easy deployment of biopolitics as a universal theory of how the entanglements of biology and politics play out in the South Asian context. All three scholars have been part of an ongoing project on thinking about biological politics in a South Asian context. The chapter highlights the key issues that emerge, and the many elisions and erasures in the complex histories of science in South Asia. Recent work challenges us to think beyond enlightenment logics in postcolonial contexts. Rather, during colonial and postcolonial times, the colonies have always resisted the imposition of western science resulting not in a pure or universal science but rather complex and hybrid sciences in the postcolony. We explore these tensions and, in particular, the new formations of reproductive labour that are emerging in South Asia.
Published Version
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