Southern India played an important role in the development of gynaecology and obstetrics, both within the subcontinent and within the British empire as a whole. Nineteenth-century Madras was a major centre of expertise in “diseases of women and children”, and well placed to become a hub of the birth control movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Sarah Hodges has written extensively on female medicine in colonial India and has made a particular study of its development in the south. Here she examines the different factors surrounding the promotion of birth control within the biopolitical context of an imperial government whose days were numbered, and the growing confidence and assertiveness of the Indian nationalist movement. The issue of birth and birthing was of symbolic importance in colonial India, partly because of British distaste for traditional birthing methods and partly because of nationalist rhetoric surrounding “Mother India”. However, a Mother was glorified in the number and strength of her sons, so this did not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for birth control. Gandhi was a staunch opponent of birth control, with all its connotations of western scientific interference and its obvious eugenicist agenda. However, concern about overpopulation coupled with an appreciation of the worldwide impact of the work of Marie Stopes led various voluntary groups in India to promote birth control enthusiastically. By the 1930s Indian newspapers carried whole columns of advertisements for condoms, coils or contraceptive advice manuals. Hodges has focused on two of the most important of these groups. The Madras Neo-Malthusian League was made up of prominent businessmen, largely from the Brahmin community, working to an essentially paternalist agenda (like many of these movements it was almost exclusively male): it wanted to link India to the worldwide Stopesian movement and saw contraception as a way of reducing India’s population of fecklessly breeding poor. The League poured out pamphlets and posters to little discernable effect: it was pointed out acidly by one critic that, since one of its founders had no children and another thirteen, they clearly either knew nothing of birth or nothing of control. More radical was the Self-Respect movement, which swept through the south in the 1930s and 1940s. This was a political and cultural movement which sought to galvanize the Tamil population—not least through using the Tamil language—into a strong sense of their separate and personal identity. It was particularly aimed against domination by the Brahmins; there seemed little point in removing relatively remote British control only to replace it with much closer and tighter Brahmin control. The Self-Respect movement held its meetings in the open air and, unlike the Neo-Malthusians, it welcomed women to its ranks. Contraception was not to be women’s way of contributing responsibly to the new nation, but a means of personal emancipation, to break the hold of the traditional maternal role forced on them by India’s hierarchical society. In many ways, the Self-Respect movement foreshadowed feminist enthusiasm for the Pill in the 1960s, with a similarly broad agenda of personal and collective liberation. These are important stories, of relevance well beyond the confines of colonial medical history, and Professor Hodges tells them with characteristic and infectious enthusiasm. She shows that the nexus between nationalism, colonialism and control of the birthing process is much more nuanced than the traditional Foucaultian model of the colonized body allows for and, in a pleasing coda to the book, she addresses the popular cliche of Indian over-population, not perhaps to destroy it but certainly to point out its oversimplifications. This is a handsomely produced volume which advances our knowledge and understanding of an important area not just of colonial biopolitics, but of the interplay between birth and politics itself.