From Female Foeticide to the New Civilising Mission
Consider the modern trope of “female foeticide”.
Today, it is routinely presented as another exhibit in the prosecution of timeless Indian patriarchy. But the history of sex selection in India contains an inconvenient Western dimension that is often missing from the narrative.
India’s post-Independence population-control machinery received substantial assistance from American foundations and international demographic organisations. The Ford Foundation itself records that its consultants visited the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the 1960s to develop grants that would bring Indian scientists into the national family-planning movement.
Scholarly histories describe the Ford Foundation, the Population Council and the World Bank as major supporters of the enormous State family-planning apparatus that subsequently emerged.
Why this extraordinary Western interest in reducing Indian births?
Cold War geopolitics was one major reason.
Historian Emily Merchant has documented how the Population Council, with the Ford Foundation as its primary sponsor, helped transform population control from an American strategy concerned partly with containing the spread of communism into an international development programme. Other scholarship on Cold War Asia has described Western population policy as part of a broader effort to keep Asian States within the anticommunist “free world”.
Then sex selection entered the population-control calculus.
In 1975, researchers reporting on India’s early use of amniocentesis explicitly argued that Indian couples continued reproducing until they had a son and that prenatal sex determination could eliminate what they called “unnecessary fecundity”. Contemporary scholarship has subsequently traced the expansion of sex-selective abortion to an environment shaped by population control, family planning and the transnational circulation of reproductive technology.
Read that again.
Sex determination was not introduced into modern India by a village priest consulting the Manusmriti.
It arrived as modern biomedical technology within a population-control environment shaped by Western foundations, international demographers and the Indian developmental State.
Later, when the consequences became impossible to ignore, the story was rewritten.
The Western population-control apparatus disappeared from the photograph.
“Hindu patriarchy” was left holding the baby—or, more precisely, the missing baby.
When the Foetus Appears
The language is equally revealing.
In contemporary Western liberal discourse, abortion is generally framed around bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, describes abortion as a private decision and frames the issue in terms of control over one’s own body.
Call abortion “foeticide” in that political environment and the language immediately sounds like the Christian Right.
Move the camera to India and something unusual happens.
The foetus returns.
Now we hear endlessly about “female foeticide”. The rhetorical centre moves from the woman’s choice to the sex-selected termination of the foetus. The same expression that can sound anti-abortion in one political environment becomes progressive language when deployed to indict India.
Even the United Nations Population Fund has recognised the problem with the terminology. Its communication guidance warns that “female foeticide” links sex selection to legal abortion and recommends the term “gender-biased sex selection” instead. Another UNFPA publication has noted that campaigns using “female foeticide” imagery can resemble anti-abortion campaigns elsewhere.
The contradiction is striking.
The same broad liberal discourse that emphasises a woman’s autonomy over pregnancy in one context can shift its moral emphasis toward the foetus when an atrocity narrative about India requires it.
Of course, abortion regardless of sex and abortion selected because of sex are not identical moral or social questions. Sex selection raises a specific problem of gender discrimination.
But that distinction does not erase the historical question:
Who built the population-control system?
Who introduced and promoted the technologies?
Why is that history so often absent when blame is assigned to Indian civilisation?
Go back another generation, and the colonial British State itself had policies affecting property and inheritance that could reinforce son preference, including circumstances in which the absence of a male heir could result in property being taken over by the State. Meanwhile, women in Britain themselves had long lacked equal property rights.
Yet somehow the entire historical burden is condensed into two words:
Hindu patriarchy.
First, create or reinforce the imperative for son preference.
Then create the machinery of demographic intervention.
Erase yourself from the history.
Finally, return as the humanitarian explaining the pathology of the natives.
The colonial trick has aged remarkably well.
The Civilising Mission
Sati, female foeticide and Sabarimala are different issues. They should not be conflated as identical social phenomena.
But the narrative technology can be remarkably consistent.
Take a real phenomenon.
Remove its scale and context.
Erase indigenous categories.
Suppress inconvenient parts of its history.
Translate it into a Western moral vocabulary.
Then make it representative of Hindu civilisation.
The handmaidens do not need to invent every social problem.
Their power lies in deciding which problem becomes a civilisation.
A Catholic male priesthood remains theology.
A Hindu temple’s ritual restriction becomes patriarchy.
Biblical submission of wives receives historical context.
Ardhanarishvara somehow becomes irrelevant to discussions of Hindu ideas of gender.
Western foundations that helped build India’s population-control machinery disappear from the history.
“Female foeticide” returns as evidence of Indian misogyny.
A rare, regionally concentrated and scripturally contested practice of widow self-immolation becomes the image of Hindus burning women.
The gaze travels in only one direction.
This is the old colonial division of intellectual labour: Western civilisation generates universal categories; indigenous civilisation supplies case studies of pathology.
Father God Discovers Feminism
Here lies the exquisite irony of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Western feminism arose in revolt against a civilisation of Father God, male ecclesiastical authority and historically male legal power. That feminist vocabulary was then exported to India. Christian-rooted Western institutions supported parts of the Indian feminist ecosystem, and some of its leading activists subsequently applied those categories to a civilisation of Devi, Shakti and Ardhanarishvara.
Father God discovered feminism.
And feminism proved to be an exceptionally effective instrument for reforming the “heathen”.
The theological missionary had become too obvious.
The feminist handmaiden performs the task more elegantly because she appears indigenous, secular and emancipatory.
The old missionary said Hindu tradition was false.
The new handmaiden says it is patriarchal.
Either way, Hindu tradition stands in the dock while the categories of judgment arrive from elsewhere.
This is why funding matters.
No crude conspiracy memo is required. Intellectual power rarely operates that way.
Fund institutions.
Fund conferences.
Fund advocacy networks.
Fund scholars.
Fund NGOs.
Fund the vocabulary.
Establish what constitutes an enlightened question. Determine which language confers moral prestige. Create a class trained to interpret its own civilisation through those concepts.
Eventually, the native elite does the work voluntarily.
Colonialism’s greatest victory was never simply getting Indians to obey the British. It was getting Indians to see themselves through British eyes.
The handmaidens continue that work.
Ask the Impolite Questions
India has serious problems concerning women. They should be investigated ruthlessly. Forced marriage, violence, discrimination, trafficking, sex selection and denial of opportunity deserve no cultural excuses.
But we should investigate our problems rather than endlessly auditioning as defendants in somebody else’s civilisational courtroom.
When a Christian-rooted institution teaches us about Hindu patriarchy, ask what its own theology says about women and religious authority.
When an imported progressive discourse uses Western frameworks to pathologise Indian society, ask where those frameworks came from.
When an organisation rooted in a religious tradition that condemns Ayyappa worship as idolatry supports an activist ecosystem demanding a Hindu woman’s “right to pray” to Ayyappa, ask why.
When female foeticide is presented as an ancient Indian pathology, ask who built the modern population-control apparatus and why sex selection emerged within its demographic logic.
When sati is used as shorthand for Hindu misogyny, ask how a rare, regionally concentrated and scripturally contested practice became the defining image of an entire civilisation.
These are not uncomfortable distractions from the subject.
They are the subject.
Whose theory?
Whose money?
Whose gaze?
And finally—
whose patriarch?
The old patriarch came carrying a Bible.
His handmaidens now carry the gender grant.
But why does Christian patriarchy write the cheque?
Perhaps the answer is that feminism, when detached from its own historical context and converted into an instrument for judging another civilisation, can become a remarkably effective vehicle for weakening Hindu civilisational confidence—and creating space for the old Father-God religion to return in a new form.
The question is not whether Indian women deserve liberation.
They do.
The real question is whether liberation requires Indians to despise the civilisation from which they seek it.
That is the question the handmaidens would rather we did not ask.
