Planned Parenthood Director: A. Bhaskar Rao Year: 1949 (8:30)
Echt sarkari pornomiseria — a sterilizing cinema for the masses.
In Jodorowsky’s Tusk, a kindly Saiva sadhu saves Holi by magically transforming himself into a rooster during a showdown with the local European shopkeeper. It’s a beautiful, shapeshifting moment in an uneven film, reinforcing in miniature the basic animal-human twinning at the heart of Jodorowsky’s rambling, double-pronged narrative. The sadhu’s street magic restages that slippery ontological movement as a weapon against the racist logic of colonial capitalism, represented by the shopkeeper — it’s a tiny saturnalia played out for an audience likewise twinned: the one onscreen made up of appreciative, laughing natives; the one sitting in theaters somewhere else, taking it all in.
“Planned Parenthood,” first generation Films Division director A. Bhaskar Rao’s 1949 family planning short, with text by Berkeley Hill and voiceover work by Romesh Thapar, begins with a shot of a mother hen and her chicks, chirping and circling her like satellites as she clucks her way down a fake-looking mud-walled lane. From the dissolving center of the image emerges another, of a rural mother and “her brood,” as we are meant to understand it, chattering and hustling down a mud-walled, fake-looking lane. The quick, hypnotic cinematic effect used for the transition underlines the analogy for the benefit of any rube too slow to catch it: these people are like animals.
Cut to a scene of an overcrowded refugee camp — remember this is just two years after Independence and Partition — “This is one picture of present-day India: ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed.” Images of hungry looking children kept at a distance, objects for analysis and corrective action, not empathy. Empathy, when and if evoked, will be kept to the point. “Can we, with clear conscience, boast of higher standards of living, when so many among us don’t even get enough to eat?” Do track the word “we” as used in this film — keep a close eye on the Films Division us. We are being mobilized. FAMINE IN GUJERAT screams a (pre-statehood) headline, FOOD SCARCITY IN THE SOUTH. “We have for many years been living under the shadow of famine. We tried for many years to combat famine by importing food at fabulous prices, with money we can ill afford.” Grain pouring off of ships. An animated sequence of horridly erect white arrows poking at the sacred body of Bharat Mata — high-cliffed and heavenly — with demands for precious foreign exchange. “Money that we desperately need for the vast reconstruction and rehabilitation program.” A new animation shows all of India’s money leaving, flying away to other countries. Our money, mind you.
No points for guessing what’s next in this neo-Malthusian nightmare flick, poverty porn produced to frighten the bejeezus out of “the masses and the classes,” particularly the latter, who could and would try to do something about it. We are shown faceless, milling, threatening crowds. “A major ailment of this country is overpopulation” — note the use of medical language, the pathologization of childbirth among the poor. Frame it as a social disease, the logic went in population control circles, and respond with surgery. When “there is too little food for too many stomachs,” the answer is simple: remove the stomachs.
The film proceeds through a series of paradigmatic exemplars trotted out like ventriloquist dummies for the State: “Take this family for instance, an unclean home, a sickly mother, and a brood of noisesome, neglected children. It only needs the master of the house to complete the dismal picture, and here he comes. The wage earner.” The poor man walks in wiping his brow. He’s trying his best, with his suit and tie, his clean white pants, his respectable topi but for godsake these children! Dragging down the whole country! “And what does he get?” Crying, ugly babies, noisy demands, histrionics and what looks like light cottage industry involving a small teenager with a hammer. Then we are shown how the other half lives, in bourgeois peace and quiet, a tranquil yet nuclear family for a tranquil yet nuclear age. “This is indeed a happy home and father looks forward to returning to it each evening from office.” Hum do aur hamare do. Daddy come home.
The objections of religious leaders are answered with a lampooning shot of two religious fundo clowns bickering over a passage in their holy book, followed by vanquishing imagery of airplanes, fast trains and steam ships. “But these people forget that the story of civilization has been man’s control over the forces of nature, mainly by mechanical means.” In this film, a chicken is a man; and a steamship is an IUD.
What of the title? The nascent Indian state was no stranger to efforts by transnational organizations to spread family planning, particularly to countries in what was then being invented as the “Third World”. In fact, the British Raj had kept clear of anything smacking of “birth control” in the years before Independence, resisting pressure back home for fear of inflaming public opinion. The post-colonial State had no such compunctions, and independent India soon found itself positioned as a kind of ideal test case for the “Third World” and its problems, a laboratory for experimentation in solutions proposed by population control advocates like International Planned Parenthood, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the UN, as well as foreign governments like the United States, who encouraged the Indian government to pursue target-based family planning by tying it to much-needed food aid. It’s a shameful history, recounted in sobering detail by Columbia historian Matthew Connelly in his 2010 book Fatal Misconception. But it’s very important to note — as Connelly emphasizes — that this is also a history that organizations like Planned Parenthood have long since come to terms with. Gone are the days when International Planned Parenthood promoted target-based population control in impoverished countries. (Anti-abortion activists who try to link present-day birth control advocates to the abuses of the population control movement are guilty of bad faith, anachronism and the sin of being full of shit.)
Somehow, zombie-like, even after the nightmare mass-sterilizations conducted during the Emergency (applauded and funded from the sidelines by many foreign governments and transnational organizations), even after the 1994 population control conference in Cairo that disavowed its methods, the sterilizing machinery of the Indian state carries on.
And at what a cost.
Special bonus: director A. Bhaskar Rao’s very early wartime pro-gardening short “Grow More Food,” produced by the colonial government’s Information Films of India in 1945, three years before the founding of the Films Division.