Substantial Relations: Making Global Reproductive Medicine in Postcolonial India

Substantial Relations is about the historical and contemporary making of global reproductive medicine in India, with a focus on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Since the 1970s, India has played a central but shifting role in shaping global reproductive medicine. Initially a provider of raw material, India has increasingly become a producer of knowledge and technology, and is today home to a thriving medical market that attracts patients from all over the world.

Substantial Relations depicts the country's trajectory by tracing the transnational travels of biological material, knowledge claims, medical supplies, and financial investments as vital substances that have animated this medical field. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in homes, hospitals, and laboratories in Delhi, Substantial Relations provides deep insights into IVF users' quest for offspring, their fears of establishing unwanted ties as well as the minute engagements of clinicians and laboratory staff with reproductive substances. This novel and rich analysis of the various substantial relations that the burgeoning IVF sector in India has relied on and generated contributes to a broader understanding of reproductive medicine as a global phenomenon constantly in the making, situating India in the midst of, rather than peripheral to, this process.

Thanks to generous funding from Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique/Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.