Dr Aprajita Sarcar

Aprajita Sarcar (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for Population and History. She works on everyday governance of the population control policies in postcolonial India. Her research brings together the historiography on global population planning, reproductive politics and urban histories of South Asia. She was awarded my PhD from the Department of History, Queen’s University, Canada. in 2020.

Her doctoral dissertation was titled ‘Mythical Families: The small family norm and everyday governance of population in India, 1954-1977.’ The thesis studies the nuclear family in postcolonial India. It studies how this notional unit of a small family was a mode of developmental economic planning, and also a site of aspiration for a modernizing nation. While she studies the role that advocacy on contraceptives played in translating cultural anxieties around overpopulation and entrenched poverty, she also document the contestations and overlaps between municipal and transnational archives.

She is interested in mixed method research that historicizes the people ‘on the ground’ and closes the gap between the archives and the everyday lives of national health programmes. Her primary research area is postcolonial South Asia. She also researches topics in colonial history of medicine, family, gender, nationalism, legal governance and citizenship. She studies the role of built environment or modernity in population planning programmes.