Chapter Eight FEMALE INFANTICIDE AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA: A CASE STUDY FROM TAMIL NADU C. 1980–2006 1 Shahid Perwez Introduction This paper engages with the social and political responses to female infanticide in contemporary Tamil South India, as an instance of the continuation of the rhetoric and practice of the British colonial ‘civilizing mission’ in postcolonial India. 2 The term ‘civilizing mission’ refers to ‘the grand project that justified colonialism as a means of redeeming the backward, aberrant, violent, oppressed, undeveloped people of the non-European world by incorporating them into the universal civilization of Europe’. 3 For the sake of this paper, I use a particular expression of the term to refer to an agenda or a discourse of civilizational otherness, which British colonizers deployed largely for the self-legitimation of their rule in the name of ‘improvement’, ‘betterment’, and even the ‘social and moral progress’ of the colonized. 4 While some historical analysis has been made with regard to understanding the ‘civilizing mission’ as a programme, concept and ideology in British India, its continuities in postcolonial India are rarely the subject of academic analyses. 5 If at the heart of this mission were an ideology and a material programme of knowing, naming and ordering 6 public spaces and political relations, do the contemporary governments of independent India differ much on this count or have they abandoned such an approach? If the ‘civilizing mission’ campaign granted the colonial subjects what Srirupa Prasad has equated with Jacques Donzelot’s notion of ‘supervised freedom’, 7 has the policing of families and communities been abandoned in postcolonial India in favour of a liberalized Published in Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (Ed): "Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development". London: Anthem Press. Pp. 243-69