Infertility in a Crowded Country

This beautifully rendered ethnography makes visible the haunting social challenge of infertility for Indian women, and especially Muslim minority women, whose reproduction is always suspect. Stories of women's secret but valiant attempts to conceive animate the pages of this book, which is essential reading for scholars of gender, kinship, and religion in South Asia, as well as those interested in reproductive justice in the Global South.

~Marcia C. Inhorn, author of Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai

By focusing on infertility, this book fills a huge gap in the study of reproduction in India. Bringing together material from Indian films, literature, extensive ethnography, and her own experiences as a daughter-in-law in India, Holly Donahue Singh weaves an anthropologically informed and fascinating account of people's reproductive desires framed by the real world of inequalities and lack of reproductive justice. Yet, it is not all doom and gloom as people forge their way out of difficulties or find new paths outside of reproductive mandates.

~Ravinder Kaur, Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi