The appalling inhumanity of an ostensibly humanitarian program is brought to light in “Something Like a War,” from 1991, one in a group of documentaries by the Indian filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj that are streaming on the Criterion Channel. The program in question is population control in India, promoted—starting in the nineteen-fifties, with American assistance—under the euphemism of “family planning”; the battlegrounds are women’s bodies, and the subject of conflict is forced sterilization. Dhanraj, amazingly, manages to film in the operating room of a factorylike clinic where women, mainly desperately poor ones, undergo laparoscopic sterilizations without anesthetic or aftercare, often as a result of their husbands’ relentless pressure and the false promises of financial help by low-level government officials whose pay depends on meeting their quota. But, far from presenting women as mere victims of a ruthless system, Dhanraj centers the film on her copious and insightful discussions with a group of poor women in an agrarian village, who speak candidly about their lives—their bodies, their families, their deprivations, their sexuality, and their keen awareness of the oppressions that they endure in a regime that puts into action men’s supremacist prejudices.