The Construction of a ‘Population Problem’ in Colonial India 1919–1947

Abstract

This article examines the construction of a ‘population problem’ among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's ‘population problem’ nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.

Acknowledgements

This article benefitted enormously from the thorough reading of a previous version by Barbara Ramusack and her suggestions on how to improve it. I am grateful to Haimanti Roy and to the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments proved extremely useful while revising the article. All shortcomings, errors and omissions in the article are mine alone.

Notes

Collectively known as the Government of India Act of 1935, this set of constitutional reforms provided for an Indian government on federal principles. For the first time, the Act envisaged, the provincial governments of the British Indian Empire would be governed, with a substantial degree of autonomy, by Indians elected to the provincial legislatures.

Baldwin, Parliamentary Debates, cols. 1721–22.

The constitutional reforms following the Government of India Act, 1919, provided for a ‘Council of State’ at the federal level. The membership of this body was heavily weighted in favour of those whom the colonial government considered its allies or natural leaders of Indian public opinion such as large landowners. For a description of the reforms along these lines, see Spear, History of India, Vol. 2, 185–89.

The text of the resolution read, ‘This Council recommends the Governor General in Council to take practical steps to check the increase in the population of India’. Government of India (GOI). Council of State Debates. 18 March 1935, 601.

Ibid., 624.

I use ‘public health’ loosely to designate the health, medical and sanitary activities of the government, which administratively came under the supervision of different official departments at different times. I use ‘public health officials’ specifically to mean those medical officials involved in public health activities of the government.

I retain single quotes for population problem for those instances where it denotes how public health officials specifically understood population growth as a problem for public health in the texts discussed below.

Kingsley Davis' pioneering study of the population of India and Pakistan in 1951 using census data was one of the earliest. There has since come into existence an extensive literature on Indian population policy, planning and control and projections that is beyond the scope of this article to list.

For a recent work that stresses the role of ‘transnational’ networks and the ‘population establishment’ see Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 277–78. On how Cold War considerations affected American demography, see Hodgson, ‘Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demography’, 546–50.

See Phadke's discussion of the eugenic objectives of increasing the number of ‘fit’ persons and reducing the number of ‘unfit’ persons in, Phadke, Sex problems in India, 266. Also, Hodges, ‘Conjugality, Progeny and Progress’, 170. As Klausen shows in her work on South Africa, even support for birth control as population control sometimes disguised the very different assumptions of its advocates, in this case, those of eugenicists and maternal feminists. Klausen, Race, Maternity and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 5.

On the influence of Malthus and other classical political economists in colonial policy, see Ambirajan, S. Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India, Ch. 2. Another recent work that mentions the enduring influence of Malthus on late nineteenth century Indian famine policy is Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 32.

A recent theoretical treatment on this can be found in Goswami, Producing India, 209–41.

For a recent sampling, see Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce; Alhuwalia, Reproductive Restraints; Rao, From Population Control to Reproductive Health; Hodges, ed., Reproductive Health in India.

Hodges, ‘Towards a History of Reproduction’, 11–16.

Arnold, ‘Official Attitudes’, 22–50.

Ibid., 23.

Hutton noted that the population had increased by 10 per cent, which he termed ‘a cause for alarm rather than for satisfaction’. GOI, Census of India, 1931, 29.

Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 9, and ‘Population is History’, 122–47; Bashford, ‘Nation, Empire, Globe’, 170–201; Klausen, Race, Maternity and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 4.

This is clearly shown in the select bibliography on population that Hutton provides in his report and other sections where he references the works of Indian authors such as B. T. Ranadive, Rajani Kanta Das and P. K. Wattal. GOI, Census of India, 1931, 30.

Royal Commission on Agriculture in India (RCA), Abridged Report, 58–59.

Contemporary Indian authors noted that compared with population growth in countries in industrialised Europe and America during the same period, India's population growth was relatively small. Sarkar, Sociology of Population, 17. While the population increase for 1921–31 was 10.6 per cent, in 1911–21 it was only 1.2 per cent and for 1881–1931 it was only 39 per cent. GOI, Census of India, 1931, 85.

A. J. H. Russell, C. A. Bentley and W. C. Ross were among the public health officials who provided evidence to the Royal Commission. At the time they were serving as the Director of Public Health (DPH) of the provinces of Madras Presidency, Bengal Presidency and Bihar and Orissa, respectively.

The absence of mass famine after 1902 may have painted a rosier view of the potential of Indian agricultural production for officials in the agriculture and land departments. Improvements in famine codes and expansion of transport and communication networks may have bred complacency in these officials that led them to discount the threat of mass-famine and to overestimate their ability to deal with it. Consequently, they were less inclined to parrot the familiar link with population growth and food supply that was characteristic of the nineteenth century. As Mike Davis has pointed out recently, rather than having ‘solved’ the problem of food availability (or more importantly access to it) as colonial officials and ‘some gullible modern historians’ believe, famine's absence merely concealed the widespread immiseration of the Indian peasantry and coincided with the fortuitous absence of extreme El Nino events. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 58.

Curtis, ‘Introduction’, xxiii.

Jeffery, Politics of Health, 68-74.

A correspondent in the Indian Medical Gazette complained of the constitutional reforms that in neither ‘the Montague-Chelmsford Report, the Government of India Act nor in the Devolution Rules is there any evidence of a real appreciation of public health matters’. Special correspondent, ‘The Need for a Public Health Policy for India’, 578.

An editorial in the IMG captures the frustration of the IMS officials stating, ‘The story of public health in India is one of splendid individual efforts, some of which succeeded in overcoming the prevailing inertia of those who were in authority, but these successes have been local and temporary’. ‘Indian Public Health’, 573.

According to figures calculated by the PHC, in British India, the average annual birth and death rates (per thousand of population) for the decade 1901–10 was 38 and 34, for 1911–20, 37 and 34 and 1921–30, 35 and 26, respectively. GOI, Annual Report of the PHC for 1933, 286. In 1930, compared with a birth rate and death rate (per thousand of population) of 35.99 and 26.85 in India, the corresponding figures in England and Wales was, respectively, 16.80 and 11.70, in Australia 19.90 and 8.60, in Canada 24.50 and 11.00, in the USA 18.90 and 11.30 and in Japan 32.40 and 18.20. GOI, Annual Report of the PHC for 1930, 4.

In 1930, infantile death rate per thousand births (of infants under one year) was 181 in British India. In England and Wales, it was 60 per thousand births. Statistics for maternal mortality were available for a few provinces only but the following study reported by the PHC's report is indicative of the high rate. In Madras Presidency, an investigation by the Public Health Department into maternal mortality in 16 municipalities spread throughout the province revealed that it was as high as 15.4 per thousand births from a total of 32,000 cases of confinement. The corresponding rate in England and Wales at the time was around 4.5 per thousand births. Ibid., 157.

A detailed account of the production of the book and the controversy surrounding it can be found in Sinha, ‘Introduction’, 1–61.

In British India, for the age group 15–40 years, female death rate at 14.11 per thousand was higher than that for men at 12.37 per thousand. GOI, Annual Report of the PHC for 1930, 19.

Ramusack, ‘Embattled Advocates’, 34–64 and also ‘Authority and Ambivalence’, 52.

For instance, in 1927 as DPH in the Madras Presidency, Russell's evidence to the Royal Commission on Agriculture spoke of his concerns with rapid population growth in that province. He served as the Public Health Commissioner (PHC) at the time when Megaw was Director General of the IMS and later occupied the same post. As PHC, he publicised the ‘population problem’ in his annual reports on public health. He co-authored articles on India's population in the Indian Journal for Medical Research with K. C. K. E. Raja who later served as the Secretary to the Health Survey and Development (Bhore) Committee.

‘The Problem of Population’, 91.

For instance, in a dissenting article in the IMG, Lt. Col. Stewart, IMS, pointed out that in Europe, both death rates and birth rates had fallen in the previous half-century, with the fall in death rates being greater. High birth rates were usually matched by comparatively high death rates, but in countries with a high standard of living, the same result was achieved through a reduction in both birth and death rates. Stewart believed that raising the standard of living in India, which to him meant better health and controlling epidemic diseases, would be accompanied by lower death and birth rates. Stewart, ‘The Population Problem’, 163–64.

EHL Dept/Health Br, 1932, No. 269/32-H (EHL/Health/1932), National Archives of India, New Delhi [hereafter cited as NAI].

An example of this can be seen from the Council of State debate on population control in 1935 discussed below. None of the speakers spoke of birth control in terms of a physiological measure to safeguard the health of women. Also, Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints, 85–113.

Special Correspondent, ‘The Need for a Public Health Policy for India’, 575.

See evidence given respectively by Dr C. A. Bentley, DPH, Bengal in RCA, Evidence Taken in Bengal, 254 and Lt. Col. W. C. Ross in RCA, Evidence Taken in Bihar and Orissa, 357.

These two notes prepared by J. W. D. Megaw were titled ‘Note on the Formation of a Public Health Board’ and ‘Further note on the formation of a Public Health Board’. EHL Dept/Health Br, 1932, File No. 269/32-H (EHL/Health/1932), NAI. Subsequent quotations of Megaw are from this file, except when indicated otherwise.

For contemporary Indian authors' views on the food shortage, see Zutshi, ‘Population and Subsistence in India’, 262–64; Das, ‘Population and Food Supply’, 453–56 and ‘The Problem of India's Poverty’, 365–70.

Dubey, ‘The Indian Food Problem II’, 180.

Ranadive, Population Problem of India, 105. The book was based on Ranadive's master's thesis, which as C. N. Vakil points out in its preface, he repudiated after he turned Communist.

Das, ‘Population and Food Supply’, 456.

EHL Dept/Health Br, 1932, No. 269/32-H (EHL/Health/1932), NAI.

Megaw, ‘India Heading for Disaster’, 42.

In the Council of State debate, the Home Secretary stated, ‘Government's action is always apt to be viewed with suspicion and we may be accused, if we take up vigorous propaganda in this matter, of attempting to reduce India to a third-rate nation’. Council of State Debates. 18 March 1935, 624.

Megaw speculated that public health failed to make much headway in India because Indians feared the horrors of famine even greater than they did disease. ‘The passive resistance of the people to the efforts of the sanitary department’ was due to ‘an instinctive knowledge that the victory over disease would lead to an evil even greater than disease, namely, inevitable famine’. Megaw, ‘India Heading for Disaster’, 4–5.

Ibid.

A detailed account of the colonial public sphere's engagement with the population problem can be found in Nair, ‘The Discourse on Population’, 121–77.

GOI. Council of State Debates. ‘Resolution re steps to check the increase in population’. 18 March 1935, 610. In tabling the resolution, Hossain Imam, appeared as an unlikely advocate of state intervention. He had previously unsuccessfully opposed the passage of the Sarda Act (Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929), which raised the legal age of marriage for women. In addition to tabling his resolution, in 1940, he also supported a resolution in favour of popularising birth control and establishing birth control clinics in centrally administered areas that successfully passed in the Council of State.

Ibid., 600.

Ibid., 624.

Ibid.

Ibid., 606.

Home/Political Br, 1935, No. [17/112/35-Political], NAI.

Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee, 25.

A notable exception to this was the National Planning Committee (NPC). The Indian National Congress set up the NPC in October 1938 under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru with a view to preparing the groundwork for future state directed planning in an independent India. One of its subcommittees, under the Indian economist Radhakamal Mukerjee, specifically looked at the role of population. Its report submitted in October 1940 included recommendations for extensive social legislation, the spread of contraceptive knowledge among the masses and eugenic sterilisation. NPC, Population, 130. Political events however overtook the activities of the NPC, which after 1942 almost ‘ceased to function’. Its final report and those its subcommittees were only published in 1947 by which time many of its initial assumptions, such as promoting Indian emigration in the British Empire, were either outdated or inoperable.

Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee, 1.

Ibid., 26.

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 483.

The organisation of the family planning programme in independent India came closely to adhere to the framework outlined in the Bhore report. Under the constitution population policy was in general the joint responsibility of the States and the Central government. While its implementation was tasked to the former, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare under the Central government was responsible for the ‘overall programme direction, guidance, direction and evaluation’. As the family planning programme was considered to be of national importance the Central government also undertook to meet all expenditures incurred under it including those of the States. ESCAP, Population of India, 162.