The discourse on population in India, 1870--1960

In the twentieth century, India's population captured the attention of policy makers and the popular imagination as an obstacle to economic growth and as a signifier of poverty. This dissertation examines the history of ideas about overpopulation in India and how these ideas, often different and at times contradictory, influenced the formulation of economic and social policy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A major turning point occurred in the 1920s when the population problem was integrated into the modern development discourse in the context of British rule. After independence, the Indian state in its efforts to institute state planning appears to have inherited and deployed key ideas about India's population that were developed during the period of colonial rule. This dissertation considers how the population problem was constructed, codified and deployed in the development discourse in India. It posits that the intellectual and discursive construction of India's population problem is a historical phenomenon distinct from that of the size of India's population and that it constitutes a key historical variable, which merits explanatory attention. Entwined within this discourse were a number of complementary discourses regarding public health, maternal and infant mortality, birth control and eugenics. In the 1930s these issues together constituted a new public discourse on population. The emergence of an urbanized Indian civil society played a crucial role participating in and lending direction to this discourse. The dissertation focuses on the primary role of Indian civil society in establishing the secular, scientific and modern nature of population discourse. Within Indian civil society the dissertation focuses on a group of Indian economists and health professionals whose pre-eminent contribution it was to situate the population problem firmly in the context of future Indian economic planning. Despite the ambivalence of many Indian nationalists to the population problem, the adoption of a national population policy by independent India was indebted to and substantially borrowed from the public discourse on population that preceded it.