Counting and Quantifying Population

Practices of enumeration and quantification were critical to emergent discourses about population in the nineteenth century. Although the fact of counting itself was not new to this period, colonial modes of generating and recording numerical data helped to connect population to reproduction in novel ways. Specifically, the task of managing population became intimately linked to gathering quantitative and statistical data about reproduction. In a shift that began with the all-India censuses, the process of enumerating population would eventually situate such measures as fertility and nuptiality on a quantitative grid, paving the way for reproduction to be connected to economy in new ways.

To trace this history, I begin with early colonial modes of counting, which relied heavily on precolonial enumeration practices. The Mughal Empire and its successor states counted as a way to determine taxes and land revenue. What they counted, and how, depended upon the structure of revenue demands. For instance, if the state taxed each household, then censuses of households ensued; if household taxes were differentiated by caste or occupation, then revenue administrators counted and recorded these categories. If the state collected a portion of the crop, then assessing the area of land planted or the number of cattle became ways to determine land revenue.⁷ The East India Company drew upon these earlier exercises in counting, and their debts to indigenous systems were multiple. Company officials found census enumerators among village-level accountants who had engaged in administrative counting in precolonial regimes. They decided what to count, in part, based on interaction with these indigenous enumerators, and their purposes for counting held much in common with earlier rulers.⁸ During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Company counted as part of taxation and land revenue assessment. Its great projects of “settling” the land revenue, as in the case of the Bengal Permanent Settlement of 1793, depended upon a massive cadastral exercise of surveying, counting, and measuring. Such projects helped to develop the expertise for later human censuses.⁹

The Company’s interest in counting also developed vis-à-vis a British and European milieu in which statistics were increasingly a mode of governance. Through the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, developments in numeracy, literacy, state fiscalism, and actuarial thinking made numbers part of the British political imagination.¹⁰ This emphasis on enumeration produced the country’s first national census in 1801. It also found expression in new institutions, most notably the Statistical Society of London, founded in 1834. The turn to numbers, as Arjun Appadurai suggests, was part of a growing sense that a powerful state could not survive without making “enumeration a central technique of social control.”¹¹ This resulted in interconnections among developments in statistical science, the generation of statistical knowledge for purposes of governance, and the policies of the state. These changes occurred within a broader imperial network that encompassed both metropole and colony.

The Indian census of 1872 marks an important moment within this longer history of quantifying population across the British Empire. The idea for such a census had been floated in the final years of Company rule. The rebellion of 1857 put a temporary halt to these plans, but they were resumed after the establishment of Crown rule to produce the first count of population in British Indian territories in 1872. This was followed by the more comprehensive census of 1881, ushering in a series of decennial counts that continued unbroken through independence. While drawing upon earlier enumerations, the new censuses also marked a significant departure from their predecessors. Unlike prior efforts, which had been localized and did not aim to generate data commensurate with other local counts, here the goal was to conduct a national census. This was not quite achieved in 1872, since the enumeration did not include all areas under Crown rule and did not count the princely states at all. Beginning in 1881, however, the census became more truly national and was forced to generate nationally commensurate categories of caste, religion, and occupation. The 1881 census was also synchronous; that is, it counted everyone on the same day.¹² This required employing an army of census enumerators and producing an ever-growing library of census reports to present the data collected. In this sense, the census became a major administrative undertaking of the colonial regime. At the same time, it produced vastly more statistical data than could be used for directly utilitarian purposes like revenue or taxation, unlike earlier enumerations that privileged information collection for clearly defined ends. After 1872, the census became at once justificatory, disciplinary, and pedagogical, far exceeding the more specific purposes for which numbers had been generated before.¹³

Significantly, the new mode of national census-taking enumerated individuals. While previous counts had sometimes hazarded population estimates based on numbers of households, the census of 1872 and its successors aimed to count each person by age, sex, and social identity. The novelty of this practice is suggested by the Madras census commissioner, W. R. Cornish, who noted with some frustration that the “female population” was likely undercounted in the presidency. He attributed this failure to the local census enumerators, who had “been singularly obtuse in comprehending the fact that the counting of females was a matter of any importance in census work. To understand how this is, we must take into account the low estimation in which females are held in this country, and also the reticence of the people on all matters connected with their female relatives.”¹⁴ Perhaps census enumerators—accustomed to earlier regimes of counting that emphasized the household—did not see the purpose of inquiring into the details of household inhabitants. However, the administrators of the 1872 census and its successors were far more ambitious in their goals and eventually built the kind of population profile that we associate with census data in our own time.

When census enumerators were pressed to uncover how many people lived in the household, alongside their age, gender, and marital status, they began to generate new kinds of data that situated reproduction within a quantitative grid. To understand the significance of this shift, we might compare this moment with earlier eras, when such data was not collected. As Sumit Guha argues, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts explained population growth primarily through migration and movement. Administrative benevolence or tax concessions might induce people to migrate into a kingdom and thus increase population. In precolonial India, “the West European concern with fecundity was therefore absent” and “it was not necessary for such an administration to penetrate into the household to ascertain its demographic contents.”¹⁵ But once the 1872 census enumerators had, so to speak, “penetrated the household,” their data began to quantify population in new ways. As Foucault argues for modern Europe, states began to understand the “population” less as people and more as a phenomenon to be managed to maximize wealth or labor capacity; this was a population “balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.”¹⁶ Increasingly, managing this population seemed to depend on generating statistical data about reproduction, which of course was intimately connected to sex and sexuality. Through collecting information about individuals within households, statisticians could surmise how many children women had, on average, and could correlate this with markers of social identity, such as caste or religion. They could generate new information about mothers’ average ages when their children were born and could document the children’s rates of survival through infancy. In short, aspects of population size and rate of growth could now be measured in relation to quantified markers of reproductive behavior. Fertility, nuptiality, and age of marriage thus became foundational to collecting data about and managing the population as a whole. These figures existed “at the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains,” merging a set of claims about reproductive sexuality with assertions about the economic prosperity of the population.¹⁷

Historicizing Famine

Even as new methods of enumeration provoked a new way of understanding the “population” in the late nineteenth century, the frequency and severity of famines during these decades prompted a concern that this population was, in fact, an “overpopulation,” an excess of people in relation to the land. To explain why famine, rather than actual population growth, led colonial administrators to claim that India was overpopulated, this section turns to the history of late nineteenth-century famine, and to the wider political and economic relations that made famines so devastating wherever they occurred across the subcontinent. Considering this history, which takes us through the causes and consequences of famine events, helps to clarify how the “population”—and its reproduction—emerged as a target of governance in the late nineteenth century. Claims about the population that first developed in the context of famine, I argue, would become foundational to the new reproductive politics that I examine later in the chapter.

Famine had been a feature of South Asian life even before colonial rule, but it occurred with depressing regularity during the nineteenth century.¹⁸ Some of the major instances included famines in Guntur District in Madras Presidency from 1832 to 1833; in the North West Provinces, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Kutch from 1860 to 1861; in Orissa and Bihar from 1866 to 1867; in the Central Provinces and Rajasthan from 1868 to 1870; and in Bihar from 1873 to 1874. But even these massive calamities were relatively limited in their geographical range, in comparison with the more widespread disasters to follow in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The famine of 1876–78 affected much of Madras and parts of Bombay Presidencies, alongside the North West Provinces and the princely states of Mysore and Hyderabad. Even more severe famines closed the century: in 1896 and 1897 across most of India, and again in 1899 and 1900, when large parts of western, northwestern, and central India were impacted.¹⁹ Colonial administrators tended to blame famines on the failure of monsoon rains; indeed, each of these crises was accompanied by adverse weather conditions. But while climate was crucial in the timing of famines, the extreme “social vulnerability to climate variability” still needs to be explained.²⁰ That is, as many contemporaries recognized and as scholars have since confirmed, famines were not necessarily provoked by an absolute lack of food but by people’s inability either to buy food or to secure the means of subsistence in any other way. This collapse of people’s means to access subsistence—their “exchange entitlements,” in Amartya Sen’s terms—requires explanation.²¹ In other words, what made people so vulnerable that a failure of monsoon rains could bring many millions to the brink of starvation?

The short answer to this question is colonialism. The conditions of colonial rule produced or exacerbated a slow erosion of food security among landless laborers and smallholding peasants, the two groups most likely to face starvation during periods of famine. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a decline in other sources of employment, including weaving and other industries, rendered agriculture the only source of livelihood for an increasing percentage of the population. At the same time, farming became an increasingly precarious source of employment. Growing commercialization of agriculture exposed peasants to the risks of market fluctuation with few of its rewards, and in consequence, landowners had little incentive to invest in the land, and agriculture was undercapitalized.²² Shifts away from food crops to commercial production also reduced food security in times of crisis. Meanwhile, the burdens of colonial taxation fell especially hard on the agrarian economy.²³ These taxes raised funds not only for Indian administration but also for British expansion in Asia and Africa, thus welding the Indian agriculturist to the finances of the British Empire.²⁴ Increases in land revenue rates sometimes coincided with and prompted the onset of famine conditions; more broadly, the demand for land revenue and its mode of collection squeezed the most marginal occupants of the land during both “ordinary” and famine years.²⁵ When the monsoon rains failed, therefore, people were left with few resources to fall back upon.

Landless laborers and smallholding peasants thus constituted an impoverished population that lived on the edge of subsistence even in ordinary years and risked starvation during periods of famine. Moreover, as Mike Davis reminds us, the financial precarity of Indian peasants in the late nineteenth century did not develop outside of an emergent capitalist and imperialist world system. Rather, millions died “in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.”²⁶ More specifically, European governments’ continuing capacity to feed their own populations, as David Arnold suggests, was “achieved at the expense of hardship and hunger in the colonial world.”²⁷ Famines in late nineteenth-century India were thus both a consequence of a global transfer of wealth and resources to the Western imperialist powers and a further engine to accelerate inequalities on a world scale.²⁸ However, they were not, as colonial administrators often assumed, a consequence of population growth; population size was, in fact, mostly stagnant at this time. The connection administrators made between famine and population depended upon Malthusian theories, as I discuss in more detail below.

The devastating impact of famine was magnified by the limitations of state support for affected populations; in most cases, the colonial administration failed to prevent large-scale mortality during periods of famine.²⁹ During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, state assistance was constrained by limited technologies of communication and transport; in addition, East India Company administrators had limited knowledge of Indian agriculture and rural conditions. As the century wore on, however, and modes of transport and communication improved, limited state funding continued to constrain famine relief efforts. The same logic that mandated a high rate of land revenue—which required the Indian taxpayer to bankroll both colonial administration and imperial expansion—also severely reduced funds for supporting starving populations. Free charitable relief was therefore always limited. Punitive regimes required famine-affected populations to labor on public works distant from their homes, and these conditions dissuaded many from even applying to the state for help. Private charity, though locally effective at times, could never exist on the scale that was required. Consequently, many famines resulted in massive mortality. In the Guntur famine, for instance, historians estimate that one-third of the population died; in Orissa, one-quarter of the population may have perished.³⁰ Not coincidentally, the only famine in which state efforts substantially limited mortality was in Bihar in 1873 and 1874, when the government expended significantly more per capita on the affected population than in other relief efforts.³¹

The colonial regime’s limited funding for famine relief rested upon a broader ideology that limited state intervention in market operations—a laissez-faire economic policy indebted in particular to Adam Smith. Classical political economy, as developed by Smith and his followers, began from the premise that individuals’ unconstrained pursuit of their own interests would necessarily produce the greatest social good. As Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) notes, the state’s role was therefore to avoid regulation of markets, leaving an “invisible hand” to effect both individual good and social benefit. The principle of state nonintervention extended to a “free trade” in food supplies. Smith rejected previous political theory that made securing food a state responsibility, arguing that state actions to fix prices, punish hoarding, or purchase grain risked exacerbating the problem they were intended to solve.³² Such action would only turn “dearth,” which Smith termed an “unavoidable misfortune,” into a full-scale famine. As a case in point, Smith wrote about the East India Company’s market interventions in Bengal in 1770, claiming that “famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of a dearth.”³³ State intervention in food markets was thus not only futile but also harmful. These doctrines became increasingly important to how colonial administrators approached famine in India, as they had in Ireland. Although Smith’s ideas did not provide a detailed blueprint for each specific case of famine, a devotion to free-market ideologies built the foundation of nineteenth-century famine policy in colonial India.³⁴

Within this longer history of colonial famine and its administration, the famine of 1876–78 marked a watershed moment. Like its predecessors, the famine was prompted most immediately by a disruption in the monsoon rains. This disruption—likely caused by an El Niño southern oscillation pattern—was exceptionally severe, of the sort to occur only once in two hundred or even five hundred years.³⁵ The crisis was unprecedented in its geographic scale and impacted districts previously considered immune to famine. Still, as in other famines, affected districts did not suffer from an absolute lack of food; with a sharp rise in food prices in late 1876, however, many people found themselves unable to buy food or to access it in other ways.³⁶ Contemporaries recognized this distinction. Thus, writing in December 1876, one correspondent for the Marathi newspaper Dnyan Prakash argued that “the present distress cannot, in strict truth, be called a scarcity of food.… The real fact is that, the suffering people have no power of purchasing food, and therefore, they are experiencing all the horrors of a famine.”³⁷

In piecemeal fashion, local and provincial governments began to institute relief measures. As the crisis worsened in the early months of 1877, the Indian government grew concerned about the growing cost of these efforts and attempted to rein in expenditures by appointing Richard Temple as its famine delegate. Within months, Temple followed his mandate to curtail the number of people receiving state support, increase labor requirements on relief works, and reduce the food and cash wages offered in exchange for this labor. The goal, on some level, was to make relief as unpleasant as possible, so as to minimize the number of people who sought assistance. Men, women, and children over ages seven or eight were required to pass a “distance test” for relief, which meant they had to travel at least ten miles away from their homes to be eligible for support.³⁸ Once arrived at the relief camps, applicants were tested for their physical fitness, sometimes via blows to the chest. If deemed capable of work, they would labor in gangs to complete assigned tasks; partial completion would mean only a partial wage. Those determined to be unfit for manual labor were eligible for charitable relief, which was distributed under punitive conditions that could include forced residence in camps.

Famine-affected populations resisted these measures in multiple ways, such as refusing to seek state relief and even going on strike to protest wages and conditions on the relief works.³⁹ In the meantime, the crisis continued its grim course. By 1878, newspapers reported that people were reduced to eating inedible foods, and even the carcasses of dead animals.⁴⁰ Families were being destroyed, lamented the Paschima Taraka and Kerala Pataka in October 1878, as “parental and other natural affections and sympathies are losing their force.”⁴¹ Eager to end its relief administration as soon as possible, the government declared the famine over with the onset of some seasonal rains in 1878. For people who had lost their cattle, seed, and tools, however, there was no clear end to the crisis, whose effects were long-standing even after the government declaration.

The scope of the disaster provoked an administrative reckoning in its aftermath. The British government appointed a Famine Commission to investigate the causes and consequences of the crisis and, in 1880, instituted its first official Famine Code. This document, which David Arnold terms “one of the most significant administrative measures devised during the entire period of British rule in India,” would set state policy for decades to come.⁴² It helped to enshrine Smith’s ideas about the primacy of the market in grappling with famines, while regularizing systems of relief administration. In retrospect, then, the famine of 1876–78 was the last to occur before the development of more fixed policies. It afforded officials “their last chance to dispute the adequacy of cost-cutting relief, or to challenge presuppositions about the famine process and the population” before official positions on these issues limited the scope of debate.⁴³ Therefore, although famine policy was not unchanging in later decades, this crisis prompted the articulation of principles and practices that would have a long life in colonial India.

Calibrating the Cost of Life

Among the effects of the famine was a new quantification of life and life processes. Linking famine administration to enumeration as a mode of state power, colonial officials counted the famine in multiple ways. They documented the number of people affected; noted how many had applied for relief; divided this population by sex, age, and bodily capacities; and finally accounted for the number who had died from starvation. Administrators marked increases and decreases in these numbers, calculated the percentage of the population receiving state support, and compared these figures across villages and districts.⁴⁴ In short, numbers were the language with which colonial officials told the story of famine, and numbers shaped how they responded to the crisis. In the process, the lives of famine-affected people became newly quantifiable, and colonial administrators calibrated the cost of saving life against the finances of the imperial government.

On one level, numbers served to document the extent and severity of the famine. A telegram from the viceroy, Lord Lytton, to the secretary of state for India in January 1877 exemplifies this use of numbers. In a few terse sentences, the text notes that the situation was especially grave in Madras Presidency, “where 13 districts out of 21, containing a population of 20 millions,” were affected. The number on relief works was over 840,000, which the author compares with only 250,000 in Bombay. The result was an estimated loss of five million rupees to the Madras revenue, though Bombay was unaltered. The author concludes that through all this there were perhaps “one or two isolated” cases of starvation, but that the government had endeavored to prevent any mortality due to famine.⁴⁵

Numbers also structured the narrative of famine at the level of the individual body. Famine administrators debated the exact amount of food required to sustain the life of famine-affected people. For instance, during his cost-cutting tour of Madras Presidency, Temple pushed to reduce the wages on famine-relief works to just sixteen ounces of grain per day for adult men, with lower amounts for women and children. This shocked observers, who noted that it was less than what the government provided for prisoners in jails, or for laborers sent on ships overseas, neither of whom performed hard manual labor.⁴⁶ Temple’s opponents, most notably the former Madras census commissioner W. R. Cornish, insisted that this wage was insufficient “for the physiological requirements of the body” and it “cannot be said to preserve life, although it may postpone death.”⁴⁷ Cornish drew upon scientific studies and personal observation to argue for anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight ounces, with precisely calibrated ratios of “carboniferous” and “nitrogenous principles” in the food.⁴⁸ Another medical officer documented the insufficiency of food by weighing the inhabitants of famine-relief camps, then compared this data with information obtained from jailed prisoners in the district.⁴⁹

Even as the government thus assigned meaning to the famine through numbers, quantification also offered a language with which to contest the government’s narrative about the famine administration. For instance, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, a civic association supported by some of the Deccan’s largest landholders, conducted its own village-level censuses to counter the state’s claims. Working with village accountants, postmasters, schoolteachers, and retired civil servants, the Sabha gathered data about rainfall, food prices and availability, the condition of cattle, and the numbers of migrant populations. In a series of published “famine narratives,” it documented “disproportionate” rates of birth and death and enumerated starvation deaths to counter the state’s claims that the famine had not resulted in significant mortality.⁵⁰ In response to the sixteen-ounce “Temple wage,” the Sabha generated its own data about the food needs of affected populations and concluded that, with only sixteen ounces, “people starve or are half famished.”⁵¹ Numbers thus became the grounds to evaluate the success or failures of the state’s famine administration.

Most significantly, numbers in the famine administration enabled a precise calculation of the cost of life itself, and a calibration of this cost against the finances of the imperial government. This calculus of life unfolded in debates about famine mortality due to starvation. On the one hand, the government claimed responsibility for preserving the lives of famine-affected populations; in Temple’s terse summation, “Every effort is to be made for the prevention of deaths by famine.”⁵² On the other hand, famine administrators were urged to balance their mandate to save lives with the costs entailed in doing so. In the words of one government missive, “While the necessity of preventing, as far as practicable, death by starvation is paramount, the financial embarrassment which must in any case arise will be most difficult to overcome.”⁵³ Indeed, as Temple added, this “embarrassment of debt” through relief expenditures would be “more fatal to the country than famine itself.”⁵⁴ Administrators sought to manage these contradictions by assuring each other and the public at large that saving all lives was the primary goal of relief efforts, and they claimed success in their implementation. When faced—as they inevitably were—with the deaths of their subjects, they tended to blame epidemic disease rather than starvation. Often, they critiqued individuals’ “obstinacy” in refusing to seek relief, rather than acknowledging that the state’s limited and punitive relief regime contributed to the deaths.⁵⁵ In other words, the finances of the imperial administration would limit the parameters by which lives could be saved or deaths prevented, even as colonial rhetoric insisted that there was only negligible mortality due to famine.

These competing principles—of saving lives or saving imperial finances—resulted in tense negotiations among the upper administration, the lower-level officials who organized famine relief, and famine-affected populations themselves, who demanded a subsistence that exceeded the limited food and wages provided by the state. After much internal discussion, the government of India finally outlined its competing priorities in a careful calibration that measured the state’s financial responsibilities against the lives of its subjects: “Considering that the revenues are barely sufficient to meet the ordinary expenditure of the empire, and that heavy additional taxation is both financially and politically impracticable we must plainly admit that the task of saving life, irrespective of the cost, is one which is beyond our power to undertake.”⁵⁶

This weighing of life against cost produced a kind of economization of life, in which the financial resources required to sustain a population were compared with the value of its life. This calculation was perhaps implicit in ordinary years, but it became especially fraught in the context of famine, as millions of people left their homes, sought relief elsewhere, and succumbed to disease and death. In this moment of crisis, it became necessary for the government of India to make explicit that imperial finances would not allow the sustenance of life under any and all conditions. Critics of the famine administration, notably the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, offered an alternative calculus. Just as they provided numerical data to contest the government’s representation of the famine itself, the Sabha also outlined a different rationale of relief, arguing that it was not an inadequacy of resources but a failure of policy and political will that prevented the state from saving life.⁵⁷

Ultimately, however, even as deaths mounted, the state remained unwilling to embrace the full implications of its own calibration of life, death, and finance. The same memo that announced lives would not be saved “irrespective of cost” concluded that the government could still apply “rules of action” that would allow “efficient assistance” and prevention of mortality.⁵⁸ Though the government had limits to its expenditures, in other words, these expenditures could still save all lives if properly managed. Despite this resolution of the problem on paper, famine mortality was in fact immense, as was recognized by many people at the time and as is perfectly clear in hindsight. Indeed, as the Madras census commissioner acknowledged in the first census conducted after the famine, in 1881, “The mark which that calamity made upon the population was so deep that it stains every column of these [census] returns.”⁵⁹

In sum, the state’s famine administration developed at the particular intersection of new rationales for counting, the consequent emergence of a new idea of the “population,” and the material conditions of crisis and scarcity. My point here is not that counting leads to starvation, or that enumeration practices led directly to famine policies, which is of course not the case. Rather, the new regimes of counting that developed during the late nineteenth century, and the accompanying importance of numbers in the colonial administration, prompted a new economization of life, whereby the benefit of lives saved was calibrated against the cost. Thus, as the “population” became a target of governance, it was also measured against other imperatives of imperial rule. In the specific context of famine in 1876–78, this calibration forced a question about the lives and deaths of people in the Deccan and peninsular India.

Famine and Colonial Malthusianism

Colonial administrators calibrating life in the context of famine found in Malthusian theories of population and reproduction an explanation for the crisis that surrounded them. They were likely familiar with these ideas since Thomas Malthus himself, who served as the first chair of political economy at the East India Company’s training college, had introduced several generations of the Company’s servants to his own theories and to the principles of classical political economy more generally. Even after the closure of the Haileybury College in 1855, political economy remained a required subject in the Indian Civil Service Examinations, thus ensuring that aspiring British administrators in India were educated in the doctrines of Malthus alongside those of Adam Smith.⁶⁰

Like colonial famine administrators, Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population, engaged in a calculus of life that weighed the growth of a population against the costs of its sustenance. This calibration was prompted, for Malthus, by the extension of the English Poor Laws. He argued that systems of poor relief in England subsidized “paupers” regardless of whether they worked, thus acting as a stimulus to their unfettered reproduction. He noted that ordinarily, the poorest classes were most likely to die in a subsistence crisis like a famine; however, poor laws would prevent these deaths while allowing the poor to marry earlier and bear more children. This growing population of the poor would strain the food supply, and under free-market conditions, this would result in rising grain prices. These higher prices, in turn, would make it more difficult for the next higher class to obtain food, and so would raise their mortality. Consequently, Malthus concluded, supporting the poor would only spread poverty to higher classes of society. This somewhat abstract conclusion stood side by side with one of Malthus’s more practical remedies: allowing abandoned illegitimate children to die so as not to swell the ranks of the poor, and forcing their parents to pay for their upbringing if they wanted them to live.⁶¹ It was left to John Stuart Mill, Malthus’s mid-nineteenth-century interpreter, to elevate these claims to the status of utilitarian principle: “Everyone has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people.”⁶² In other words, Malthus and Mill called for the regulation of poor people’s reproduction as a service to the “population” as a whole.

At the center of Malthus’s claim about the population and its reproduction, Catherine Gallagher argues, was a disjuncture between the health of the individual body and that of the body politic. Unlike the ideas of most of his contemporaries, who imagined a correlation between a healthy society and healthy individual members, Malthus’s theories suggested that the health of the individual body would, through reproduction, “eventually generate a feeble social organism.” As a result, “the healthy, and consequently reproducing, body … is a harbinger of the disordered society of starving bodies.”⁶³ To check this disorder, Malthus offered the remedy of sexual continence. Foreshadowing late nineteenth-century imperial discourses that linked sexual control to white, bourgeois masculinity, Malthus regarded sexual continence “as a criterion of civilization and even a major element in the civilizing process.”⁶⁴ Thus, although Malthus may not have called himself a philosopher of sexuality, his concerns about overpopulation were intimately connected to fears about the oversexuality of poor and “uncivilized” classes and nations. In Mervyn Nicholson’s terms, “population in Malthus’s text is also a codeword for sex: the result (population) stands metonymically for its cause (sex).”⁶⁵ The sexuality of the poor, by resulting in overreproduction, becomes a powerful threat to a status quo that divides the propertied and laboring classes, the civilized from the uncivilized. Moreover, as Alison Bashford demonstrates in her “spatial history of Malthusianism,” population was rendered overpopulation for Malthus when it surpassed the food-producing capacities of available land; that is, reproductive sex became a problem when it overturned the balance with space.⁶⁶ Consequently, in a Malthusian calibration of life, sexuality and reproduction were balanced against land and economy.

By the late nineteenth century, some British administrators, especially at the higher levels, looked to Malthusian theories to explain famine. They understood events in India as proof of Malthus’s argument that population would overrun its means of subsistence. Administrators speculated that the colony had already reached a Malthusian limit and that population was out of balance with the land available. In the midst of famine in 1877, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, made these concerns public, suggesting that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.”⁶⁷ In the aftermath of the famine, the government-appointed Famine Commission reinforced Lytton’s assessment, concluding that “the numbers who have no other employment than agriculture, are in large parts of the country greatly in excess of what is needed for the thorough cultivation of the land.”⁶⁸ The balance between sex and space had been overturned.

This assessment of Indian overpopulation did not depend upon any demonstrable increase in population numbers. Too little information existed, in any case, for contemporaries to make definitive claims about whether or not population was increasing, since census data was just beginning to be collected. We know in retrospect, however, that in most parts of the subcontinent, population was relatively stagnant between 1870 and 1920, though there was some slow growth after 1880. We know, as well, that there was substantial regional variation in population growth rates. According to Sumit Guha, peninsular and eastern India witnessed relatively rapid growth between 1800 and 1870, whereas the central Indo-Gangetic plain did not experience a similar population increase.⁶⁹ However, more than numbers, the fact of famine itself seemed to provide colonial administrators with proof of overpopulation. They suggested that the death of so many Indian peasants confirmed that the land they inhabited could not sustain all those who depended upon it. Such was the view of James Caird, an agricultural scientist and member of the Famine Commission. “The greatest difficulty with which the Indian statesman is confronted,” Caird wrote in 1879, “is over-population, with constant increase.” This was a problem, since India was a “country already full of people, whose habits and religion promote increase without restraint.”⁷⁰ One of Caird’s correspondents went even further. Famine in Madras and the Deccan, he argued, was due to the “radical dangers and ultimate result of Indian social life and habits.” Specifically, he claimed that “Malthusian practice of marriage,” by which he may have meant reproduction without regard to population growth, was pursued “without the slightest reference to the consequences.” Only “nature” could restore the balance by carrying off “tens of millions” through repeated famines.⁷¹

This image of the overly prolific and hypersexual “native” is not new to scholars of imperial history, who have demonstrated that the production of a racialized, bourgeois, and masculine European sexuality was premised on an “other” that was not white, not bourgeois, and not masculine.⁷² Colonial representations of famine contributed to this sexual discourse by bringing Indian conjugal and reproductive practices forcefully into the realm of economy; they held the “native” responsible not only for sexual perversion but also for his or her own poverty and starvation. As the undersecretary of state for India, Louis Mallet, thus concluded, “a people with such practices as prevail in India with regard to marriage and inheritance must be miserable.”⁷³ This supposed connection between reproduction and famine appears starkly in a document that one historian terms the “most Malthusian” in colonial famine administration. In a memo to Viceroy Lord Ripon, Finance Secretary Sir George Couper insisted that the famine was affecting only the lowest stratum of the population: “If the famine mortality in 1879 be tested, it will be found that about 80 per cent of the deaths come from the laboring classes.” These laborers died in large numbers, but “still they reproduce themselves with sufficient rapidity to overcrowd every employment that is opened to them.” In classic Malthusian fashion, Couper argued that keeping this class alive would only push wages down further while threatening the classes above it. Indeed, Couper concluded, any change in famine policy that would maintain the laboring classes “to the full span of human existence, without at the same time providing safeguards against their reproduction” would only exacerbate problems of Indian poverty.⁷⁴

In its final report, the Famine Commission brought together these various strands of debate to conclude that British rule in India had changed the balance between life and death in the country. With little empirical evidence, it claimed that British technology and civilization had “fundamentally changed the position of the people for the better” by giving “a check to some of the great causes of mortality among them.” This reduced mortality rate, however, brought its own grave consequences, which the report defined as “an increase of the population” and a “pressure on the means of subsistence.”⁷⁵ In this view, vulnerability to famine was due to population growth brought about by British civilization and was thus a mark of the success of the imperial administration, rather than its failure. In the Famine Commission’s Financial Statement, Sir Evelyn Baring made this point even more directly, noting that “every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine … serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”⁷⁶ Too many lives saved through famine relief would only increase poor people’s reproductive capacities. Thus, when life was calibrated against the price of its sustenance, reproduction threatened to tip the balance—to push the scales into a Malthusian “overpopulation.” In the context of famine, reproduction thus became an economic cost that had to be accounted for.

Marriage and National Malthusianism

In the waning days of famine, the Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha similarly counted reproduction as an economic cost in an article titled “Over-Population and Marriage Customs.” Appearing alongside the Sabha’s detailed “famine narratives” about the impact of the crisis on specific villages and districts, the article took a more expansive view on the causes and consequences of famine in India. The author, who remained anonymous, suggested that Hindu marriage practices had led to the rapid growth of population, which in turn exacerbated the country’s poverty and ultimately led to famine. Consequently, he argued, “among the principal causes of the brutal ignorance and degraded poverty and pauperism of the people of India must be reckoned the Hindu law and custom of marriage.” It was a “source of fearful diseases and plagues, and of more fearful famines.” Having witnessed the terrible suffering of the famine’s victims, the author concluded that it was time to make radical changes in Indian reproductive practices.⁷⁷

The anonymous author of “Over-Population and Marriage Customs” was likely Mahadev Govind Ranade, a lawyer and judge active in Poona’s public life who was among the chief architects of Indian economic nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Ranade was a founding member of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1876, and he played a leading role in the organization’s efforts to collect information about the famine. The Quarterly Journal was created at his instigation.⁷⁸ The article reflects this kind of personal experience with the famine, which the author describes as having “seen with our own eyes.”⁷⁹ It also resonates with Ranade’s developing critique of colonial political economy and with his documented attempts to reform marriage practices. Thus, although I have not located definitive proof of authorship, I follow other historians in suggesting that Ranade is the most likely author of the text.⁸⁰

Ranade’s article welds his rejection of Hindu marriage practices to a critique of the political economy of colonial rule. Beginning from the Malthusian premise that there was an “over-growth” of population in India, as evidenced by the recent famine, Ranade argues that the country could no longer sustain its rate of reproduction. Whereas population growth may have been necessary in earlier eras of human history, the constraints of colonialism now mandated a new balance between the life of the population and its economic prospects. In other words, Indian reproduction had to account for the country’s poverty. In terms that anticipated the economic nationalist critique that Ranade would develop—alongside Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and others—“Over-Population and Marriage Customs” indicts colonial economic policy as the chief cause of this poverty. India’s unfavorable balance of trade with Britain, alongside the “home charges” that funded the colonial administration, had drained the country’s savings. Meanwhile, the imperial government supported the interests of the British textile industry at the expense of Indian manufacturing, thus “inflict[ing] upon the land all the evils, without most of the blessings of a so-called free trade policy.” Ranade also lamented soil exhaustion due to “pauper cultivation” and lambasted the “stress of rack-rent and rigid [land revenue] settlements” that had forced peasants to cultivate uncultivable land. Finally, the government had not encouraged emigration as a means to relieve the pressures on the land. By listing these factors, the article challenges Malthusian arguments that stressed a natural propensity of all species to reproduce beyond their means of subsistence. Instead, Ranade develops a historical critique of colonial policies making the population unsustainable. He insists that the problem in colonial India has been, more than any “natural” increase in numbers, the “slow development of [the population’s] means of subsistence” under British rule.⁸¹ Indian reproduction only magnified a poverty whose fundamental origins were found in the colonial economy.

Given these impoverished conditions, Ranade argues, it became imperative that Indians reform their marriage practices. For “in these days, no-body will be prepared to dispute the position that the law and custom of marriage in any country are closely connected with the economical condition of the bulk of its population.”⁸² Such recognition was prompted, for Ranade, by the fact of famine itself: “If the multiplication of the population had not been encouraged and ensured by the supposed sanction of religion and caste opinion, and each man and woman had been left to exercise a prudential restraint on the instinct of propagation, there would not have been such helplessness and such fearful pauperism in this country, nor such devastating famines.”⁸³ Ranade targeted two conjugal customs that prevented this “prudential restraint” on propagation: marriages that occurred before puberty and universal marriage. The custom of prepuberty marriage violated true Hindu tradition, which insisted on four “Ashrams or divisions of human life.” Of these four, the married condition was only one, and for Ranade, it lasted “between the age of 20 and 45 years of a man’s life.” Before and after those years, he maintained that “the single or celibate life is enjoined as a virtue and a duty upon all.” But in contemporary times, people had ignored this call to celibacy by marrying girls even before puberty and commencing sexual intimacy soon thereafter and thus had increased their numbers rapidly. This increase was exacerbated by an imperative for universal marriage. In contrast to Europe, where peasants would not marry unless they could provide for children, Ranade claims, Indian peasants believed that “their religion inculcates marriage as a sacred duty.”⁸⁴

From this perspective, Indian “overpopulation” was the product of a specific intersection of colonial policies with customary conjugal practices of universal and prepuberty marriage. The article called upon readers to question these practices as a way to bring reproduction in line with colonial economic constraints. For Ranade, such a shift in marriage could not occur via legislation by a foreign government; it required the “educated and reflective” among the native population to change public opinion among the masses.⁸⁵ He figures the middle-class intelligentsia—men very much like himself—as the central historical actors, capable of effecting change in the reproductive sexualities and economic fortunes of its “own” peasantry. Despite their political disenfranchisement, and without access to financial capital, these men could still intervene in the economic life of the nation through the reform of marriage.

I term Ranade’s intervention a national rereading of Malthus because it adopts core Malthusian principles about population but refutes colonial discourses that claimed Indian overpopulation was the sole cause for poverty. This endeavor to theorize overpopulation and poverty in the context of specific colonial conditions parallels Ranade’s more influential work on political economy, in which he proposed an Indian inquiry that challenged the supposedly universal principles of the discipline.⁸⁶ The result, in “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” is a reading of Indian reproduction that is at once pro-Malthusian and anticolonial. Moreover, in mobilizing a middle-class intelligentsia to transform the nation’s reproductive practices, the text sidelines the colonial regime and centers a section of the Indian population as the agents of change for the nation. Ranade understands marriage reform as offering “economic” advantage, insofar as it can reduce famine and impoverishment. These reforms also offered “cultural” benefits, since they returned Hindus to their earlier traditions of celibacy and sexual restraint and, as he argued elsewhere, were necessary on moral and humanitarian grounds. Consequently, the text’s national Malthusianism joins together arguments about economic policies and cultural practices in India—about colonial impoverishment and indigenous marriage—to stake its claims about reproduction and population.

Just a few years after the publication of “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” these connections among marriage, population, and economy reappeared in one of the most significant public interventions on Hindu-Indian conjugality in the late nineteenth century, Behramji Malabari’s “Notes on Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood” (1884). Malabari, a Parsi publicist and reformer residing in Bombay, made a forceful plea to end the practice of marrying Hindu girls before puberty and supported the remarriage of Hindu “child widows.” He circulated his “Notes” among British administrators and Western-educated Indians and received numerous responses. This marked the beginning of a fraught debate about child marriage that would consume public attention during the 1880s and early 1890s, eventually leading to the Age of Consent Act of 1891, which legislated a minimum age of consent of twelve for all girls in British India.

Like Ranade, Malabari insisted that the marriage of girls before puberty held grave economic consequences for India. The practice resulted in “a too early consummation of the nuptial troth … the birth of sickly children, the necessity of feeding too many mouths, poverty and dependence.”⁸⁷ Taken together, these individual catastrophes contributed to a national crisis of poverty caused by overpopulation: “Here we are confronted with that grave economic problem—over-population in poverty. If over-population is felt as an evil in advanced and wealthy countries, where natural and artificial means exist to hold it in check, what must be the effect of over-population in a poor and backward country, where the evil is actively stimulated by unnatural means?”⁸⁸ These “unnatural means”—prepuberty marriage—produced a rapidly growing population that a country like India was ill equipped to handle. Because of these “economic” consequences of Hindu conjugality, as I noted in the introduction, Malabari called for the colonial state to legislate a minimum age of marriage for girls. A foreign government might hesitate to intervene in the cultural or religious practices of its subjects, Malabari conceded, but surely it could not ignore the “economic phase of the evil.” Indeed, the low age of marriage threatened both the wealth and the governability of the Indian colony: “Taking infant marriage as a purely economic question, as a source of over-population and consequent disturbances, can the State do nothing to check it?”⁸⁹ Thus, in Malabari’s hands, marriage became a legitimate public question, subject to a foreign government’s jurisdiction, precisely because of its connections to population and poverty. However, in contrast to Ranade’s “Over-Population and Marriage Customs,” the “Notes” did not offer a simultaneous critique of both colonial impoverishment and prolific reproduction; Malabari indicted “infant marriage” while exonerating the policies of free-trade imperialism. Following from this argument, the Indian middle class did not figure as the agents of reform. Instead, Malabari’s critique of prepuberty marriage prompted new engagements with the state.

Malabari’s Malthusian analysis of Indian conjugality remained largely unquestioned among his respondents. Neither supporters nor opponents disputed his assertion that “infant marriage” increased the population by leading to motherhood soon after puberty or that population growth impoverished families and the nation. According to Keshavlal Madhavdas, for example, early marriages became customary at a time of “great prosperity in India and abundance of food, so that no one cared for increase in the number of family members.” The custom was ill suited to the less prosperous present, when “the wealth of India is being diverted into several channels by which it flows abroad.”⁹⁰ Others identified additional economic impacts of “infant marriage.” For Gopalrao Hari Deshmukh, early marriage led to universal marriage among Hindus. Echoing Ranade’s suggestion that some people ought to remain unmarried, Deshmukh lamented that every country required “a number of bachelors who could venture upon enterprise, foreign travel, & c.” However, in India, this was impossible since “every man has a family. Even little boys are burdened with wives and children.”⁹¹ The result of these conjugal practices was a country in which people were unfit for either agriculture or trade and lived in conditions of poverty and economic stagnation.

Among the best-known respondents to Malabari’s “Notes” was Ranade himself. While assuring Malabari of his support, Ranade questioned whether economic considerations alone would provide sufficient motivation for changes in marriage customs. He suggested that “mere considerations of expediency or economical calculations of gains or losses can never nerve a community to undertake and carry through social reforms” in marriage. This is a curious argument, given the contents of “Over-Population and Marriage Customs.” Perhaps disappointed by the failure of his own economic arguments to promote change in marriage practices, Ranade seems to be rethinking the wisdom of this strategy just a few years later. Without refuting his national Malthusianism, Ranade instead speculates that fears about poverty or the promise of prosperity would not convince people to change sexual customs that mandated prepuberty marriage. Anxiety about overpopulation, in short, would not convince anyone to postpone their marriage. Instead, for Ranade, “only a religious revival” could offer the “moral strength” to make lasting and fundamental reform in Hindu conjugality.⁹² He calls for religion, rather than economic rationality, to be the basis of reproductive reform.

In immediate terms, Ranade’s forecast was correct. The late nineteenth-century battle over child marriage was fought not over “economical calculations,” but in the terms of an emergent Hindu cultural nationalism. Public attention focused less on claims about poverty or overpopulation and more on the situation of the child bride, heralded as a symbol of Hindu tradition but also of a degradation of that tradition. Two specific cases brought these debates to a head. In 1889, the ten-year-old Phulmoni died after sexual intercourse with her adult husband, Hari Mohan Maiti. Maiti’s trial received widespread media coverage, propelling the case into the heart of questions about the nature of child marriage and its wider implications for Hindu society. Equally controversial was the case of Rakhmabai, a former child bride who, at age twenty, refused to live with her husband on the grounds of personal incompatibility. Here, too, questions about the “consent” of child brides reverberated across wider debates about the nature of Hindu marriage. As Tanika Sarkar demonstrates, these debates engaged in complex negotiations of community and individual rights. Linking the fate of the “Hindu wife” to that of a “Hindu nation,” they helped to produce a new cultural nationalist politics in the late nineteenth century.⁹³

Meanwhile, even as the child marriage debates provoked a distinct cultural nationalism, nationalists also began to delineate “the economy” in new ways. A pivotal figure in this emerging economic nationalism was Dadabhai Naoroji, who expressly rejected Malthusian thinking about population and reproduction in his major work, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). A former mathematics professor, Naoroji drew upon regimes of quantification and measurement in his number-filled analysis of the causes of Indian poverty, concluding that a “drain of wealth” from India to Britain left the colony impoverished. To make this argument, Naoroji had to contend with colonial discourses that looked to overpopulation as the primary cause of Indian poverty. Claims that India was overpopulated, he insisted, were merely a “favorite excuse” of “Anglo-Indians.”⁹⁴ Under current conditions, he wrote, “it is absurd to talk of over-population—i.e., the country’s incapability by its food or other produce, to supply the means of support to its people—if the country is unceasingly and forcibly deprived of its means of capital. Let the country keep what it produces, for only then can any right judgment be formed whether it is over-populated or not.”⁹⁵ Conditions in India were thus not the result of “economic laws” of free trade or population growth but of the “pitiless perversion” of these laws under British rule.⁹⁶

Naoroji’s rejection of Malthusian analysis helped to frame the Indian economy as a site of critique that stood apart from marriage and sexuality. Therefore, for Naoroji, unlike for Ranade or Malabari, the problem of poverty could not be addressed by a middle-class intelligentsia that reformed their own marriages, their own bodies, and their “own” peasantry. There was no biopolitical solution, in other words, to the economic problems posed by a colonial drain of wealth.⁹⁷ Instead, Poverty and Un-British Rule insists that “the economy” must be addressed and transformed prior to any consideration of questions about overpopulation and reproduction. Consequently, Naoroji offers no recuperation of Malthus, repurposed in the name of national economic development; the text’s critique of colonial and national Malthusianisms, and their attendant reproductive politics, charts a different terrain of struggle.

Birth Control in an Imperial World

While concerns about Indian famine prompted men like Ranade and Malabari to call for reforms in Indian marriage, and for Naoroji to excoriate a colonial drain of wealth, the same conjuncture helped to fuel a campaign for birth control led by a woman, Annie Besant. Her campaign began from the familiar Malthusian premise that human reproduction would increase beyond its means of subsistence, but Besant also brought something radically new to the reproductive politics of the late nineteenth century. That is, she called for control over reproductive capacities not via raising the age of marriage or encouraging celibacy but through contraception. Moreover, although Besant was based in London, her case for birth control depended on India. Arguing that the recent Indian famine provided proof that the colony was overpopulated, she recommended contraception as the best remedy to prevent the starvation of many millions of Indians. Controlling births, in other words, was the best means to bring the Indian population into balance with food and finance. In this way, Besant’s campaign for birth control rendered contraception into a reproductive technology that claimed to address the economies of impoverishment in an imperial world.

Besant insisted that birth control was the best means to regulate reproduction since it enabled the expression of “natural desire” while controlling its consequences.⁹⁸ In her trial defense when charged with obscenity for publishing Knowlton’s birth control manual, Besant thus argued that any attempt to delay marriage or enforce celibacy was bound to fail because it ignored sexual desire. Meanwhile, poor people, both in Britain and across its empire, suffered the most from these failures, since they lived in conditions where there was “food enough for two but not enough for twelve.”⁹⁹ Under these circumstances, Besant called birth control the only rational response to poverty. She and her supporters termed this argument a “neo-Malthusian” call for contraception, since it adopted Malthus’s arguments about population but rejected his ideas about birth control. At her trial, Besant built this case meticulously, citing Malthus as well as his utilitarian followers, including John Stuart Mill, to make what she termed an economic case for reproductive regulation.

Following her acquittal, Besant continued her campaign for birth control. She and Charles Bradlaugh founded a Malthusian League in July 1877, with the goal of spreading “among the people by lectures, cheap books, leaflets, and all practicable means a knowledge of the law of population, and of its practical application.”¹⁰⁰ The League’s first members were drawn from the Defence Committee constituted in support of Bradlaugh and Besant during their trial, but Besant invited others to join, especially the “poor, above all for whom the struggle is being fought.”¹⁰¹ While building the Malthusian League, Besant also authored The Law of Population, a text she hoped might replace Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy. The pamphlet explained the mechanism of fertilization and listed several birth control techniques, including condoms, withdrawal, and Besant’s most favored method, the contraceptive sponge.¹⁰² The text appeared with advertisements about contraceptive devices, and Besant herself recommended specific types of syringes, sponges, and pessaries and provided information about where to obtain them. The Law of Population was immensely successful, selling 40,000 copies in its first three years.¹⁰³ By 1891, it had sold 175,000 copies in England, had been reprinted in the United States and Australia, and had been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, and French—making it among the most widely circulated tracts on contraception in its time.¹⁰⁴ Although Besant’s text was not an official publication of the Malthusian League, the organization advertised and distributed it, recommending it especially to those who sought “practical advice” on contraceptive methods.¹⁰⁵

Indian famine gave energy and urgency to Besant’s argument that birth control would bring reproduction into balance with the economy. In terms that would have been familiar to colonial administrators, she wrote that British rule had lowered mortality in India, even while Indian reproductive practices encouraged prolific growth. The result was famine: “It appears that our civilization in India, taking away the ordinary natural checks to population, and introducing no others in their stead, brings about a famine which has already destroyed more than 500,000 in one Presidency alone, and has thrown about one-and-a-half million more on charity.” These circumstances put India in an untenable bind: “the law of population is ‘an irrefragable truth’ and these people are starved to death according to natural law; early marriages, large families, these are the premises; famine and disease, these are the conclusions.”¹⁰⁶ Prefiguring the findings of the government’s Famine Commission Report, Besant opined that Indian practices of marriage led inevitably to rapid reproduction and that, in the absence of Malthusian “positive” or “preventive” checks, famine was the necessary result. Yet whereas colonial administrators and famine commissioners had merely lamented this fact or suggested policies of emigration and agricultural modernization, Besant turned to birth control for a solution. Indeed, given Indian conditions, contraception was even more important for the Indian colony than for the British metropole. In Besant’s terms, “Even our philanthropy [in famine relief] is misjudged and but aggravates the evil it seeks to allay. Our rebellion against the teaching of Malthus and [John Stuart] Mill is sad enough in its effects at home; in India it promises a harvest of two hundred millions in starvelings.”¹⁰⁷ In other words, for Besant Indian conditions of famine fueled a Malthusian campaign for birth control both at “home” in England and more widely across the British Empire and the world.

In making this neo-Malthusian argument, Besant turned away from potential alternative frameworks of contraceptive advocacy, namely the sexual radicalism of early European socialist movements and the campaigns of Victorian feminists. Besant was familiar with Owenite socialism through her work with the National Secular Society and was undoubtedly aware of the movement’s call for the collectivization of reproductive labor and commitments to “the liberation of sexual pleasure from the burdens of procreation.”¹⁰⁸ Her defense of sexuality as a “natural” and necessary part of human existence for both men and women gestured to these Owenite ideals, and she retained this argument both in her trial and in The Law of Population. Besant was equally aware of the Victorian feminist movement, which, though it did not support birth control, developed a powerful critique of marital norms.¹⁰⁹ She was a vocal advocate for women’s rights in her own personal life and wrote at length about women’s inequality in marriage. Nevertheless, in her contraceptive advocacy, Besant avoided such critiques and argued instead that birth control would support earlier marriage and more genuinely monogamous conjugality. Her relentless attention to the doctrines of Malthus posited birth control as a scientific response to the economic problems of empire.

On one level, this neo-Malthusian framework of birth control advocacy offered Besant a way to challenge Victorian assumptions that deemed public discussion of sexuality, especially by a woman, to be obscene. The references to poverty and its alleviation in the Indian colony cloaked her support for contraception in more respectable vestments. Birth control was now harnessed to a mission of civilizational uplift and imperial responsibility. Moreover, her focus on poor and starving people situated Besant firmly within nineteenth-century humanitarian discourse on hunger, which marked starvation as the product of an unjust society.¹¹⁰ As I have argued elsewhere, all this may have lent her birth control advocacy an aura of respectability and greater acceptance at a moment when, in both her personal and her political life, Besant faced accusations of sexual immorality and unfit motherhood.¹¹¹ Yet on another level, the choice to link birth control so firmly to famine and Malthusian overpopulation had far-reaching implications. Beyond simply energizing a Malthusian worldview, her argument made birth control a critical component of debate about the causes, consequences, and remedies for poverty. At a moment when new imperial axes of inequality were being crystallized, Besant called attention to Indian famine as a critical imperial problem and offered birth control as a solution. In other words, she suggested that contraception was a necessary feature of struggle against poverty in the British Empire. If this logic sounds startlingly contemporary, this is perhaps because it is. By the mid-twentieth century, as we shall see in later chapters, contraception had become a critical component of population control campaigns that claimed to target “Third World” poverty. Decades earlier, by referencing the famine in India, Besant was among the first to make birth control a tool for poverty alleviation, thus articulating a relationship between reproductive regulation and economic prosperity that would prove enduring.

Even as India came to figure so prominently in Besant’s case for birth control, Indian writers and publicists also became important to the imperial circulation of neo-Malthusian ideas. Their participation helped to validate claims that overpopulation was an Indian problem and shaped the contours of an imperial contraceptive advocacy. The Besant-Bradlaugh trial, reported extensively in the English-language media in India, offered one site for this circulation of ideas.¹¹² Indian responses to the trial centered on Madras, a city profoundly affected by the famine. In the wake of the trial, the Philosophic Inquirer, a “weekly Anglo-Tamil Freethought journal” published in Madras and edited by Murugesa Mudaliar, contacted the Malthusian League in London to praise the “neo-Malthusian views so steadfastly and so bravely held by Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant.”¹¹³ The League’s official publication, the Malthusian, responded with its “hearty greeting to our fellow labourers and brethren of the new Malthusian faith in Hindostan.”¹¹⁴ Mudaliar thereafter joined the League’s international correspondents—drawn primarily from European countries and Australia—in circulating neo-Malthusian propaganda. He requested copies of the Malthusian League’s pamphlets and in 1880 became a vice president of the League, thus occupying an important place in the organization’s claim to connect neo-Malthusians globally.¹¹⁵

Mudaliar and the Philosophic Inquirer accepted Besant’s insistence on the centrality of India in the supposedly global crisis of overpopulation, but the journal also charted out the specifics of India’s population problem. In a striking parallel to Ranade’s and Malabari’s interventions, the journal identified child marriage as the central Malthusian issue among Hindus. According to an article by the pseudonymous “Veritas,” “ever since the birth of the Code of Manu, the system and practice of early marriage is viewed by the faith-bound Hindus with a favorable eye.” As a result, “the country is deplorably laboring under the burden of over-population, and the misery the laboring classes are suffering from is so enormously greater in magnitude that all our attempts to depict them in detail are an utter failure.” Even the “great diminution [of population], owing to the late monstrous famine” in Madras and the Deccan had been insufficient to return a balance between population and resources. Consequently, “Veritas” looked to neo-Malthusianism as a solution to the problem of Hindu reproduction, since “conjugal prudence” would result in fewer children and a smaller population.¹¹⁶ The Malthusian League, for its part, welcomed this message for its importance to the “teeming nations” of India.¹¹⁷

These nascent connections between neo-Malthusians in Madras and London took additional institutional form in 1882 with the founding of the Madras Malthusian League, an organization whose principles were the “same as those of the Parent League of London.”¹¹⁸ The Madras League was established just five years after its English counterpart and a mere four years after the official end of the famine, but there is little in the historical record attesting to the activities of the organization or its founders, Muthiah Naidu, Lakshmi Narasu, and Mooneswamy Naiker.¹¹⁹ Yet the very existence of the Madras League, its goal of propagating contraception, and its stated affiliation with the Malthusian League in London are significant. Rooted both in the historical experience of famine in Madras and the Deccan and in an emergent neo-Malthusian discourse, in which India played a critical role, the Madras Malthusian League suggests the contours of a reproductive politics that connected an Indian economy to Indian sexual practices and that moved from the Indian colony to the British metropole and back again.

Besant herself would eventually move to India, but not as a birth control activist. After meeting the occultist and philosopher Helena Blavatsky in 1890, Besant shifted away from her radical secular politics and became a member of the Theosophical Society. In that capacity, she traveled to India, where she became president of the organization, and lived in Madras, where its international headquarters were located. Active in Indian nationalist politics, she became a leader of the Home Rule League during World War I and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. Besant’s shifting political and geographic locations changed her reproductive politics as well, and in 1891, she withdrew The Law of Population from circulation. Writing of her decision in Theosophy and the Law of Population in 1896, Besant did not completely disavow her earlier Malthusian concerns with poverty, and she acknowledged that birth control might serve as a “palliative” for the poor. However, as a theosophist, she claimed to look away from the “material plane” that had been the basis of her support for birth control in the 1870s and proposed that control over “sexual instincts” was “the task to which humanity should set itself.” Foreshadowing Gandhi’s more famous call for brahmacharya, Besant called for “self-restraint within marriage” and rejected birth control. Removing reproduction from a question about economy, Theosophy and the Law of Population looked instead to “spiritual intelligence” to make change.¹²⁰ Yet, despite Besant’s ultimate rejection of birth control, her neo-Malthusian claims about famine, poverty, and contraception continued to resonate throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As we shall see in the following chapters, some of India’s earliest birth control advocates would draw inspiration from Besant, both in her contraceptive advocacy and in her Indian nationalism. While Besant herself never brought these parts of her life together, her successors would eventually call for contraception as a means for nationalist economic progress.

Conclusion

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, conditions in India prompted a rearticulation of reproduction as an economic question. This new economy of reproduction depended, in part, upon a new regime of numbers, which quantified the population and made it a target of administration. These processes of quantification occurred in the context of famine, and this, too, shaped how reproduction entered into public debate. As famine seemed to provide empirical proof of Malthusian theories, the colonial state weighed the life of the population against the costs of its sustenance. Within this calibration of life, colonial administrators like Richard Temple and Indian reformers like M. G. Ranade represented population as an economic cost and suggested that reforming reproductive practice to control population growth would bring economic benefit. This was the context that enabled Malabari to demand colonial legislation on child marriage as an economic question and supported Annie Besant’s conviction that birth control could remedy poverty in the British Empire. In short, reforming reproductive practices seemed to promise a way to grapple with the period’s major crises of subsistence.

Reproduction was economized even as the broad contours of a new economic nationalism took shape in late nineteenth-century India. Ranade and Naoroji, among others, made the emergent category of the economy foundational to a national imaginary. In other words, they could imagine India as a bounded territorial entity, as a nation-in-the-making, in part through demarcating its national economy. This vision of the national economy, as Manu Goswami argues, emerged from a critique of colonialism and classical political economy, alongside a “naturalization of the interlinked categories of nation, economy, and territory.”¹²¹ Consequently, the question of reproduction was not asked and answered in preexisting economic terms. Rather, what “the economy” was—what it included and excluded, how it mapped onto India as nation and territorial entity—was being worked out even as reproduction was economized. These categories of thought overlapped and were co-constituted.

Ultimately, however, the dominant strands of Indian economic nationalism moved away from reproduction, and from Malthusian population theories in their critique of colonialism. Ranade himself would keep his work in “social reform”—regarding practices of child marriage, widow remarriage, or religious custom—largely distinct from his theories of Indian political economy. His ideas in “Over-Population and Marriage Customs” thus did not reappear in his major interventions in the field.¹²² Organizations like the Madras Malthusian League, which centered reproduction in their analysis of Indian poverty, were likely short-lived. Malabari’s campaigns against infant marriage eventually turned toward “religion” and “culture” as key battlegrounds. Even Besant—perhaps the most committed Malthusian—would disavow her own advocacy of both Malthus and birth control as she joined the cause of Indian nationalism.

Yet the economizing of reproduction that first emerged in the context of famine in the late nineteenth century would have a long life in colonial and postcolonial India. In particular, the notion that Indian conjugality contributed to Indian impoverishment endured across the decades and was taken up both by reformers and by defenders of the status quo. As the next chapter demonstrates, this idea gained new life during the interwar decades, when feminist and eugenic movements recentered reproduction within a national body politic.