Demographic Trends in Western Bengal, 1881-1951

In India, historical demography as a branch of academics is sufficiently rich. The works of eminent demographers, e.g. Kingsley Davis, Pravin and Leela Visaria, and Tim Dyson, to mention a few, are significant. However, a study on historical demography related to Western Bengal is rather scant and sketchy. Moreover, it is largely confined to studying the demography of famine, where the works of Amartya Sen, PR. Greengough and Arup Maharatna, are noteworthy. In this regard, it must be also mentioned that literature on historical demography in western Bengal has not been analysed adequately at the district level, and thereby it has fallen short in establishing the linkages with fertility, mortality, and migration during 1881-1951. In hindsight, it can of course be mentioned that both an incomplete registration system as well as lack of reliable demographic and socio-economic data at the district level has been the biggest debilitating factors in this direction. The present study is a modest attempt to establish trends and patterns of population growth and its characteristics between 1881 and 1951 in western Bengal in general and their district-level variations in particular. Trends and patterns of vital statistics such as population growth, sex-ratio, proportion married, fertility, mortality, and migration at the aggregative level would be undertaken in this analysis. Additionally, inter-district variations of these parameters will be explored to the extent possible. An attempt would also be made to ascertain the relationship between the aforesaid population parameters and certain socio-economic characteristics such as literacy, occupation and workforce participation, religious affiliation, etc. The study primarily uses census data for the successive decades from 1881 to 1951. Moreover, information from the Annual Sanitary Commission's Reports and Public Health Reports of the colonial government for successive years, in addition to other secondary literature including computation of various vital rates made in these studies, are also analysed. The findings of this study have been presented in four sections. Section-1 deals with selected trends of population statistics, while section-2 focuses on trends in fertility indicators and associated proximate determinants at the aggregative level and their inter-district variations. In sections 3 and 4, we have tried to find out trends in mortality indicators, and urbanization and migration respectively along with factors responsible for such trends. Here, it is important to mention three major limitations of the present study. Although western Bengal has undergone territorial reconfiguration during the colonial and early postcolonial periods, the present study considers only the core areas, which continued to be a part of western Bengal in the post-Partition (1947) period. Thus, small territorial changes have not been accounted for in the present study. Secondly, Dyson argued that the two major problems with using Indian census data, particularly, census age distributions, which are gross age distortions and information on infant and child mortality, are unreliable. As noted by Arjun Adlakha and Dudley Kirk, the Indian censuses generally under-record children up to five years of age, and over-report those at ages five to nine. In our calculations, it was assumed that the levels of under- and over-count of age-specific groups were similar in successive censuses, and we did not apply any indirect method to adjust the census age distributions. Finally, in the initial periods, census data for some districts were not available. For example, the total population for Calcutta and Coach Behar were not available during 1881 and 1891. So, our analyses and interpretation could be, at best, indicative but not conclusive