gender

This is a very interesting question. Although not familiar with the exact trajectory of India’s demographics over the period, I know of several things that started its population growing beyond what it would have been pre-British colonisation. You can see my books on the subject here: About Sheila Newman, social researcher I would also really like to have some more details and discussion on Indian demographic history, so anyone with ideas, please contact me. [This article is based on a question and my answer posted on Quora at https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-reasons-for-the-rapid-growth-of-population-after-Indian-independence]

Here is my explanation:

HENRY JAMES SUMNER AND LAND-TENURE AND INHERITANCE LAWS

For starters, the British rewrote Indian land tenure and inheritance laws to ressemble their own, which promote high population growth. I do not know whether these rewrites left any part of India alone.

Henry James Sumner Maine was the British lawyer who rewrote the laws. As I recall, he believed, correctly, that male primogeniture, increases the chances of capitalism.

HOW DOES PRIMOGENITURE INCREASE POPULATION GROWTH?

The way it does this is to favour the aggregation of land in private hands: only one person inherits the land, and the rest become landless labour, for factories, agriculture, army, religious orders. Land aggregation was also favoured by the fact that women could not inherit land, but their husbands could, so Lord X might marry Miss Y, who had no brothers, then he would get her family fortune. In the 17th century land began to be commodified and land-titles, instead of entailing responsibilities and rights to various members of the local community, were redrafted under a single title holder. Now that title holder could buy and sell land that had previously been kept together by the entailments and rights of others. The excuse, under pareto-sufficiency economics was that, as long as the winner of a dispute put more money into the economy through selling land, then it didn’t matter who lost out in the meantime, even if they died of cold because they had lost their entitlement to cut wood on the property, for instance. That’s how British law works and how it works in all the countries that Britain carried that law to. (In continental Europe, under the Roman law system with Napoleonic civil codes, population growth is largely democratically controlled and the societies remain relatively endogamous and sedentary - especially compared to Britain.)

Male primogeniture also increases the rate of population growth, unless it happens within a sedentery endogamous society where people live on the land and most do not marry. When people cannot for some reason survive on the land, they are forced to wander in search of a living. This breaks up endogamous clans and tribes and causes new marriage opportunities by exposing the wanderers to a larger pool of people, when they might previously have remained in ‘house’ families, where only one couple bred and the rest were aunties and uncles helping, in exchange for home and food.

Before British rule, it is probable that India was composed of many endogamous tribes (or peoples), subdivided into smaller kinship groups of skins or moities. (Note that I use the term ‘tribe’ to indicate a people made up of related clans, not to indicate a non-agricultural society or something.) (Let us leave aside the castes for a moment.) The populations of these tribes and the skins or moities within them would have been much smaller. The tribes would be in part defined by their territory, which would generally remain fixed as the tribes were ‘sedentary’ - meaning did not move around much.

Tribes have rules about marriage that keep their numbers within the limits of their territory and its ability to support people, based on a tension between endogamy (marrying within your clan, skin, tribe) and exogamy (marrying outsiders). (Animals and plants also do this.) [I have a theory as to how they do it and I wrote about it in Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations and the next book in the series, called Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, in case you are interested.] I have also published diagrams of how these rules work, if you are interested, at this URL: Overpopulation: Endogamy,Exogamy and fertility opportunity theory

The tension between endogamy and exogamy limits the number of people who actually marry and therefore the fertility rate. Exogamy enlarges your marriage pool and therefore raises growth rate potential.

GENDER SEPARATION AND MALE AND FEMALE LAND

Tribes also have rules and traditions that keep the genders more or less separate and this also reduces marriage opportunity. For instance, men and women of Australian Aborigines often lived in separate quarters, engaged in different activities in different sections of the tribal land. In the Pacific Islands and Africa, and probably everywhere once, men and women had separate land, and even villages. A couple might live together for a while after marriage, but generally the woman went back to her female kin and raised the children, with the boys going to live with the men when they were around six years old.

TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGIES

Different transport technologies mean that you can go further in search of a mate than you could just on foot. So elephants, horses, boats, cars, trains, aeroplanes all contribute to increasing fertility opportunities. The most exogamous systems are cities and the global economy.

BRITISH SYSTEM IMPACT

The British system dispossessed and dispersed endogamous and sedentary tribes, completely breaking their endogamous systems and distancing them from local biofeedback that helped set the algorithms for endogamy/exogamy. The British then imposed inheritance laws that further interrupted the usual way that people inherited the territory they were born on. They probably also changed the land-title system and accelerated land-commodification, developing a financial system that had little relationship to the biophysical qualities of the actual land.

CASTES

Castes seem to be a relic of past invasions and takeovers and the British imperialists were another cast, but fueled by coal and iron.

Pre-British castes existed and intermarried within their own. A ruling caste is probably always smaller in number than the caste they rule over. That is because the ruling caste acts like a dynasty to consolidate their land-holding and power, by intermarrying with close relatives. This means that they have very limited marriage opportunities, but a lot of land and power per person, living in a kind of House system (called cooperative breeding in non-human species) in palaces etc. The people they rule over - the lower caste - is characteristically squeezed into smaller land areas, with less power. It may have once consisted of a large tribe with various skin groups and gender pathways. As the dominated caste is squeezed in together, these pathways and skin divisions get mixed up and broken. Usually there are battles and the deaths of the overtaken tribe cause marriage vacancies. Too many changes to write about here. If the lower caste remains endogamous and sedentary, then its population will be limited. If, however, as under the British system, if finishes up without land and having to work for low wages in cities, it will (a) have increased marriage and fertility opportunities and (b) if there are no laws enforced against child labour, may have a lot of children because their small wages will enhance the household income.

HOW DID ENGLAND GET THIS WAY?

I’ll just add that the British land-tenure and inheritance system of primogeniture, which only changed in the 1920s, was imposed on the British by William the Conqueror, who came from areas of France settled by Vikings in the 19th and 10th century. Under Viking inspired law, Britain was a colonial frontier that had to be defended by knights. The knights received parcels of land from the king in exchange for defending it. Women were not considered to be fighters, so the land and the buildings on it, could only be owned and passed on by men.

After the primogeniture rule changed in the 1920s, the system still tended to dispossess and cause landless labour because there were no rules requiring parents to pass on their estate to their children. (This was the subject of my book, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.) Under Roman law, however, the law compels parents to pass on their estate to children equally to both sexes. This is how land remains relatively proportionately within families and you have male and female inheritance lines. (The French system is the subject of the book I am currently writing which will be called, Demography Territory Law 3: Land-tenure and the Origins of Democracy in France.

Watching Q&A is an increasingly confusing experience. It would appear, from the questions and the panel responses, to anyone with a perspective of more than 30 years that we have not just been marking time but gone backwards with respect to gender and sexuality, anti-racism and colonialism. There was a sense of enlightenment in the 1970s, when women burned their bras, anthropologists wrote about gender pathways, and women in the Middle East wore miniskirts and went to co-ed universities - but things have gone downhill since. From current discourse as exemplified often on the media and especially on ABC 1's Q and A, it's as if the easy-going youth cultures of the 60s and 70s never happened ! We are now being 'educated' about a grey future where the best we can aspire to is mutual tolerance, when once we had far greater ambitions. In the 70s, for young people, the sky seemed to be the limit in terms of understanding international friendship possibilities. This was long before the Internet but when international travel became more widely available and there was a bit of a pause in wars which have since become constant.

A strange Monday night experience at home in Melbourne

Sylvie stirred on the sofa as one program ended and a set of promos began. It was the change of rhythm that disturbed her, or perhaps a slightly higher volume on the television. She was still barely awake but was aware that she needed to undress, clean her teeth and wash her face before bed. It was cold in the bathroom so she stayed put for a little while in the warm living room. Somehow the television looked different; larger, much larger, brighter, flatter than before. The promos had finished and the next program started. The people on the screen were unfamiliar to her. It was a panel show with a studio audience. To her amazement, one of the women on the panel was wearing a sort of archaic black head dress but spoke with an American accent. Sylvie sat up with a bit of a start. Where had this program come from? It was not the normal Monday night program. She went over to the television to try another channel but could find no way of adjusting this TV. She sat down again transfixed. Questions were coming from the audience to the panel. The themes were unfamiliar, troubling and seemed to concern Britain and the US. They referred to recent violence in the US and one of the panel members, a young British sounding woman was talking about Nazis and how there must be no ambiguity in our condemnation of them. Well of course they should be condemned! Sylvie was not used to local programs being so serious. And why were they talking about Nazis? WW2 ended about 30 years ago ….didn't it ? The program was mildly disturbing and seemed to be preaching to her.

Time is playing tricks

She stood up and walked into the bathroom. The image in the mirror looking back at her was that of an old woman. She moved toward her reflection and frowned. It frowned back at her.
Somewhat shaken she wandered back into the living room and sat down. She turned her attention once again to the TV program. It was getting more and more agitated.

Progress?

They were talking about "progress" and was it moving too fast? Sylvie was trying to figure out what sort of progress they meant. The girl in the black head dress said that progress was not happening fast enough. The progress they seemed to refer to was progress that resulted in some people losing some of their advantage. Sylvie could not work out who these people were nor who, in exchange was supposed to be better off.

She had obviously lost a few decades since falling asleep. This was a very bad habit. "Where is everyone?" she wondered. Her long term partner, June, had gone out for the evening and had not yet returned. "She should be back in the next hour," Sylvie reassured herself. They had been together for 10 years and had raised June's daughter Rhiannon together from the age of 10.
Sylvie was too shocked to go back in the bathroom and see her reflection. She re- focused on the TV program. Names like "Barak" and "Trump" came up several times. "Who are they?" she wondered. They were talking about interviewing members of the "far left" and the "far right". These were unfamiliar terms and sounded rather scary. " Nazis must be stopped " came up again. “Discrimination is worse than being accused of being a white supremacist!" the young woman journalist declared emphatically. “Neo Nazis are violent” said the young woman in the head dress.

Women’s lives in the Middle East

The panel discussion moved on to women's rights in Islamic countries. “Strange, all this focus on things Middle Eastern!” Sylvie had thought that women in Iran, in Egypt, in Syria lived fairly liberated lives. "Maybe they don't …or maybe they don't any more? But why such a focus on this in this program?" Sylvie was really puzzled.[1]

"My God, what has been happening ?" Sylvie wondered.

“I went to sleep in 1979 and I don't know where I am now. It seems to be some terrible dystopia. But what caused it?”

Coincidentally the panel started talking about the current popularity of dystopian novels, mentioning George Orwell’s “1984” which Sylvie had read when she was about 18. “ God,” she thought rather sleepily,” perhaps something terrible happened in 1984 but I've missed it!”

The future being discussed on the program seemed to be looming even more negatively as the very strident young female journalist declared that the reading of dystopian novels was "trauma rehearsal."

The program started winding up as she heard a key in the front door lock. "Oh thank goodness June is home. Perhaps she can fill me in. Did I have a stroke?"

Safe return to 2017?

"Hi Darling!” June’s soft smoky voice called from the hallway. “How was Q and A? As irritating as usual?"

"Yes it was very disturbing, in fact. I went to sleep just before it and couldn't quite bring myself into the present. It all looked and sounded very strange as though I was seeing something way into future. How was the council meeting? Is there any chance of stopping that 20 storey development down the road? "

NOTES

Check out, http://afghanistanonmymind.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/afghanistan-in-60s-and-70s-with-or.html