HistoriCity | India’s population through the ages

How do we possibly understand India’s demography in pre-modern times? As we move further back into the past, the sources of information on population dwindle

Nothing like a modern census existed before the first such exercise was conducted between 1865 and 1872 and then in 1881 by the English colonial government that ruled India. However, the first reliable Census is considered to be that of 1901 when India’s population was estimated to be close to 30 crores. Before then there had never been either a synchronous or non-synchronous census to enumerate just how many people lived in the subcontinent. Between 1901 and 2011 censuses, there has been an over 350% increase in India’s population which has crossed 1.4 billion. After a delay of over six years India’s latest Census is set to begin in 2026-27.

A colonial-era painting. (Sourced)

How then do we possibly understand India’s demography in pre-modern times? As we move further back into the past, the sources of information on population dwindle. There are the usual accounts related to tax collection and land records, particularly during the Mughal rule over much of north and central India. Then there are court chroniclers’ accounts of kings and kingdoms, both extant and extinct, these hoary tales too contain some references to populations and their dispersal due to man-made (wars) and natural reasons (for instance drought and disease). And finally, there are accounts left by travellers to India starting from Fa Hien (4th century CE), Hieun Tsang (7th century CE) to Ibn Batuta (14th century CE), Al Beruni (11th century CE), Barbosa and several others after the 16th century, these travelogues reveal a lot about people and customs that prevailed in the past. Despite these sources the process of ascertaining the populations in the early modern, medieval and ancient past is based on reverse projections i.e journeying from the known to unknown or using today’s numbers to estimate what they might have been in the past.

Earliest Glimpses of Population

Both literature and epigraphical evidence i.e texts such as Panini’s Ashtahdyayi, or the Arthashastra or the Jatakas and others provide us a range of tribes, castes, kingdoms, linguistic groups both within and outside India but they are wholly inadequate in understanding the numbers or population of such groups of people or regions where they resided. The Ashokan edicts from the 4th century BCE too contain rich information about kingdoms and various regions, found written in various scripts from Kharoshti in present day Pakistan to local Prakrits in Karnataka, they capture the vast diversity of Indians more than 2,000 years ago, but they too remain silent when it comes to giving quantitative data. The only exception is the reference to the great war in which hundreds of thousands were taken captive, and many more times slain and maimed. The relevant part of the inscription reads as follows, “When King Beloved of the Gods Priyadarsin had been anointed eight years, (the country of) the Kalingans was conquered by (him). One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the men who were deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who were slain there, and many times as many those who died.”

These numbers are indicative and while it is likely that the actual numbers were very large, they were but a fraction of what is stated in the edict. Nevertheless, urbanisation grew and so did population during the Mauryan period (5thBCE- 2nd BCE). According to Tym Dyson, author of A Population History of India, “archaeological evidence from two districts in the core of the basin has been interpreted as suggesting that perhaps 13 per cent of the population lived in settlements covering 10 hectares or more—places which may have contained between one and two thousand people. Yet irrespective of how one defines a place as ‘urban’, there is no doubt that the level of urbanisation was still extremely low. All the same, the subcontinent’s population had grown considerably compared to the situation 1,700 years earlier (i.e. when the Indus civilization was near its height). Therefore, there had undoubtedly been a considerable increase in the number of cities and towns.”.

Like now, in the past too, but with greater intensity, urban agglomerations were prone to outbreak of diseases. Cities also attracted the wrath of invaders and enemy forces who sought them out to plunder and pillage. Therefore, population growth was not always linear, Dyson writes, “from time to time the people of these kingdoms must have experienced severe demographic crises and cutbacks. On the basis of various estimates starting with the ones made by Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 19th century, Dyson reckons that “around the year 100 CE larger urban centres—places like Mathura, Vaisali, Kausambi, and probably also Indraprastha, Rajagriha, Ayodhya, and Kashi—may each have contained more than 50,000 people”.

This number was certainly greater than the Mahajanapada era (approx 6th BCE- 4th BCE), however given that these calculations are based on population density per hectare - they are only indicative. Dyson writes, “The size of the subcontinent’s population at the time of the Mauryan Empire (e.g.c.320–230 CE) will never be known with any precision”.

It is a wide range from 181 million during the Maurya period to 70 million!

Some of these estimates are too high as during roughly the same period 300 BCE to 200 CE, various other estimates of world population are more sober. For instance, Dyson writes, McEvedy and Jones put the world’s population in 200 BCE at only about 150 million; Jean-Noël Biraben estimates it at about 225 million; while Edward Deevey considers that it was around 133 million in the year 1 CE”.

Hsuan Tsang’s 7th Century accounts of Urban India

If we are to rely entirely on his travelogues, the Buddhist monk from China visited as many as 75 urban centres in India. Tsang left detailed descriptions of people, places, customs, castes and most importantly, distances. He has left behind meticulous records of distances between cities and provinces as well as their sizes along with that of kingdoms. Dyson writes, “Hsuan Tsang’s estimates of perimeters were made in terms of a unit called a li—which seems to have been about 240 metres. So, to illustrate, if a city’s perimeter was 48 li its area would have been 144 square li (i.e. 144 = (48/4)×(48/4))—which is about 830 hectares”. Scholars like Joseph Russell have made assumptions such as 60 to 100 people per hectare which takes the population to 334,560 and 557,600 respectively for the combined populations of the largest cities.

Tsang’s records are helpful to make such assumption-based calculations but they too offer little concrete information on population. An extremely valuable observation Tsang left behind also points to the desolation he recorded in the regions of Gandhar (north-west) and Kalinga (in modern Odisha). He also travelled through vast tracts of unpopulated regions indicating that there were vast swathes of land either outside the influence of Hindu kingdoms or contained people who were outside the varna system i.e tribals. The desolation of Gandhar tempts us to consider whether the infamous Justinian plague which ravaged Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East also affected India, but given the available evidence, scholars such as Dyson have concluded that India was barely, if at all, affected.

Population ‘Explosions’ and Declines

The rise of the Delhi sultanate is seen as a time of upheaval in the traditional power structures of India. The various Hindu kingdoms withered or just crumbled in the face of superior military tactics and strategy of the armies descending from the north-west frontier.

The Persian accounts of the 10th century, however, are exaggerated and test the limits of credulity. K S Lal writes in Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, “Masudi (writing about CE. 941-42) says that there are 120,000 towns and villages in Sind. Rashiduddin,in Jamiat-ul-Tawarikh (completed 1310 CE ) writes that “it is said that Gujarat comprises 80,000 flourishing cities, villages and hamlets. He also writes that Haryana contains 125,000 cities and villages while Malwa had more than 18 lakh villages and towns”. Lal asserts about such chronicles, “a few no doubt are trustworthy but many of them are extremely faulty with regard to figures and statistics, and almost all of them let their imagination and their pen run riot. Consequently, even when they are not quite reticent on demographic matters, they are neither very informative nor always reliable”.

All the same, Lal asserts constant warring and regular famines did cause a decline in population as well depopulation of regions such as parts of Rajputana, and the Ganga- Yamuna doab. Going even by contemporary examples of the two world wars and more recent conflicts, it is hard to not believe that grave political instability leads to exodus and mass killings are a standard accompaniment of warfare. Lal writes, “by the time Muhammad bin ’Tughlaq died (1351), it had become obvious that the population had greatly dwindled because of constant warfare, foreign invasions, famines and pestilence. That is why when during Firoz Tughlaq’s reign (1351-88 CE), no Mongol invaders crossed the Sindh, and the sultan himself renounced the path of war and destruction, his contemporary chronicler Shams Siraj Afif noticed a rise in population. He writes, ‘The subjects of the Sultanate increased to such an extent and there was such increase in population that in every iqta (territory) and pargana, a village was established (inhabited) at every four kos.”

The Mughal period provides us with better records of land revenues allowing us to estimate populations better using the 1901 Census figure of 285 million as India’s population. According to Prof. Irfan Habib, in 1600 the total area under cultivation was 60 % of what it was in 1901. However, he argues in “‘The Cambridge Economic History of India: c.1200–c.1750” that the land/person ratio was higher in 1600”. Therefore, Mughal India’s population may have been nearly 142 million of over 14 crores in 1600s.