From Punjab’s population studies to New York’s Mayor: The Mamdani thread

By Mohan Rao 

I am so delighted — a rare feeling in these times — at Zohran Mamdani’s victory against all odds. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, inspired my Ph.D thesis through his brilliant book The Myth of Population Control.

A bit of background is necessary. A widely accepted demographic transition theory once held that birth rates declined when societies urbanised, industrialised, and moved away from systems based on family labour. This theory was derived from the demographic experience of First World countries.

By implication, it was believed that in the Third World — where birth rates were high — these rates could not fall on their own, as there was supposedly no demand for family planning. Families in these societies valued children for the security they provided in old age. Children worked on family-owned lands, and given high infant and child mortality, it made little sense to have few children.

Then came the monumental Khanna Study: Population Problems in Rural Punjab (Harvard University Press, 1971). Conducted by public health scholars from Harvard, it was a well-funded, five-year study. Its findings — that Punjabi peasants welcomed contraception — appeared to overthrow the demographic transition theory. Here, seemingly, were peasants eager for contraception.

It was on the basis of this study that India launched its family planning programme — a massive initiative that siphoned funds from health programmes and evolved into a behemoth victimising the poorest and most marginalised.

Mahmood Mamdani, in The Myth of Population Control (Monthly Review Press, 1973), did something most unusual. As an anthropologist, he went to speak with the very people surveyed in the Khanna study. What he found was utterly shocking. The entire study, he discovered, was based on lies. Respondents admitted they had lied for various reasons — some even amusing. The research assistants knew they were being lied to but fabricated data themselves. Mamdani demonstrated that the lead authors, John B. Wyon and John E. Gordon, indulged in a bit of statistical skulduggery of their own.

Yet it was on this flawed study that one of the most expensive health programmes in the world was built — with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mamdani showed that the Punjabi peasant was not a foolish or superstitious being. He — and yes, at that time, it was mostly “he” — had rational reasons to want more sons, and therefore more children. Sons were economic assets; daughters were not. Sons provided security in old age. However, this perception varied across different sections of the peasantry. In fact, the poorest agricultural labourers tended to have the smallest families.

While examining data on family size, I came across the large Mysore Population Study, carried out in the 1950s by the UN but almost completely neglected. It too revealed that the poor had smaller families, due to higher mortality and complex sociological factors. Family size, in fact, increased with landholdings.

Other quantitative studies had their own problems, as Professor Krishnaji’s work had shown.

The idea that the poor had large families was thus a myth — a construct of neo-Malthusian imagination.

Since Mamdani’s work was largely anecdotal, I decided to undertake a multi-method study in Mandya district, Karnataka, conducting two years of fieldwork. My research gave both quantitative and qualitative depth to Mamdani’s insights. I found that family size was lowest among landless labourers, irrespective of caste. It increased with landholding up to the rich peasant class, after which it began to decline.

My Ph.D thesis, submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), should be available on the JNU website. It forms a chapter in my book From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (Sage, 2004).

My Ph.D, therefore, is Zohran Mamdani’s sibling!

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The writer was a professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). A version of this article was first published in ToxicsWatch