No researcher has done more to understand the historical demography of India than Tim Dyson. In 1989, he edited a volume, India’s Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease and Society, arguably the first set of writings on Indian historical demography (Dyson 1989), after Kingsley Davis’s seminal work The Population of India and Pakistan (Davis 1951). In the 1990’s, Dyson continued to write a series of research papers on the demographic history of Berar in central India and on the demography of famines, focusing mostly on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After a brief lull of two decades, which saw his research cover other themes and regions, he returns to his research roots in this book.
The book has 10 chapters that follow a familiar chronology of grand-sweep histories of India till the 19th century—two chapters on prehistory and early history, a chapter taking the narrative from there till c 1000 CE, another from there to c 1707 CE, followed by one till c 1821. Then, it follows a non-political chronology that is dictated more by demographic considerations—one chapter covers the period from c 1821 till the first full-scale census of c 1871, a chapter on the 1871–1921 period that was demographically volatile with major famines and epidemics, a chapter on the 1921–71 period, when the Indian population growth rate began to systematically rise, and the more recent period characterised by fertility reduction from c 1971 to c 2016. For each time period, Dyson pays close attention to the scholarship of that time period and offers an argument or fresh analysis for the most likely demographic trajectory in a field where data is barely available before the censuses of the late 19th century. Every chapter has a similar template, covering population trends, fertility and mortality, major demographic events, urbanisation and migration.