I

Neo-Malthusianism figures prominently as an ideological construct that undergirds development theory emerging in the post-Second World War era.Footnote ¹ These twentieth-century reformulations of the Malthusian principle that population growth will outrun food production, resulting in a failing agricultural sector, continue to be an explanation in international political economy formulations of the reasons that poor countries are unable to embark on successful development strategies. They also point to the continued power of the Malthusian principle in policy circles, where harking back to this postulate and its potential to unleash hunger and death endows policy-makers with the authority to shape and direct agricultural policy in developing countries.Footnote ² These recent contributions in the field of international development serve as a timely reminder of the continued sway of Malthus in formulating public policy: beginning with Malthus's own ideas, these ideas spread through a subsequent construction of Malthusianism and later neo-Malthusianism that became vital in thinking about development policy.Footnote ³ In the case of India, Malthusian notions have generated a pall that has hung over the identification of the cause of meagre economic conditions in the country for the last two centuries. The long-standing view that Indian agriculture epitomizes Malthusian tendencies, where the economic condition of a country is attributable to the inability of food supply to keep up with the rate of population growth, could be overturned by recent fresh thinking in international development that distinguishes between Malthus's own ideas and the political economy motivation of subsequent Malthusianism in later centuries.Footnote ⁴

Recent compilations on Malthus hold rich intellectual promise in improving our understanding of Malthus, and a particularly valuable formulation is provided by Wrigley's depiction of Malthus as a man ‘between two worlds’ that permits an examination of the production and reception of Malthus's own ideas both at home and in other geographies.Footnote ⁵ By drawing our attention to how Malthus's ideas were received in different countries, it also opens up for us the distinction between a ‘national’ and ‘global’ Malthus, the former referring to the reception of Malthus's ideas in England and the latter to how Malthus himself viewed other countries and his ideas were regarded in these other geographies. A second promising line of scholarship on Malthus that makes the case for distinguishing between Malthus's own ideas in his own time and the Malthusian peaks in subsequent centuries is found in contributions by Mayhew, of delineating ‘two scales’; the smaller scale of Malthus's own ideas located in his time and the larger scale etched against the Malthusian peaks in later centuries.Footnote ⁶ Mayhew's differentiation of aspects of Malthus's own writings and ideas using the distinction of the smaller and the larger scale is a device similar to that created by Bashford and Chaplin in their examination of Malthus in the Old and New Worlds in that they both open up the possibility of exploring the global imaginaries that draw their origin from ideas that emerge from Malthus's writings and thinking. The imagery of ‘two worlds’ facilitates an examination of how Malthus looked at, and was looked at, across different geographies, while the conjuring up of ‘two scales’ makes it admissible to examine Malthus's ideas and their reception within the national and the global.

There is a third opportunity to further our ability to understand Malthus's ideas in his own time and of later Malthusian thinking, through an examination of the methods used to study the relationship between food, land, and population. We know that Malthus's own emphasis on the difference between preventively checked and positively checked societies was crucial to distinguish modern societies from more primitive ones. Unpicking the mechanisms of analysis adopted by Malthus, it is evident that while designing and establishing a theoretical model between food and population was the central feature in the first edition of the Principle of population, there is a shift towards a search for empirical data to examine the validity of his ideas over the next three decades.Footnote ⁷ This shift in Malthus's own thinking also underscores a growing recognition among intellectuals of the need for empirical data to understand phenomena in the empire giving rise to ‘empirical globalism’, the practices of collection of evidence in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸ The difference between theory-driven and empirically motivated intellectual examination of society is that the former is a closed system that focuses on a well-defined, even binary relationship between population and food, while the latter is an open system that examines a less clear-cut and consequently more complex relationship between population and natural resource systems.Footnote ⁹ The rising tide of statistics and its relation to ‘national’ and ‘global’ in Malthus's own life and the global imaginaries in later periods could help us to unpick why there has been a long-term tendency to regard population and agriculture in India since the eighteenth century as destined for human starvation and physical ruin.

This article co-locates Malthus, statistics, and the characterization of Indian agriculture by identifying the oppositional tendencies in whether to adopt a closed or open approach to the relationship between population and food supply and its importance for the particular constructions of ‘national’ and ‘global’ Malthus, by public figures engaged in policy-making in India over the past three centuries.Footnote ¹⁰ In this article, Malthusian is used to describe ideas that emerged during the nineteenth century as a direct outcome of the circulation of Malthus's own ideas; and the term neo-Malthusian for denoting arguments propounded in later centuries that resurrect the original ideas of Malthus to promote their own concerns regarding the destructive power of population to overrun food supplies and destroy natural resources. India figures prominently among the Malthusianism peaks of the nineteenth century, with the ‘famines of Indostan’ espoused by British officials in India who saw the rising population growth in British India through the nineteenth century as a consequence of the culture – for example, India's tendency towards early marriage and high birth rates – rather than the outcome of British policies in India.Footnote ¹¹ By the early twentieth century, neo-Malthusian thinking abounded in India, as both international organizations as well as Indian elites regarded rapidly increasing population alongside growing food shortages with increasing concern.Footnote ¹²

Bringing together themes of closed and open approaches to the relationship between food and population, alongside the importance of geographies of ‘national’ and ‘global’ Malthus, makes it possible to investigate how public figures variously understood the role of land, food, and people in the making and remaking of Indian agricultural policy. These opposing tendencies provide the important Malthusian moments around which this article is written, and it builds on the ideas developed in Bashford's wide-reaching and richly detailed Global population, that shows that the intentions of neo-Malthusian enthusiasts had more to do with concerns of their own times than with Malthus's original understanding of the relationship between food and population.Footnote ¹³ The first oppositional tendency investigated is between Malthus's own pursuit of empirical data through the new statistical societies and its contention with a closed approach, both of which advanced the case for data collection through surveys to assist in making statistically informed public policy.Footnote ¹⁴ The second oppositional stance examined lies in an emerging divergence regarding the logic of Malthusian thinking that is prevalent among English public officials; between those who regarded the relationship between population as a closed approach and determination to use the model to maximize revenues from land; contrasted with those imbued with a radical approach, eager to learn more about India and to investigate statistical data collection on population. The third oppositional tendency is located in the early twentieth century, evident among political figures in India and professional opinions about India, with neo-Malthusian models emerging with regard to how agriculture could find the wherewithal to feed a large Indian population embarking on a rapid industrialization strategy and the American models that regarded the need for aid to support India to produce more food to overcome the spectre of hunger. These opposing tendencies, located across three centuries, continue to have an impact on policy-making in the first decades of Indian planning.

II

In Malthus's own time, his principle on the relationship between population growth and food supply drew both brickbats and bouquets, as his contemporaries regarded the implications of his ‘checks’ for the future of society in England and then further afield.Footnote ¹⁵ Malthus did not only stand between two worlds but also on the threshold separating two approaches: a closed method necessary to uphold the validity of his principle by accessing new sources of material that detailed the population growth rates in different countries of the world;Footnote ¹⁶ and an open system that would allow statistical data to become the basis for new thinking and theories on population and resources in other societies.

It was clear that Malthus's publication of the Principle of population was not immediately welcomed widely; indeed, it resulted in sharp rebuttals, published in scholarly journals and magazines, of his proposed relationships between land, labour, life, and death. His interlocuters were besieged by worries that were raised by his predictions about population trends in the first edition in 1798, particularly the fear of high food prices, and these grew to an onslaught of criticisms after the publication of the second edition in 1803, focusing on the implications of his theory for the existing social practices, especially the poor law regarded at the time as a public mechanism to control the population of early nineteenth-century Britain. The volume and acerbity of the responses resulted in Malthus's subsequent reluctance to engage in the public sphere: he refrained from responding to the published criticisms till the last decade of his life.Footnote ¹⁷ Malthus did not, however, stop working on methods for improving the statistical basis of his treatise on population growth. He appeared to avail of professional and personal networks, during the last few years of his life, to seek out new data, largely because he sought further corroboration of his proposition that population expanded as a geometric progression, while food production increased in the form of an arithmetic progression. The professional route was through the learned societies of his time that were keen to increase their influence by using large datasets to influence public policy, while the personal correspondence took place through private letters to his erstwhile students from Haileybury College, then serving in India as officers of the East India Company.Footnote ¹⁸ Untangling how the global’ and ‘national’ Malthus relate to the ‘two approaches’ of open and closed systems of thinking in Malthus's own work opens up avenues to understanding the role of statistics and data collection in challenging the intellectual currents of his times. Exploring the importance that Malthus increasingly accorded to the collection of data, and how it was received by his contemporaries and students, is undertaken through examining the appetite for a statistical approach in the public debate on policy-making in England and also how these ideas were construed by those officers in the East India Company who considered statistics increasingly important for the colonial administrative apparatus further afield in India.Footnote ¹⁹

The academic world inhabited by Malthus was one which exhibited an increasing commitment to finding data to confirm scientific hypotheses, and among its key advocates were doctors, commissioners, and investigators who collected societal information with a view to convincing parliament of the need for public reforms to avert social unrest.Footnote ²⁰ These leading professionals agreed that their common purpose would be best served by setting up statistical associations in England, so that they could propose policies for ensuring social order emerging from the analysis of statistical information that they could generate and present as full members of these associations.Footnote ²¹ The British Association for the Advancement of Science, the first of these associations, had been established in 1831, and Malthus attended the third meeting of the Association held in Cambridge in summer of 1833, where Charles Babbage chaired a fourteen member committee that proposed and was successful in establishing a new Section F for Statistics within the Association.Footnote ²² It was Babbage's intention to create a Section and direct its activities to provide a channel by which to collect and use statistical facts for influencing government policy-making. Led by a Cambridge group of Malthus, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the committee passed the founding resolution that explicitly states the Section's purpose as ‘the collection and classification of all facts illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society’.Footnote ²³ Babbage had engineered the presence of leading public figures at the meeting, having invited and ensured that Adolphe Quetelet, the leading statistician in Europe, was present in his capacity as the official Belgian delegate, to provide international support for the new Section.Footnote ²⁴ Babbage also invited prominent officials in the government and the East India Company to be part of the original committee: and John Elliot Drinkwater, a civil servant, and Colonel Henry William Sykes, a former statistical reporter for the East India Company, agreed to be members and were willing to vouch for the value of statistical facts in public life.Footnote ²⁵ Quetelet, who was best acquainted with Malthus among the fourteen members of the committee, recounts a conversation between them during this 1833 visit to Cambridge: Malthus handed Quetelet a survey that he had designed for collecting population data, and pressed him to administer the survey in Brussels and return the completed questionnaire to him.Footnote ²⁶

The members of this new Section commenced their first meeting with a set of papers on statistical data collection, including a paper on Indian statistics by Colonel Sykes on the Population Returns of the Four Collectorates of the Deccan.Footnote ²⁷ At this meeting, Malthus is likely also to have had an exchange with Sykes,Footnote ²⁸ who had returned to England after his retirement in 1833. He would have seen the data on land and labour collected by Sykes, when he was statistical reporter from 1824 to 1829,Footnote ²⁹ and subsequently published in various volumes of the Journals of the Statistical Society and of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.Footnote ³⁰ Malthus's pursuit of leading professionals and officials for population data from other lands, both in Europe and in the colonies, underscores the emergence of a ‘global’ Malthus. While Malthus was increasing his search for data to understand people and food availability in other geographies, other members of the new Society had begun to develop an opposing view: that the statistical data being collected by Section members was to support established theories of society rather than form new, global ones. Sykes was one such prominent member, and continued collating and publishing statistical data, eventually setting up a small Department of Statistics at India House in 1847, and publishing the first statistical series on British India in 1853.Footnote ³¹ The compilation, collation, and discussion of Indian population statistics, primarily those relating to the size and condition of British troops, and other series pertaining to land measurement provided by Sykes and other officials employed in the colonies, followed the objectives of the new Society to create an empirical tradition for the study of key economic trends.Footnote ³² And yet this was an oppositional tendency, as this predominant members’ view did not reflect Malthus's own open approach to statistical data. Instead, the rising tide of ‘empirical globalism’Footnote ³³ saw the classification of colonial data as a method to control Indian natives and manage Company operations. In contrast, ‘global’ Malthus appears to be alive and well in the letters of Malthus's erstwhile students, who went out as officials of the East India Company to serve in India after completing their training at Haileybury; they show a keen interest in the collection of statistics on people, land, and food through the technique of survey questionnaires.

The first of these students was Brian Houghton Hodgson, who had resided at Haileybury while preparing for his admission to the college, as his mother was a friend of William Smyth, a contemporary of Malthus at Cambridge and later the regius professor of history. Houghton was a student at the East India Company training college between February 1816 and December 1817, and Malthus was a definitive influence on his intellectual development. Hodgson was dux in his year, awarded prizes for economics, classics, and Bengali, and after his training was posted in Calcutta. He continued his run of academic excellence there by successfully learning Persian at Fort William College in short order. He was then posted in Kathmandu, to the office of the British Resident, where he successfully learnt the languages of Parbatiya and Newari while travelling in the region.Footnote ³⁴ Malthus corresponded with Hodgson while the latter was posted in Nepal, about his keenness to pursue collection of data from countries further afield, whereupon Hodgson points out that it is extremely difficult to obtain empirical data on population and food prices and that the Gorkha administration guards such statistics very carefully.

Hodgson's official duties revolved around data collection, classification, and evaluation, and he was responsible for the revenue settlement from 1819. He was required to acquire land revenue data so that the Company could ascertain tenancy rates and agree associated tax payments. This was a pivotal position in Nepal and he would have been the most appropriate officer to access the figures on population and food that Malthus was so keen to acquire. However, he faced difficulties in this pursuit due the ill feeling between the Company and the Gorkha administration on account of the Company's imposition on the Gorkha administration, including accepting a British Resident in Kathmandu in 1818. In such a hostile environment, the Gorkha government did not permit Hodgson and his team to leave Kathmandu,Footnote ³⁶ but Hodgson continued to find methods to pursue his interests as a collector within the Kathmandu valley. His statistical prowess is evident in the cataloguing of his Buddhist manuscripts and information-gathering from local intellectuals for his (never completed) ‘History of Nepal’, which was drafted on the lines of a statistical survey.Footnote ³⁷

The second of these students was Benjamin Guy Babington, who studied at the East India College between 1810 and 1811, obtained a position in the Indian civil service, and was posted to Madras presidency. He continued to correspond with Malthus after leaving Haileybury, returning to Britain from Madras due to ill health in 1919 and began to read medicine at Cambridge in 1820. Babington had come to be widely regarded as an exceptionally gifted linguist having mastered the Tamil language while at Haileybury, later translating Beschius's Tamil grammar, the leading publication for the teaching of Tamil since the late eighteenth century while he was in India.Footnote ³⁸ He had the opportunity to provide Malthus a copy of his various translations after his return to Cambridge, and Malthus was enthusiastic about making use of Babington's publications to improve the provision of Indian languages in Haileybury, proposing that the college add some of these materials to the syllabus.Footnote ³⁹ In the college record of 7 May 1822, Malthus noted that Babington had provided a new composition for the teaching of Tamil and that this ‘composition in Tamil for Madras students-approved on the 14th, is accompanied by a testimonial from Dr Wilkins’. Malthus added that

After completing his study, Babington went on to be an acclaimed medical professional, and was elected the first president of the Royal Epidemiological Society. In his inaugural lecture to the Society in 1850, Babington began by setting out the importance of using scientific principles to develop a better understanding of communicable disease. He emphasized the value of statistical methods, stating that ‘Statistics too have supplied us with a new and powerful means of testing medical truth.’Footnote ⁴¹

The expert collections and the survey method employed by Hodgson, as well as the close attention played to lauded grammatical compilations in the translations by Babington, are indication that they had imbued the principles of statistical enquiry that were also of keen interest to their old teacher, Professor Malthus, who was continuing to explore a survey-based approach to data collection and analysis. They in turn appear to uphold this approach, and their subsequent prominence in public life is linked to their ability to use statistical methods to create new subjects of study, that of natural history in the case of Hodgson and epidemiology in the case of Babington.

The third student from Haileybury is Samuel Sneade Brown, who was at the college from 1826 to 1827, and subsequently went out to Fort William in Calcutta. He served most of that time as a magistrate in and around Delhi, assigned to managing revenue collection on behalf of the Company. A regular and long-standing correspondence with his mother in England while Brown was posted India from 1827 to 1841Footnote ⁴² indicated his keen interest in this very different geography and the value of compiling information of the culture of the inhabitants.

Brown's emphasis on the value of collecting information to obtain a more detailed understanding of the country and its people is very much in keeping with Malthus's open approach to statistics, evident in his drive to collect survey data. Brown was deeply disappointed when officials worked for quick commercial gains rather than the larger interests of Britain and India. He regarded this as a failing of many of the well-regarded British colonial officials, and writes on 3 February 1838 about his views on Thomas Babington Macaulay's time in India.

On Brown's return to England after a long period of service, he became a public official in the sanitation department, and in his Notes of sanitary reforms, Brown underlines the importance of the need for epidemiological data to examine deterioration in health in British cities. Once again, the continued keenness of another of Malthus's students to push for public oversight of official practice, with Brown's views on the need to collect statistics to improve public services, bears a striking resemblance to earlier views on the need for an enlightened administration to govern an Indian population.

While there is no evidence of correspondence between Brown and Malthus on the collection of data on population trends, the views expressed in Notes, particularly with regard to the ability to influence the behaviour of the lower classes, fits with the open approach that Malthus was advocating in the last decade of his life.Footnote ⁴⁶ The views of this handful of returning East India Company officials on the value of an open approach to improve public policy in reducing epidemics and improving sanitation services contrasts with the dominant position of leading members of the Royal Statistical Society. The large sets of data on the impact of squalor and disease on human life collected by their members at best influenced public policy through favouring a closed approach, a return to a ‘national’ Malthus that recommended control of the populace in relation to accepted theories of societal trends. It was also in sharp contrast to the position of the majority of East India Company officials: that public policy is needed to control the native population through the gathering of statistics by language, religions, and caste classification, as well as the mapping of its land, climate, and resources. This is the set of modalities that Cohn identified as aiding the governing of the colony.Footnote ⁴⁷ This oppositional tendency on the the role of statistics in fashioning government was particularly significant as the state of falling tax revenues of the East India Company in the 1840s was increasingly to become the matter of parliamentary debates.Footnote ⁴⁸

III

This section sets out the the second oppositional tendency identifiable in the sharp contrast between the official proposition – that there was a pervasive Malthusian condition on account of social and cultural mores of Indians and the need to ensure the collection of land tax revenues in a difficult environment – and the minority position – the need to adopt an open system of using statistics to design an agricultural policy more conducive to improving the condition of Indian agriculture that was advanced by radical public figures in England.

The question of colonial public policy was built around an established model of Indian mores and proclivities to have a maximal number of children, and that it is most appropriate to regard the conditions of land and population in India to be the outcome of this pervasive Malthusian tendency.Footnote ⁴⁹ The East India Company regarded this growing population to be the only reason for the onset of famine in India, as they deemed the land to be capable of plentiful produce, based on the data collected on conditions in monsoon abundant, high-yield rice-growing areas in Bengal. This was the first region of India where the Company had administrative control and, consequently, the ability to collect data, then used to propose a taxation system for all lands owned by the East India Company.Footnote ⁵⁰ The land tax revenues collected by the Company subsequently became the first statistical basis for evaluating public policy, and the indication of rising costs and falling land revenues led to the voicing of official concerns. As Stokes shows in his magisterial account of peasant society in India, the falling revenues in Bengal at the end of the eighteenth century motivated an official policy of shoring up business, with Lord Cornwallis's code of 1793.Footnote ⁵¹ This resulted in the first land revenue settlement, termed the Zamindari Act and established a permanent ownership of land with the purpose of increasing the returns on land revenue.Footnote ⁵² Following the implementation of the act, there were growing claims that corruption was rife in the activities of the East India Company officers, the highpoint of which was the public notoriety that emerged during the attempted impeachment of Warren Hastings by Edmund Burke in 1788. The concern was that the East India Company did not have the administrative capacity necessary for ensuring that revenue accrued to British parliament through a strict adherence to legal rules, and this was the basis for removing all trading functions of the East India Company in 1834.Footnote ⁵³ Thomas Babington Macaulay, elected as a member of parliament in 1830, openly criticized the administration of British territories in India due to the faulty remit of East India Company. He regarded it as both a bureaucratic anomaly and susceptible to an early form of ‘crony capitalism’ run by a coterie of closely linked families employed by the East India Company, based at Fort William in Calcutta and also operating as a powerful lobby in parliament.Footnote ⁵⁴ A growing preoccupation with improving official policy by undertaking administrative reform motivated Macaulay to become a regular attendee of the parliamentary debates on the renewal on the charter of the East India Company that took place between 1831 and 1833. He was well versed in the testimonies that were collected by the committee to write the new bill, and he delivered a speech in the House of Commons on 10 July 1833, at the second reading of the bill to push for a change in the balance of administrative duties between the British government and the East India Company.

Macaulay also indicated this preference for public policy closely adhered to legal rules, as a member of a committee, along with Lord Ashburton, Benjamin Jowett, Shaw Lefevre, and Henry Melvill, that was appointed in 1854 to ‘take into consideration the subject of the examination of Candidates for the Civil Service of the East-India Company’ and their recommendation resulted in the shutting down of the college in 1855.Footnote ⁵⁶ Macaulay's own decision was that he ‘defended the system of education in the college’ at the debate in parliament, and that he only supported the closing down of Haileybury due to the preference for ‘competition in opposition to patronage’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The challenge posed by the corruption evident in Haileybury and the inability of its graduating students to perform land tax revenue collection duties effectively in colonial India provides one link between Macaulay and Malthus, via the workings of the East India Company. There is also an academic link between these two public figures, as Macaulay evinces an interest in the responses to Malthus's own publications, engaging with Sadler's refutation that the second edition of Principles (1803) implied an unwillingness to accept the benevolence of God.Footnote ⁵⁸ Macaulay's response in the January 1831 edition of the Edinburgh Review drew on existing empirical data to critique Sadler's own proposition that a fall in population would adversely affect economy and society.

Macaulay's decided preference for statistical data to test propositions about the impact of rising and falling population is far closer to the open approach to policy-making, and reflected growing public opinion in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, for favouring competition and improvement. Such ideas of improvement in Britain are markedly different to the oppositional tendency evident in official colonial policy that regarded India as ‘backward’ (as it was unimproved), and part of a larger Oriental despotism.Footnote ⁶⁰ Official policy characterized the Indian population as indolent and apathetic; thus, any increase in the Indian population was to be regarded as a calamity rather than a blessing.Footnote ⁶¹ The lassitude of the populace was attributed to the lack of formal systems of property ownership, which resulted in perverse incentives to increase production or enhance labour productivity.Footnote ⁶² The emphasis was, consequently, on finding a closed system in a land that was in the clutches of a Malthusian spectre and hurtling towards certain doom. The bureaucrats at the India Office, who replaced the administration of the East India Company in the mid-nineteenth century, were intent on developing rule-based development policy. They devised a closed model of agricultural property rights with the purpose of improving land revenues and overcoming the ill-effects of the Malthusian spectre brought about by high levels of fecundity. This model was subjected to criticism in the 1870s, when Lord Mayo, appointed the viceroy of India in 1869, established a new Department of Agriculture, Revenue, and Commerce in 1871, to reduce the propensity for famines. The department was less inclined to regard the Indian population as indolent and pushed for greater attention to Indian welfare.Footnote ⁶³ Agricultural policy reform came in the aftermath of a series of famines in the mid-nineteenth century, and the creation of the Famine Commission of 1866 which concluded that the huge loss of lives was due to the imminent expiry of land settlement and the indifference of the British bureaucracy. This questioning of the official Malthusian stance that regarded people, food, and land in India as variables within a fixed model, and that failing revenues were due to erroneous actions on part of the Indian subjects, is followed through by the recommendations of the Famine Commission pushing for a revised agricultural policy. This, in turn, led to the appointment of Allan Octavian Hume as secretary to the department, to drive the proposed reconstruction of the agricultural department.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hume proposed a remedy to the closed model where revenues were regarded as the automatic outcome of agricultural legislation and adherence to rules, set out in his pamphlet Agricultural Reform in India (1879):

These tracts spell out the need for an ‘improvement’ in agricultural production, through bringing in expert knowledge, a feature that was previously being acknowledged by the Statistical Section of the Association for the Advancement of Science in England, advocating a statistical approach to the making of public policy in earlier decades. Hume highlighted the importance of understanding local practices, and acknowledged that external laws might not work in a local context where village communities were governed by social norms.Footnote ⁶⁶

A growing consternation about the miseries inflicted by famines and the need to understand local conditions was also evident in the writings of Florence Nightingale, a key commentator on the Indian Land Question and its implications for public policy in India in the mid-nineteenth century. Nightingale, already a leading public figure, was recommended for election as a member of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858 by William Farr, the leading medical statistician in Victorian Britain, in recognition of her excellent use of statistical methods to bringing about sanitary reforms in the army.Footnote ⁶⁷ What has been overlooked is that Nightingale also had a long-standing interest in changing the land revenue system in India, and she penned a manuscript on this subject titled The zemindar, the sun and the watering pot as affecting life and death and India.Footnote ⁶⁸ This manuscript was a detailed study of Indian agriculture, addressing Nightingale's preoccupation with the disastrous impact of the land revenue settlement, particularly perturbed by the system that allowed Indian zamindars and European planters to domineer over the Indian peasant, in a manner that reflected ‘something between an Irish middleman and an American slaveholder’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nightingale meticulously gleaned empirical data on rents collected across the Bengal and Madras presidencies, and her methods of gathering statistical materials to influence public policy falls squarely into the tradition of the Society, one that was pioneered by Malthus and the other co-founders.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nightingale sent copies of her draft manuscript to a number of close friends, among whom were Sir Arthur Cotton, Bartle Frere, and Benjamin Jowett, then master of Balliol College and a close friend since 1862.Footnote ⁷¹ The comments she received were scathing in their criticism. In particular, Jowett cautioned against the publication of the manuscript, regarding Nightingale's suggestions for reforming the Land Act as ‘too jerky and impulsive’, and advising a complete overhaul.Footnote ⁷² Nightingale's radical view that land tax, rather than a Malthusian condition, lay at the root of Indian peasants’ difficulties, was not readily accepted among official and professional circles.

While Nightingale did not pursue the publication of her manuscript, she also did not reduce her labours regarding the life of the Indian peasant, redoubling her efforts to obtain reliable information by engaging in correspondence with Indians. Writing in April 1878 to Prasanna Sen, an attorney at the Calcutta high court, Nightingale sought data on the Indian peasant's ability to pay rent, the threat of famine and death if unable to do so. She indicated that she did not regard Malthusian high fertility as the reason for famine. ‘And I would suggest that it would be most useful if you were to obtain facts – trustworthy and individual facts – about their prosperity and its causes. That would not only be most interesting but would lead to great and practical good.’Footnote ⁷³ It was Nightingale's intention to collate a rich compilation of Indian statistics, and her chosen method was to use survey methods, an approach that Malthus had adopted in his own queries. She wrote to Lord Salisbury in October 1875, setting out in detail the types of data needed to understand the state of Indian agriculture: ‘the length of these notes meant to show the direction enquiry should take, if it is desired to have real results & returns’. She made it clear that the existing data on the condition of the Indian peasant lacked rigour, with different sources contradicting each other. She was deeply frustrated by this shortcoming: ‘I am not simply writing as a parrot, if parrots write; - for I have laboured thro’, & tried to tabulate, immense piles of (so called) Indian Statistics myself.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Nightingale pursued leading colonial officers to get a resolution on the contradictory data, and her notes of an interview conducted on 21 January 1875 with Sir Bartle Frere at University College, London, contains his revelation on the limitations of data collection – ‘for an English official, does not go out and talk and ask among the natives, he will be hoodwinked about the conditions in the country’!Footnote ⁷⁵ Nightingale continued to be deeply troubled by the ever-present threat of famine, causing Sir Bartle Frere to offer the services of a Col. Fife, who ‘could get any information on the subject of irrigation in Bombay or Sind which you might indicate to him’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Nightingale was also in correspondence with Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian professor of mathematics and philosophy at Elphinstone College, who also set up a cotton trading company, Dadabhai Naoroji and Co., in 1851. He went on to be the president of the Indian National Congress in 1886, a member of the House of Commons, 1892–5, and the author of Poverty and un-British rule in India.Footnote ⁷⁷ Naoroji and Nightingale became regular correspondents on the subject of the condition of the Indian peasant. When Naoroji decided to stand for election, he requested her to write him a letter of support, and Nightingale wrote in June 1886,

Naoroji was not successful in the election and Nightingale writes to him, on his second attempt, in a letter on 24 June 1892,

Nightingale was determined that the conditions of Indian subjects should become public knowledge in England and create momentum for reform of the land rent system: the most effective method would be through having representation in parliament. This could remedy the propensity to conceptualize India as plagued by a Malthusian spectre and was a theme that was also echoed in Poverty and un-British rule in India, where Naoroji raised questions regarding the validity of the presumed relationship between a growing population and the level of poverty in India, countering the official Malthusian position that population growth would herald doom. Citing Macaulay's commentary that population increases are a harbinger for economic growth, Naoroji presented statistics that the average numbers of inhabitants across British India was lower than that in European countries. And while the province of Bengal was far more densely populated than these countries, it had a much lower rate of growth.Footnote ⁷⁹ In pointing out the lack of a single correlation between population growth and resources in India, Naoroji had clearly used the logic that we see in Macaulay's response in 1831 to Sadler in the Edinburgh Review, which upholds Malthus's own thinking on the importance of empirical data for understanding the relationship between land, food, and people. This emphasis on the need for re-examining the statistical data in Naoroji's own work is to make explicit the need for public policy to treat its Indian subjects fairly, in a manner befitting a country within the empire. Naoroji made it clear in his speeches in London and further afield in England that India needed to be given her freedom if she was to continue to contribute to the economic wealth of the empire.

This liberal view that was espoused by public figures such as Hume, Nightingale, and Naoroji clustered around raising the matter of the ‘unequal’ treatment meted out to Indians and rebuking the view that it was the Indian peasantry who were responsible for their own poverty. Their ideas also feed into the earliest nationalist proposal, calling for a less unfair treatment of Indians. This concerted push to shift public opinion in favour of reducing the particularly difficult circumstances that plagued the peasantry, and to identify that the poverty of the peasantry was due to the harsh system of land taxation rather than cultural modes, was, however, unable to replace the more generalized pessimism about the ability of Indian agriculture to support economic growth that permeated the official sphere in both England and India.

IV

The third oppositional tendency became evident in the early twentieth century, at a time when there was a geopolitical shift away from a British and towards an American construction of neo-Malthusianism. This is evident both in the ‘nationalist’ community development experiments of Rabindranath Tagore's Sriniketan and in the increasing international presence in India, the Rockefeller Foundation for example, both shaping future agricultural policy in India. National and international neo-Malthusianism emerges as the outcome of attempts to make sense of the state of people, food, and land to ensure the success of the national struggle and the subsequent need to design and implement a development policy. The ‘nationalist’ reorganization of agriculture was first embarked upon by Tagore who advocated new agricultural training in the United States. He dispatched his son Rathindranath, along with two other young men, Nagendranath Gangulee and Santosh Mukherjee, to study agriculture at the University of Illinois, in 1907.Footnote ⁸¹ Rathindranath and Santosh returned to teach at Shantiniketan, in charge of Tagore's newly established Institute of Rural Reconstruction from 1922. Locating the future of India in such newly created village communities, a theme that was close to the hearts of Nightingale and Hume, are clearly evident in Tagore's ideas of rural development.

While Tagore wanted to promote these ideas in India, Gangulee travelled between India and Britain, to lecture on the central importance of agriculture for India's future: ‘it affects a very large part of our population. To my mind it is of the greatest national interest.’Footnote ⁸³ He was particularly keen on ‘an economic survey of our rural areas, that rests with the administrative officers of the agricultural college and the state Departments, and when this is done, the students will realize the pubic and social aspects of our agricultural problem’.Footnote ⁸⁴ While the value of a statistical survey was being advanced by Gangulee, the importance of scientific agriculture was at the heart of Tagore's conceptualization of Sriniketan, which was to become a community where villagers could gain self-reliance and self-respect based on their own cultural traditions of peasant proprietorship.Footnote ⁸⁵ Tagore was also insistent that the Indian National Congress should adopt a new agricultural model to address seriously the need to feed India's millions and to eradicate poverty, illiteracy, and disease. His desire to overcome these neo-Malthusian obstacles drove him to engineer an agreement between political rivals Subhas Chandra Bose and Nehru: the new planning committee established in 1938 would be chaired by Nehru, in the interests of devising an assured agricultural strategy for a hungry India.Footnote ⁸⁶ There is further evidence of neo-Malthusianism within in the national movement, with Radhakamal Mukherjee, head of the planning committee's group on population, pushing for a population policy rather than a food policy in keeping with a closed Malthusian approach: the fecundity of the populace rather than a shortage of food was regarded as the key problem.Footnote ⁸⁷ The most extreme view was that of M. K. Gandhi who appears to posit the need for a greater neo-Malthusian pressure in India in 1947! He regarded an increasing price of food to be motivation to make everyone work harder.Footnote ⁸⁸

In contrast, there was a different view emerging among professional economists in the first decade of national planning. They perceived a pressing need to devise a post-Malthusian formulation by addressing directly the ways to improve the contribution of agriculture to the national economy. V. K. R. V. Rao and D. R. Gadgil, later to become founders of a number of leading economic institutions in India, were predominantly concerned that Indian planning should conjointly examine the role of agriculture and industry to ensure the well-being of its people.Footnote ⁸⁹ A variant on the role of agriculture is evident among the Bombay school of economists, led by P. R. Brahmananda, B. R. Shenoy, and C. N. Vakil, who regarded the price of food, known in classical economics as the wage good constraint, to be as the primary obstacle to growth and prioritized agricultural goods as the primary source of exports rather than industrialization.Footnote ⁹⁰ The range of responses to the neo-Malthusian construction that was circulating in the Indian National Congress indicate that there was no consensus on the best strategy to move from a positively to a preventively checked society, but there was a clear sense that both politicians and professionals were searching to find a way to devise an agricultural strategy that would increase the rate of economic growth.

The second driver of the geopolitical shift towards the United States was spearheaded by the Rockefeller Foundation and its declaration that India was an underdeveloped country in the 1940s. An inter-office memo circulated in the Foundation at the eve of India's Independence described the country as ‘too vast and complex’. There was a need for ‘a thorough-going survey’ before making any decision on the types of policy that it might fund.Footnote ⁹¹ This suggestion was at odds with the thinking put forth by Joseph Willits, the director of the Social Sciences Division who proposed a development model ‘where the ratio of developed resources to population was a problem in all “unindustrialised” countries’.Footnote ⁹² He consulted Sir Richard Stone, later Nobel Laureate in Economics, on his approach, who responded that any model required statistics, and that techniques used to calculate national income in industrialized economies were not likely to produce good results in underdeveloped countries.Footnote ⁹³ Stone's emphasis on the need for empirical data was closely aligned to Malthus's late thought on the value of an open approach, and was debated among officials of the Rockefeller Foundation. Alan Gregg, the vice president of the Foundation, noted in ‘Precarious welfare’ written in 1951 that there was a need to move away from the neo-Malthusian view that positive checks were inevitable towards the proposition that improved public policy could support the economic needs of a growing population in India.

While the Foundation accepted that there was a definitive neo-Malthusian situation in India, and that it was necessary to improve agricultural production, it was the US political leadership that most explicitly put forth the notion that it was co-operation between the US and India that would be the key to increasing food supply. At the inauguration of the World Agricultural Fair in 1959, Dwight Eisenhower emphasized the benefits of new links to ensure that India could better manage the lives its vast rural millions.Footnote ⁹⁵

The emphasis on the superior ability of the US to overcome hunger and turn population growth from a curse to a source of economic advancement was evident in the American exhibit at the Fair – ‘Food–Family–Friendship–Freedom’ – a shorthand for the grand purpose of achieving world peace through the uniting of Indian and American interests under the same banner.

Oppositional tendencies are identifiable in the 1940s. On the one hand, the role of internationalism, to create a better-fed India so that it could walk confidently into its new-found freedom and the nationalist ideals of Tagore's Sriniketan;Footnote ⁹⁸ that freedom from hunger and ensuring economic development should be based on a domestically created community approach to development. On the other hand, the Foundation was pushing for US aid policy to assist India as part of the new strategy of development for peace, as it was concerned that India's surging population might become a cause for global war.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such divergences between the closed and open approach to statistics is also evident in other international quarters: with the advice of Professor Austin Robinson, a close observer and commentator on the Indian economy, to his professional colleagues in India of the need to acquire new empirical evidence on the trends in population and food supply in India:

Robinson's response highlighted the need for Indian politicians, officials, and professionals to take seriously the importance of an open approach to collecting statistics, and indicated that policies should only be made using an inductive method of reasoning. The preference of the Indian nationalists was to address the role of agriculture to improve the state of India's food supply for economic growth, while the American formulations were built on the need to overturn the imminent threat of a neo-Malthusian tragedy of the commons and avert global war by accepting the donor policies of the United States.

V

The need to overcome neo-Malthusian thinking in explaining the relationship between population and food supply remained a concern among the architects of the new national planning system. The radical decision to invest primarily in the creation of an industrial sector was at least in part an attempt to move beyond regarding the economy solely as the relationship between people and food. With the appointment of P. C. Mahalanobis, D. R. Gadgil, and V. K. R. V. Rao as members of the new national planning committee in 1949, there was also a push to an open approach to statistics to address the crucial need for primary data collection in India to gain a clearer contour of the economic contribution to national income, particularly of the ability to feed its population.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The committee of international economists and statisticians, led by Prof. Simon Kuznets, previously associate director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics, War Production Board, Prof. J. R. N. Stone, newly appointed director of the Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge, and Dr J. B. D. Derksen of the International Statistical Association, concluded that the conceptual categories and empirical data collection method for the estimation of national accounts could not be based on categories previously developed for use in industrialized countries.Footnote ¹⁰² The primary need for low-income countries, which were predominantly based on agricultural production, was new statistical toolsFootnote ¹⁰³ to provide sources of data for agricultural policy-making.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These gaps in the statistical base – essential for Indian planning – became key parameters for the design of early Indian planning documents and continued to impact the development trajectory of the country for future decades.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Neo-Malthusian thinking was a lively ideology in Independent India, and its historical roots, going back to Malthus's own ideas and times, become evident by distinguishing ‘two approaches’ to statistical data collection. Important Malthusian moments can be identified. The first lay in the opposition of ‘national’ and ‘global’ Malthus, showing how the validity of Malthus's own propositions on population gave way to an ideologically constructed image of Indian agriculture. The second was to explore how a closed approach resulted in a pervasive Malthusianism, devised by official elites in British India to control and coerce the Indian populace to ensure continued tax revenue collection. This was in contention with an alternative open approach to data collection that used survey methods, constructed by radical public figures in Britain and India who supported a more positive view of agricultural policy in India. The third was to untangle the various responses to neo-Malthusian thinking that emerged in the early twentieth century, with a shift to a community agricultural model devised by Tagore. This constrasted with American attempts to provide aid to avert global war by increasing food production. In each case, there was tension between a closed model of policy-making with scant use of empirical data for deductive thinking, and a search for new statistics on population, food, and land to embark on an inductive approach to agricultural policy. By bringing to the forefront the role played by the collection and interpretation of statistical data in identifying the relationship between food, land, and people, alongside a co-locating of Malthus, statistics, and Indian agricultural policy, it becomes possible to examine explicitly the phenomenon of the rising tide of ‘empirical globalism’. It also shows that agricultural policy-making in independent India continued to be plagued by a Malthusian tendency to relapse into simplistic and closed thinking: that population pressure would inevitably cause prolonged periods of hunger and become a serious obstacle to industrial development. This dismal condition of agriculture, the result of the continued presence of a Malthusian spectre, with an inability to emerge from the opposing tendencies located in each of the preceding three centuries, has shut off the possibility of using statistics to devise new visions where agricultural communities have the ability to contribute productively to development policy-making.