Any research or writing which touches on population issues in India is liable to be misinterpreted. For white western scholars like us, writing about two caste groups, one Muslim and one Hindu, with a special reference to issues of women's agency, is a hazardous enterprise. Here we explain why we selected this research topic, why we chose to study population issues in Bijnor and how any insights we gain might apply beyond the two villages where we collected most of the information on which our arguments are based.

Population issues in India: Malthus, Marx or reproductive rights?

The contentiousness of India's population dates from colonial times. The body of writing about India's demography and its population policy is voluminous and varied. Here we pick out three main strands of such writing – the Malthusian, neo-Marxist and feminist – in order to help locate our own position.

The British rulers of India, almost as soon as they established a presence in any part of the sub-continent, started to enumerate the population, as well as counting their crops, animals, and anything else that might be of interest. Much of this counting went way beyond what could ever have been of direct use, and contributed to a categorization of the Indian population by caste and religion, some of whose results can be seen in the anti-reservation and communal riots we described in the last chapter (Cohn 1987; Appadorai 1993).