21 | Urbanization, Towns, and Cities in British India at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Published on: 29 June 2026

On March 1, 1901, the British government finished the first Indian census of the twentieth century. When the final numbers were added up, they showed one very important thing: nine out of every ten people lived in small villages rather than in cities. This meant that nearly 270 million people in the Indian Empire led rural lives. India was, in the starkest statistical terms, a rural nation.

While officials already knew India was a rural nation, they were interested in the small details hidden in the reports, such as the slow and uneven move of people toward towns. This move was often interrupted by the bubonic plague, which made many people leave cities to find safety in the countryside.

This essay uses the 1901 Census reports to explain how "towns" were defined (usually as any place with its own local government or at least 5,000 residents). It explores  why some provinces were more urban than others. Finally, it looks at the three biggest presidencies — Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras to see how new industries and trade were beginning to change Indian society. 

— Census of India, 1901

DEFINING THE URBAN: The beginning

Before any comparison is possible, one must understand what the Census meant by a "town." The Imperial Census Code offered a four-part definition. A town included every municipality of whatever size; all civil lines not within municipal limits; every cantonment; and any continuous collection of houses permanently inhabited by no fewer than 5,000 persons that the Provincial Superintendent decided to treat as urban. The definition was mostly inherited from the 1891 census and not altered.

The main problem was how the rules were applied in different areas. Local census leaders had a lot of freedom, and they used it in different ways. In Burma, any settlement with more than 5,000 people was automatically called a town. Meanwhile, in Baluchistan and Bengal, some places with fewer than 5,000 residents were still counted as towns for "special reasons"

The report itself was candid about the consequence: 

These blurry definitions are important because the famous outcome of this census - “one in ten Indians lived in a town” is based entirely on them. For example, if Burma had used the strict Madras standard, or vice versa, the population numbers for those provinces would have looked very different. The census leaders understood this problem and warned that the line between "urban" and "rural" was really just a rough estimate rather than a hard fact. 

TABLE 1 — Urban Population & Village Character by Province, 1901

Sources: 1901 Census of India, Part I, Chapter I, paragraphs 56–73. Urban % = proportion of provincial population in census-defined towns.

THE POLES OF INDIAN URBAN LIFE

The gap between the most and least urbanized corners of the empire was extraordinary. Ajmer-Merwara led the way with 26 per cent of its population living in towns. This high figure was inflated by the ancient grandeur of Ajmer city and the important cotton mart of Beawar, but also by the province's small size, which concentrated its limited geography around a few busy administrative and trade centers. Baroda followed closely at 24 per cent, a figure driven by 47 distinct towns packed into a compact state. While this percentage was high for India, officials noted that in Baroda, the distinction between a town and a village was often merely nominal. 

In Assam, the tea industry actually slowed down the growth of towns. While big industries in other places usually bring people together into cities, each large tea garden in Assam acted as its own independent center. Because these plantations had their own shops and markets, the workers lived in spread-out communities on the estates instead of moving to urban areas.

Baluchistan was another useful example where 95 per cent of the people lived in the countryside. However, the reason here was not farming but the fact that so many people were wandering with herds. About 44 per cent of the population was nomadic, moving their animals across a landscape where the search for water determined everything. The few people who lived in towns were almost all traders from India or Afghanistan, or workers who relied on British military camps for their livelihood. Villages in this region were also very small, with 91 per cent having fewer than 500 residents.

Between these extremes was a group of provinces. This includes Madras, Punjab, the United Provinces, and Burma where about 9 to 12 per cent of people lived in towns. These similar numbers hid very different social realities. In the Punjab, urban life was focused on three major cities - Lahore, Delhi, and Amritsar - which together held 22 per cent of the province's entire town population. In contrast, the urban population in Madras was more thinly spread out, but there were still areas with no urban life at all: the hilly and forested Agency regions contained zero towns.

THE ENGINES OF CHANGE: RAILWAYS, COTTON, AND PLAGUE

Between 1891 and 1901, the total population of India grew by only 2.4 per cent marked by a decade filled with famine, epidemic, and ecological disruption. But the population living in towns grew by 7.3 per cent over the same period. In British territory specifically, urban growth ran at 8.5 per cent against a general increase of only 4.8 per cent. Something was drawing people, however tentatively, away from their villages.

The census commissioners identified two primary reasons. (a) The first was the railway. In the Central Provinces, where the urban share had risen from 6 to 7.6 per cent, the improvement in railway communications had caused "a rapid development of trade at the main centres" and encouraged new industries. The number of factories and mills in the province had risen from 16 to 59 in a single decade.

Towns well-placed on the rail network such as Raipur, Bilaspur were growing rapidly(b) The second was industrial cotton. Berar's urban population grew by 58,740 persons or 16 per cent, driven almost entirely by the boom in cotton ginning and pressing. The number of cotton presses in the province had nearly doubled; ginning mills had grown by more than 50 per cent.

Against these factors was the plague. The epidemic first appeared in Bombay in September 1896 and had a massive impact on the 1901 Census. By the time of the count, it had killed an estimated 114,000 people in Bombay alone and driven tens of thousands of others to leave the city temporarily. As a result, the population fell by about 6 per cent, dropping from 821,764 in 1891 to 776,006 in 1901. Had the plague not struck, Bombay’s population would almost certainly have reached one million. Instead, the city shrank as residents fled from the crowded central wards to the northern suburbs to escape both the disease and the strict government measures used to fight it.

— 1901 Census Report

FAITH AND THE CITY: RELIGION AS URBAN PREDICTOR

One of the most striking findings in the 1901 census was the degree to which the religious community predicted urban residence. The overall average was that one in ten Indians living in a town  masked enormous variation across faiths. The Parsi community was the most dramatically urban of any significant group: more than 85 per cent of Parsis lived in towns. This was not incidental. Parsi commercial culture, centred on Bombay and Surat, had been urban for generations; the community's prosperity depended on trade, banking, and industry, all of which clustered in cities.

The Jains, at 30 per cent urban, reflected a similarly commercial orientation. A diaspora of traders and moneylenders spread across the subcontinent, Jains had moved to market towns and trading centres. Christians, at 22 per cent, were urban partly because of the colonial administrative and missionary apparatus and partly because many Indian Christian communities were concentrated in the more commercially active coastal areas.

The way Hindus and Muslims lived in cities varied greatly depending on the region. In areas like Bengal, Baluchistan, Assam, and the Punjab, Muslims were actually less likely to live in towns than Hindus. However, in most other provinces including Berar, Madras, Mysore, and the United Provinces, the situation was completely different. In those places, the percentage of Muslims living in towns was more than double their share of the total population.

This difference is mostly due to history. Many larger Indian towns were originally built around the royal courts of Muslim rulers, such as the Mughals. Even after these rulers lost their political power, the Muslim families, soldiers, and workers who had moved there to serve the courts remained in the cities,. In contrast, in regions like Bengal, the majority of Muslims were local farmers who preferred to stay in the countryside rather than move to urban areas.

THE TWENTY-NINE CITIES

By international convention_, which the 1901 census adopted, a city was a place with at least 100,000 inhabitants. Applying this standard, the whole of India contained just twenty-nine cities, with a combined population of 6,605,837 which was barely two per cent of the total population of the empire.

The contrast with Europe was stark. In England, nearly one-third of the population lived in cities; in Germany, one-sixth; in France, more than one-seventh. Yet the commissioners were careful to explain this gap. They pointed out that a century earlier, England, Germany, and France together had between them only seven cities, with a combined population less than a third of India's twenty-nine cities in 1901. The mass urbanization of Europe was a recent, steam-powered phenomenon. India in 1901 sat, perhaps, at the beginning of a similar transition.

TABLE 2 — India's Major Cities: Population Change 1891–1901

Sources: 1901 Census of India, Part I, paragraphs 76–82. Estimates used for 1891 figures where exact census boundaries differed.

THREE CITIES, THREE STORIES

Calcutta was the largest city in India and, when its suburbs and the industrial twin of Howrah were counted, one of the twelve largest in the world. Its population in the area administered by the Municipal Corporation had risen to 847,796, a 24 per cent increase since 1891. Add Cossipore-Chitpur, Manicktola, Garden Reach, and Howrah, and the metropolitan agglomeration reached 1,106,738. The census noted, with some archival precision, that a century earlier the population of London had been 969,310 — considerably less than Greater Calcutta at the present time.

Yet Calcutta's growth was a story of immigration rather than natural increase. Barely one-third of the inhabitants of the Municipal Corporation area claimed Calcutta as their birthplace. The remainder had come from South Bihar, Saran and Muzaffarpur alone contributing 128,000; from the United Provinces (90,000); from Cuttack, Burdwan, Dacca, and dozens of other districts. The relentless in-flow of male labour, specifically of the immigrant population where only one-quarter were female had pushed the sex ratio steadily downward, from 556 females per 1,000 males in 1881 to 507 in 1901.

Bombay told a different story from other Indian cities at the turn of the century. The migration into the city had seemed unstoppable throughout the nineteenth century: growing from just 10,000 under the Portuguese to 60,000 within 14 years of English rule, then reaching 180,000 by 1814 and 644,405 by the 1872 Census. By 1891, the population had climbed to 821,764.

This momentum was halted by the bubonic plague, which first appeared in September 1896. The epidemic caused an estimated 114,000 deaths by the time of the 1901 Census, leading to a mass flight of workers and a significant disruption of trade and industry. Furthermore, the sanitary measures used to fight the disease created great fear, resulting in violent popular resistance. The 1901 count recorded a population of 776,006, a decrease of about 6 per cent. Mr. S. M. Edwardes, who wrote the separate Bombay Census report, estimated that 43,000 residents had temporarily fled the city due to fear of the plague; had they been present, the population would have been nearly equal to the 1891 figure. While the city survived, it bore the visible scars of the crisis.

Madras, with a population of 509,346, was the smallest of the three presidency cities and the most distinctive. Unlike Calcutta and Bombay, it was of small industrial importance and lacked large modern factories. It attracted far fewer immigrants where the foreign-born (those born outside the city) made up less than one-third of the total population. Most of these immigrants came from within the Madras Presidency itself, specifically from the neighboring districts of Chingleput and North Arcot.

This localized, more stable migration pattern was clearly visible in the sex ratio: Madras was nearly in balance, with males and females almost equal in number (approximately 984 females per 1,000 males). In contrast, in Calcutta and Bombay, females were in "marked defect," because the labor migration that fueled those cities was overwhelmingly male.

A CIVILIZATION AT THE THRESHOLD

The 1901 Census showed that India was almost entirely a nation of villages. Nine out of ten people and nearly 270 million individuals lived in the villages rather than in towns. Their lives were defined by farming the soil and following the pattern of the monsoons and harvests instead of factory schedules.

However, the records also showed that the country was starting to change in a few areas. Railways were beginning to connect different markets, and cotton and jute mills were bringing large groups of workers together in one place. The big port cities were becoming diverse centers that attracted migrants from hundreds of miles away. There were only 29 large cities holding about 6.6 million people, which was only two per cent of the population.

Even though these cities were small in number, they were already becoming the centers for government and business for the whole country. In 1901, the heart of India was still the village, but the future was being built in the mills of Bombay, the trading houses of Calcutta, and the railway workshops of the Central Provinces. Reading the 1901 Census is like looking at a dawn of a society that was about to begin a major transformation of urbanization.

Source:

H.H. Risley & E.A. Gait, (1903). Census of India, 1901, Volume I — India, Part I (Report). Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, Calcutta.