23 | The Movement of Population and Migration in India, 1872–1911

An essay based on Chapters II (Movement of Population) and III (Birthplace) of the Census of India, 1911, Volume I, Part I — Report, by E. A. Gait (Calcutta, 1913).

1. Introduction

Chapters II and III of Gait's 1911 Census Report form a connected pair: the first treats the census in its dynamical aspect, comparing the 1911 count with the four earlier enumerations and dissecting the causes of change. The second uses the question of Birthplace to map the movement of people across the map of India and beyond its seas. Together the two chapters describe a population of 315 million that was growing in spurts between catastrophes, and moving; but moving far less than any European observer would have expected.

Their raw material lies in Imperial Table II (variation since 1872) and Imperial Table XI (birthplace), whose principal results are digested in ten Subsidiary Tables printed at the end of the Birthplace chapter. The general distribution of persons by birthplace and by place of enumeration, proportional migration, the born-in-district proportions, the variation since 1901, the province-to-province matrix for both censuses, the foreign-born series, Indians enumerated elsewhere in the Empire, and the registers of the emigration ports. 

Gait opens by insisting that birthplace statistics matter for more than migration. They explain the variations in the population of each local area; they allow the calculation of the natural population, persons born in a tract, wherever enumerated, as against the actual population present on census night. Lastly, they throw light on the effect of modern industrial development on the movement of labour. The difference between the two populations could be dramatic: in Calcutta proper there were only 475 females per 1,000 males in the actual population, but 869 in the natural. The city's sex ratio was an artifact of male migrant labour, not of Bengali demography.

2. The growth of the population, 1872–1911

The recorded population rose from 206.2 million in 1872 to 315.2 million in 1911, a gain of 52.9 per cent. The census of 1872 omitted great tracts (Central India, Rajputana, Hyderabad, the Punjab States); 1891 brought in Upper Burma and Kashmir; 1901 much of Baluchistan; 1911 the Frontier agencies. Each successive count was also more complete than the last. Stripping out new areas (43.2 million) and improved enumeration (15.7 million), the real increase over 39 years was about 50 million, or 19 per cent. The paradox of India was a birth-rate far higher than any in Europe cancelled by devastating mortality, above all among infants. At the 1872–1911 rate the population would double only in about a century and a half.

Table 1. The population of India at the five censuses, with Gait's decomposition of recorded into real growth. Note: The census of 1872 omitted great tracts (Central India, Rajputana, Hyderabad, the Punjab States); 1891 brought in Upper Burma and Kashmir; 1901 much of Baluchistan; 1911 the Frontier agencies.

The determinants of growth are set out with characteristic economics. Migration, decisive for districts and even provinces, counted for very little for India as a whole. The net excess of emigration over immigration was about 581,000 in 1911 against 496,000 in 1901, trivial beside a decadal variation of twenty millions. Growth therefore turned on the balance of births and deaths, and that balance on harvests and epidemics. 

The decade 1901–11 escaped the great famines of 1897 and 1900; there was partial failure in 1907 and local scarcity elsewhere, but the period ranks as one of 'moderate agricultural prosperity', with irrigation extended from 18.9 to 22.5 million acres, exports nearly doubled, coal output up from one to twelve million tons since 1881, and railway mileage past 32,000. 

The single great subtraction was plague: from its outbreak in Bombay in 1896 it killed a recorded 6.5 million people in the decade and over a third of them in the Punjab. Gait reckons that without it the decade's growth would have been 9.3 rather than 7.1 per cent. Malaria added its own toll: in 1908 alone nearly two million 'fever' deaths were recorded in the United Provinces and the Punjab epidemic belt.

3. The provinces: recovery, stagnation and decline

The all-India average conceals different provincial histories. The fastest-growing units were those rebounding from the famines of the 1890s: Hyderabad (+20 per cent), the Central Provinces and Berar (+17.9), Central India (+10). It was exactly as Gait had predicted in 1901, when he observed that famine kills at the extremes of life and leaves the reproductive ages intact, so that 'the recuperation will be rapid'. 

The steadily prosperous rice tracts grew: Bengal +8.0 per cent (its fourth successive decade between 6.7 and 8.0), Madras +8.3, which Gait offers as the growth to be expected in India when the past and present conditions are normal. Burma remained the frontier with Lower Burma growing 135 per cent since 1872, and the province's real decadal growth of about 13 per cent included a heavy stream of Madrasi immigration. Assam grew 14.6 per cent, and for the first time its natural increase outran the tea-garden influx.

At the other pole stood the plague provinces. British Punjab, despite canal colonies, booming trade and an extraordinary rise in wages, lost 1.7 per cent of its people. And the loss fell entirely on women: males slightly increased while females fell 4.3 per cent. The United Provinces likewise declined by 1 per cent, the whole loss again female. 

The regional pattern within provinces was equally stark: the Punjab's Indo-Gangetic plain west and sub-Himalayan districts fell 8.9 and 5.9 per cent while the canal-fed North-West Dry Area grew 17.8 per cent (62.9 per cent over thirty years). In the United Provinces, Muttra and Ballia each lost about 14 per cent, while the healthy Himalayan districts gained 10.1 per cent. 

Everywhere Gait finds the same inverse law: 'the rate of increase tends to vary inversely with the existing density'. half the decade's entire increase occurred in tahsils with fewer than 150 persons to the square mile, though East Bengal defied it with Dacca (952 to the square mile) adding 12 per cent and Tippera nearly 15.

In the main British provinces registered births exceeded deaths by 9.4 million while the census showed an actual increase of 12.1 million; only in Bihar and Orissa and the Central Provinces did the two sets of figures approach each other. The reporting agency was the village chaukidar, 'a low paid, illiterate person', frequently absent. The epidemics like smallpox, cholera, plague and fever broke the system precisely when it was most needed. Yet Gait's verdict is balanced: the degree of error was fairly constant, so the returns could be trusted for trends if not for levels.

4. Migration based on Birthplace

Chapter III opens with a five-fold typology that has remained standard. Casual migration covers the minor movements between neighbouring villages. They are called casual not because they are temporary or accidental, for they are often of a permanent character, but because a change of residence within a very short distance does not amount to migration. 

Temporary migration is the movement of coolies to new canals and railway lines, and of travellers on business, pilgrimage and marriage. Here the census itself intervened in the statistics: the date of the count was deliberately fixed to avoid the great festivals and the Hindu auspicious season for marriages, so temporary migration on census night was smaller than usual. But the season chosen was the season of public works, and the labour assembled on the Ganges bridge works at Sara Ghat and the triple canal project in the Punjab was correspondingly larger.

Periodic migration is the seasonal pulse: harvesters to the Sundarbans, Burma and the wheat districts of Upper India; the cold-weather road gangs of Bengal; the Powindah traders wintering across the North-West frontier. Semi-permanent migrants earn their livelihood in one place but keep their families and their hearts in another. 

Most Europeans in India, the mill-hands of Calcutta, Government clerks and domestic servants, go back to their homes. The report also quotes, “the ubiquitous Marwari trader and money-lender, who plies his business in the remotest corners of the Empire, but who, in his old age, almost invariably returns to his home in Rajputana”. 

Permanent migration, finally, is colonization. From Upper Burmans into Lower Burma after annexation, the congested Punjab districts into the canal colonies, with a devotional minor form, the old people, especially Hindu widows, who retire to die at Benares or Brindaban.

The census sees this colonization only while the first generation lives. When the settlers die and are replaced by children born in the new home, all traces of the movement disappear from the census tables. The bulk of Sikkim's population was of Nepalese origin, but this fact ceased to be apparent from the census return of birthplace.

4.1 The fact of immobility

Of 315 million people, all but 27.2 million, around 8.7 per cent, including the 650,000 born outside India, were enumerated in the district of their birth. Subsidiary Table IV puts it at 9,135 persons in every 10,000 counted in their home district. The provincial extremes are instructive, with Travancore (9,711), Madras (9,583), Kashmir (9,540) and Bihar and Orissa (9,522) being the most home-bound. The receiving frontiers such as Sikkim (6,597), Coorg (7,372), Ajmer-Merwara (7,978) were the least. And of the 26.5 million internal migrants, 16.5 million, or 62 per cent, were born in a district adjoining the one where they were counted as casual migrants, in Gait's sense, rather than migrants at all.

Census Commissioner Gait identified the caste system as a primary social anchor that heavily restricted the mobility of the Hindu population. Within this rigid framework, an individual’s life was deeply tied to their local social circle, as being away from home made it nearly impossible to marry within prescribed limits or even share food, water, or tobacco with others. 

The risks of long-term absence included being viewed with suspicion upon return and potentially losing one's social standing due to suspected violations of caste rules. Furthermore, severe cultural and religious taboos, such as those prohibiting sea voyages or the crossing of specific rivers, acted as powerful barriers that discouraged people, particularly women, from traveling beyond their traditional boundaries.

The second major deterrent to movement was the economic anchor of agriculture, as a society composed largely of small-scale landholders had little motivation to relocate unless new, fertile land became available. However, Gait anticipated that this historical immobility would soon diminish due to the rapid expansion of large-scale industries, mining, and commercial cultivation. He predicted that the growing demand for labor in these sectors would inevitably increase the volume of migration across the Empire. This shift was further supported by advancements in modern transportation, which made traveling a thousand miles in 1911 far more feasible than a much shorter journey had been just a century earlier.

Against the agricultural stillness he sets the pastoral contrast of Baluchistan, quoting Mr. Bray's report at length:

“Probably no feature of Baluchistán life impresses a new-comer more forcibly than the apparent fact that the population, such as it is, is always on the move. If he travels through Zhób and Lóralai at the fall of the year, he will come across swarms of Afghán Powindahs on their yearly journey into India… If he travels up the Bólán, he will have to thread his way through a moving mass of Saráwán Bráhúis, leaving their native highlands with their wives and their children, their flocks and their herds, for the warmth of the Kachhí… whole masses of the population move down-country like a slowly advancing glacier… Now and then he may be drawn to a village of fairish size, only to regard it as a village of the dead, until he stumbles up against a few unfortunates who have been left behind to look after the crops.”

4.2 Village exogamy and the casual migrant

The most significant factor driving minor population movements was the near-universal Hindu practice of village exogamy, where parents chose brides for their sons from outside their own local community. This custom was rooted in strict prohibitions against marrying within one's own clan or near relatives, alongside a general social belief that all members of a single village shared some form of kinship. Additionally, it was often viewed as practically advantageous to marry someone from a different area to ensure the privacy of family matters and minimize interference from the bride's parents during domestic disagreements.

These migration statistics were further increased by the common tradition of young wives returning to their parental homes to give birth, which resulted in many children being registered in a birthplace different from their eventual permanent residence. Finally, temporary factors such as social gatherings for festivals and weddings, as well as necessary evacuations during outbreaks of epidemic diseases like the plague, also contributed to the high volume of recorded casual migration.

5. The internal currents: Maps and Imperial Tables

The Report has two remarkable maps. The first shows the main currents of inter-provincial migration: the net arrows converging on Bengal, Assam and Burma from the great reservoirs of Bihar, the United Provinces and Madras. The second shows the ebb and flow between contiguous Provinces and States, the thick double-headed traffic of the casual borderlands. Between them they compress the whole geography of Indian labour into two pages.

Imperial Table XI Part III: The census's first full internal migration balance sheet has a simple and powerful geography: the great reservoirs of labour were the congested, purely agricultural tracts like Bihar and Orissa (net loss 1.73 million), the United Provinces (−0.81 million), Madras (−0.63 million) and Rajputana (−0.55 million, proportionally the heaviest loss in India at over 5 per cent of its population). The great sinks were industrial Bengal (+1.18 million), the tea frontier of Assam (+0.76 million), rice-frontier Burma (+0.48 million), Bombay (+0.41 million) and the recovering Central Provinces (+0.33 million).

Table 2. The principal inter-provincial streams of migration, 1911 (Imperial Table XI Part III

The labor systems of colonial India were defined by distinct regional needs and the availability of local workers. In Bengal, the fertility of the land allowed the indigenous population to sustain themselves through agriculture, resulting in a shortage of local landless laborers for the province's growing industrial sectors. To fill the demand for workers in the Hooghly jute mills, the tea gardens of Darjeeling, and various infrastructure projects around Calcutta, employers recruited heavily from other provinces. 

This reliance on outside labor extended to public services like the police and jail wardens, as well as domestic roles. While Bengal saw a net gain of nearly 1.4 million people, most of these migrants were temporary laborers who arrived without their families for a few seasons and returned home once they had accumulated sufficient savings.

In contrast, the sparsely populated regions of Assam and Burma faced a different challenge, as local inhabitants had little economic incentive to work for hire. This led to a significant reliance on immigrant labor, which made up 12.5 percent of Assam's population and 5 percent of Burma's. In Assam, the tea industry developed a complex recruitment system that brought in tens of thousands of people annually, eventually accounting for one-sixth of the total population. Many of these laborers eventually transitioned from the gardens to reclaim and farm jungle land independently. 

Similarly, Burma’s rice mills and oil industries were supported by a steady stream of laborers from Madras and Chittagong. The tea-garden population of foreign origin was about 700,000, and Mr. McSwiney estimated the ex-coolies at 350,000: the industry had given Assam at least one-sixth of its people. By 1911, the Madras-born population in Burma had nearly doubled compared to two decades prior, with the vast majority of these immigrants residing in urban areas.

On the other side, severe population pressure in western Bihar and the Chota Nagpur plateau forced many landless families to send adult males elsewhere for work, leading to 399,000 people from Bihar and Orissa being recorded in Assam, a 42 percent increase since 1891. While the Orissa division provided metropolitan Bengal with domestic servants and laborers, the United Provinces sustained a significant net loss of approximately 800,000 people, primarily moving toward Bengal. 

Additionally, emigration from the United Provinces to Central India dropped from 320,000 to 169,000 as famine colonies emptied, and a regional exchange with the Punjab saw 220,000 people from the United Provinces moving there, while 122,000 Punjabis moved in return. 

In southern India, the industrial backwardness of Madras and its large population of landless castes drove many to seek livelihoods overseas in Burma, Ceylon, and the rubber estates of the Federated Malay States. Although fewer of these migrants remained within India compared to those from Bihar or the United Provinces, the total volume of emigration from Madras actually exceeded both of those regions. 

Rajputana experienced the heaviest proportional net loss in the country at more than 5 percent, with the majority of its emigrants settling in nearby British territories. Despite this, the region's impact was felt across the subcontinent through the enterprising Marwari traders, who established shops in every major market throughout Bengal and even in the remote areas of Assam. 

5.1 The district lens

The Report's district examples show migration at its true grain. The Chenab canal colony served as a primary hub for internal migration, hosting more than 600,000 individuals born in other regions. These migrants were largely drawn from the congested districts of Sialkot, Amritsar, and Jullundur rather than immediate neighboring tracts. 

The social makeup of this influx was highly specific, as Jats accounted for approximately one-quarter of the immigrants and Arains represented one-ninth, whereas Brahmans and Rajputs were far less mobile, appearing at rates of only one in 333 and one in 50, respectively. Similarly, the abundance of inexpensive land in Purnea led to a rapid increase in its immigrant population from four western districts, which nearly doubled from 68,000 to 130,000 over a ten-year period. 

Economic and industrial developments elsewhere also triggered significant population shifts, such as in the Jheria coal thana, which tripled its population in twenty years and secured the largest district gain in Bihar. At the same time, the Sonthal Parganas saw a steady movement of people into North Bengal to reclaim long-standing jungle areas for cultivation. 

This search for viable land was also evident in the migration of numerous Muhammadan cultivators from North and East Bengal up the Brahmaputra into Assam. Finally, the previously strong migration from Upper to Lower Burma largely stabilized by 1911, as new canal systems made land in the Upper region more valuable while the best agricultural plots in Lower Burma had already been claimed. 

5.2 British territory and the Native States

The interchange between British territory and the Native States ended in a net loss of 135,000 to the States and the Rajputana Agency was responsible for the whole of it, giving 595,000 to British territory (182,000 to the Punjab, 118,000 to Bombay, 103,000 to the United Provinces) against 170,000 received. This was excluding the casual type, a large proportion of these emigrants were traders who looked forward ultimately to returning to their homes. 

Heavy net losses were also sustained by the States attached to Bombay, especially Kathiawar and Cutch. In contrast, there was a notable movement from British districts into the sparsely populated Bihar and Orissa States, where improved communication and low rents for waste land attracted new cultivators. Similarly, Mysore drew large numbers of laborers from Madras to work on coffee and cardamom plantations and in the Kolar gold-fields, where an extraordinary 85 percent of the population was foreign-born. 

This migratory trend significantly impacted urban demographics as well, with immigrants making up about one-third of the population in Bangalore city and its civil and military station. Finally, the Bengal States saw an influx of people as the populations of Sylhet and Tippera overflowed into the cultivable waste lands of Hill Tippera. 

Table 3. Migration between the Native States and British territory, 1911, thousands.

6. India and the world

6.1 The foreign-born in India

Some 650,502 persons enumerated in India were born outside it, against 627,438 in 1901 and 525,521 in 1891. More than half of the 504,113 Asia-born were natives of Nepal (280,248, up from 243,037), of which more than three-quarters were enumerated in the contiguous districts of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and the United Provinces. In Sikkim, where in 1901 there were nearly half the inhabitants who were immigrants from across the Nepal frontier and in 1911 the proportion still greatly exceeded a quarter. 

Of the Nepalese elsewhere, a considerable number were sepoys in the army and military police battalions with their dependents. In Assam they bred buffaloes, made ghee and worked as sawyers in the Government forests, their numbers rising from 21,000 to 48,000 in the decade. 

Afghanistan recorded a total of 91,640 immigrants, which marked a decrease of 22,000 compared to the 1901 figures. The vast majority of these individuals were located in the Frontier Province, the Punjab, Baluchistan, and Sind, while the remaining 11,000 primarily consisted of seasonal Powindah peddlers who traveled across the country during the cold weather to sell clothing and textiles. Furthermore, migration from Arabia accounted for 23,078 people, most of whom were concentrated in Bombay.

The population of individuals born in China increased from 47,000 to 80,000, with the vast majority residing in Burma, where their numbers grew from 43,000 to 75,000. This growth was attributed to the first-time census enumeration of two frontier regions and a 55 percent genuine increase in Burma proper. Socially, Chinese men often married Burmese women, leading to a unique identity dynamic where sons typically identified as Chinese for perceived racial status, while daughters identified as Burmese to benefit from the higher social position granted to women in that culture.

Because some Burma-born sons claimed China as their birthplace to support their ethnic identity, the official statistics for the China-born population were likely slightly inflated. Economically, the Chinese were well-established as shoemakers and were becoming increasingly valued as skilled carpenters.

From regions outside of Asia, the population reached 146,265, of which 131,968 were Europeans. The United Kingdom provided the largest contingent at 122,919 people, followed by Germany with 1,860 and France with 1,478. The British total included 77,626 soldiers, a notable rise from 60,965 in 1901, a year when many troops had been redirected to South Africa. Beyond the military, growth in the British population was driven by industrial expansion, the development of railways, and a rising trend of Englishmen marrying while in India. This social shift was reflected in the number of British-born women, which increased from 14,663 to 19,494 over the decade.

6.2 The Indian abroad

Information regarding migration across land frontiers was relatively limited, though total frontier emigration was estimated at roughly 200,000 people, with a notable flow from congested British districts into the sparsely populated Nepal Terai. In contrast, the census provided exact returns for the overseas Empire, recording over one million India-born individuals living abroad. This demographic was predominantly male, accounting for about two-thirds of the total, while over four-fifths were Hindu and only one-tenth were Muhammadan.

Among those who specified their province of origin, 85 percent (or 693,000 people) were from Madras, while other groups included 32,000 from Bengal, approximately 20,000 each from the United Provinces and Bombay, 16,000 from Bihar and Orissa, 13,000 from the Punjab, and 8,000 from Mysore. Most of these individuals emigrated to work as laborers on sugar, tea, coffee, and rubber plantations. However, specific regional occupational patterns existed, as many migrants from Bombay and Bengal served as lascars on ships, and those from the Punjab frequently joined the army or military police in various eastern colonies.

The settlement of Indian migrants across various territories followed a distinct progression based on the history and economic needs of each region. In Ceylon, where migration was long-standing, the India-born population grew by 65 percent in the 1890s due to the tea industry and reached 473,830 by 1911, supported by rubber cultivation. Although the total number of Tamils on the island exceeded one million, about half had been domiciled there for centuries, and only roughly 100,000 were the offspring of recent settlers. 

In contrast, migration to the Straits Settlements and Malay States was a recent phenomenon driven by rubber plantation labor, resulting in a population where the total number of Indians was only 12 percent higher than the number of those born in India. This demographic was overwhelmingly male, at nearly four-fifths, and originated primarily from Madras, with the Punjab being the only other significant source at 8,754 individuals.

Permanent settlement was notably more established in Natal, where nearly half of the Indian population was colony-born and many had transitioned to speaking only English. 

However, the most advanced stage of colonization occurred in Mauritius, where Indian laborers had been introduced for sugar plantations 75 years prior. While only 35,000 India-born residents remained, the total Indian population reached 258,000, making up about 70 percent of the island’s inhabitants. By this period, Indians in Mauritius had moved beyond temporary labor to own significant portions of land and become dominant in the island's commercial, agricultural, and domestic sectors.

6.3 The view from the ports

Subsidiary Table X adds a register the census itself could not supply: the emigrants to the colonies registered at the ports of Calcutta and Madras during the decade 1901–10. The asymmetry is overwhelming. Madras embarked 2,007,251 persons and received back 1,819,337; Calcutta embarked 97,233 and received back 42,505. 

The Madras flow was the circular coolie traffic of the Bay; 1,501,623 embarked for Ceylon (1,327,559 returned) and 447,096 for the Straits Settlements (251,887 returned), while Calcutta's smaller stream fed the long-distance indenture colonies. 23,361 to Demerara, 22,845 to Trinidad, 17,202 to Fiji, 8,525 to Surinam, and shares of the Mauritius and Natal traffic. The table names the birth districts of Calcutta's emigrants, like Basti (28,361), Gonda (12,075), Fyzabad (6,572) and the other congested districts of eastern Oudh, with Shahabad (2,956) leading Bihar. These are the exact tracts whose ‘land-hunger’ the internal tables had already exposed.

6.4 Indians in Great Britain

At Gait's request the Registrars General of England and Scotland compiled a special return, printed as an Appendix to the chapter. It counted 4,069 India-born Indians in England and Wales (3,892 males, 177 females) and 140 in Scotland, a figure exclusive of Europeans born in India. 

Their age distribution was overwhelmingly young-adult (2,780 of the 4,069 aged 15–34), and their occupations sketch the first Indian community in Britain. Of them, 2,536 males were the lascars, divided by the return into the navigating department (577), the engineering department (1,363) and cooks and stewards (591), with 902 students, 76 in medicine, 41 in letters, arts and sciences, 42 in domestic service, and a scattering across trade, law and public administration. It is a portrait in miniature of the two channels, the stokehold and the Inns of Court, through which India then reached the imperial metropolis.

7. Conclusion

Read together, the two chapters overturn two easy assumptions. The first is that India's population history was one of steady Malthusian increase. In fact the recorded growth of 1872–1911 was half illusion, and the real growth of 19 per cent was hostage to famine and, in this decade, to plague, which alone cost the census 6.5 million people and pushed two great provinces into absolute decline, borne almost entirely by women. 

The second is that Indians did not move. Nine in ten died in the district of their birth, and Gait's anchors of caste and smallholding held fast; yet along the edges of that immobility ran some of the largest labour migrations of the age. A million net into Bengal's mills and gardens, three-quarters of a million into Assam, half a million into Burma, six hundred thousand settlers in a single Punjab canal colony, two million registered embarkations from the port of Madras in a single decade, and a million Indians already overseas from Demerara to Fiji, with a vanguard of lascars and students in London.

Gait's framework encompassing the five types of movement, the distinction between actual and natural population, the push of congested Bihar and eastern Oudh and the pull of the frontier, along with the balance sheets of Table XI and its Subsidiary Tables remain the foundation on which every subsequent study of Indian migration has been built.

Sources

E. A. Gait (1913). Census of India, 1911, Volume I (India), Part I — Report, Chapter 2 and 3. Calcutta