Historical Mortality Trends in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

The story of how India’s population grew over the last 150 years is, in many ways, the story of how Indians died. Long before the country became the world’s most populous nation, generations were swept away by famines, plague outbreaks, smallpox, and the deadliest pandemic in modern history. Understanding these historical mortality patterns is not just an academic exercise. It explains why India entered the 20th century with only 238 million people, why 1921 is remembered as the “Great Demographic Divide,” and why public health remains so central to the country’s development today.

Early mortality in colonial India (1871-1921) 🔗

The first fifty years for which we have systematic census data tell a grim story. Between 1871 and 1921, India’s population grew by only about 19%, an annual growth rate of less than 0.4%. In several decades, especially 1891-1901 and 1911-1921, growth was nearly flat or even negative. Death rates were so high that they consistently cancelled out the high birth rates of the period.

According to historical demographic studies, the crude death rate in India rose from around 41.3 per thousand in the 1880s to 48.6 per thousand in the decade of 1911-21. Life expectancy at birth hovered around 25 years, and infant mortality often exceeded 200 deaths per 1,000 live births. Three forces were chiefly responsible: famine, epidemic disease, and the structural conditions of colonial rule that made both worse.

The age of great famines 🔗

The late 19th century was one of the most famine-prone periods in Indian history. Approximately 15 million Indians died in 24 major famines between 1850 and 1899, more than in any other 50-year period in recorded Indian history. The Great Famine of 1876-1878 killed between 5.6 and 10.3 million people across the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. The famine of 1896-1897 affected an area of 700,000 square kilometres and a population of 62 million.

These were not simply natural disasters. Colonial policies that prioritised grain exports and treated food markets with a strict laissez-faire attitude turned droughts into mass mortality events. Even during the worst months of the 1876 famine, the districts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam continued to export grain. Recent research published in the journal World Development argues that India suffered 50 to 165 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period, with the death rate rising from 37.2 per 1,000 in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s and life expectancy actually falling from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.

Plague: the new killer of the 1890s 🔗

The bubonic plague arrived in Bombay in 1896, almost certainly brought by ship-borne rats, and quickly became the dominant epidemic threat for the next two decades. What made plague so demographically significant was both its scale and its inequality. As one influential study showed, in 1897 European mortality from plague in Bombay was only 1.8 per mille, while the rate among low-caste Hindus was over 24 per mille. By 1921, plague was still active in colonial South India, with 14,652 deaths recorded that year despite decades of rat-extermination campaigns.

Plague control also revealed the limits of colonial public health. Aggressive policies of forced segregation, hospital isolation, and house-searches were so resented that they fuelled nationalist protest and, in some cases, riots. Many cases simply went unreported because families feared the authorities more than the disease.

Smallpox, cholera, and malaria 🔗

Plague captured the headlines, but the bigger killers were quieter. Malaria was likely the single largest cause of death across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in northern India, and its outbreaks frequently followed famines because malnourished bodies were less able to fight off infection. Cholera dominated the 19th-century epidemic landscape until the 1890s and remained endemic in parts of Bengal and the Gangetic plain. Smallpox killed at high rates until vaccination programmes slowly began to take hold in the early 20th century. As one historical analysis of pandemics in India describes, the period was characterised by a “cholera, plague and influenza” cycle that shaped popular memory and newspaper coverage alike.

The 1918 influenza pandemic: the deadliest single year 🔗

If one event captures the brutal mortality regime of the early 20th century, it is the 1918 influenza pandemic, often called the Spanish Flu. India bore the heaviest burden of any country in the world. India lost roughly 16.7 million people across the three years of the pandemic, representing a mortality rate of about 5.2% of the population. Some more recent estimates using panel data models from the Census of India put district-level mortality at at most 13.88 million, but even the conservative numbers describe a catastrophe unmatched in modern Indian history.

Why young adults and women died disproportionately 🔗

The 1918 pandemic broke the usual rules of influenza mortality. Normally, flu is most dangerous for the very young and the very old. In 1918, healthy adults aged 20 to 40 were the most likely to die. According to historian Mridula Ramanna, in Bombay Presidency “for every 1,000 persons living between the ages of 20 and 40, 62 men and 79 women died.” The bias toward female mortality was unusual; in most other parts of the world, men died at higher rates than women in the 1918 pandemic.

Several factors explain the female disadvantage in India. Women in the reproductive age group were particularly vulnerable, with a 30% drop in the birth rate in 1919 reflecting both maternal deaths and pregnancy losses. A 1920 report noted that pregnant women who contracted influenza often miscarried and died of post-partum haemorrhage. Poor nutrition, limited access to medical care, and the cultural expectation that women would nurse sick family members all compounded the risk. The scientific debate continues, but one leading hypothesis is that prior exposure to an H3N8 influenza strain during the 1889-1892 pandemic primed the immune systems of those who were young adults in 1918 to respond catastrophically to the new virus.

The geography and intensity of the pandemic 🔗

The pandemic arrived in Bombay in May or June 1918 and travelled rapidly along rail and shipping routes. The first wave was relatively mild. The second wave, between September and November 1918, was devastating. According to data compiled by epidemiologists, the Central Provinces alone recorded 791,000 deaths from October to November, and Bengal saw 213,098 fatalities in the second wave. The Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala famously wrote that “Ganga was swollen with dead bodies,” after losing his wife and several family members and being unable to find enough firewood for cremations.

The transition period (1921-1951) 🔗

The 1921 census recorded a small decline in population from 1911, the only such decline in modern Indian history. But it also marked a turning point. From this year onward, mortality began a slow, steady, and ultimately irreversible decline. Demographers call 1921 the “Great Demographic Divide.” In the next three decades, India’s population grew from about 251 million in 1921 to roughly 361 million in 1951, a 44% increase.

What changed after 1921 🔗

No single factor explains the shift. Rather, several modest improvements added up. Famine relief operations became somewhat more effective. Basic public health infrastructure expanded, especially in cities. Smallpox vaccination programmes reached more districts. Quinine became more widely available for malaria. Plague mortality declined sharply after the early 1920s, partly because the rat populations carrying the disease had reached a new ecological equilibrium and partly because of slowly improving sanitation.

Demographers like Kingsley Davis noted “an unmistakable downward trend” in crude death rates after 1918, with infant mortality also showing a high point in 1918 and a gradual decline thereafter. The crude death rate fell from about 48 per thousand in 1921 to roughly 27 per thousand by 1951. Birth rates, however, remained stubbornly high, around 40-48 per thousand, because fertility behaviour responds far more slowly to social change than mortality does.

The role of natural immunity and recovery 🔗

Part of the story is biological. Populations that survived repeated waves of plague, smallpox, and influenza built up some degree of immune resistance. Survivors of the 1918 pandemic, for example, carried antibodies that protected against future H1N1 variants. Famine survivors in their childhood developed metabolic adaptations that helped them get through later food shortages. This biological recovery, combined with the absence of another catastrophic pandemic between 1921 and 1947, allowed natural population increase to take hold.

A textbook case of early demographic transition 🔗

The 1921-1951 period is the classic example of Stage 2 of the demographic transition model, where death rates fall while birth rates stay high, producing accelerating population growth. According to the demographic literature, the average annual exponential growth rate during this phase was about 1.2% – modest by later standards but transformative compared to the near-stagnation of the previous fifty years. The truly explosive growth came after 1951, when public health investments by the independent Indian government drove death rates down even faster, while fertility decline did not begin in earnest until the late 1960s.

Why these patterns still matter 🔗

The historical mortality regime shaped almost everything about modern India: its rural-urban distribution, the persistence of certain genetic adaptations, the cultural emphasis on having many children, and the enduring concern with food security and epidemic preparedness. The colonial period demonstrated that high mortality is rarely just a problem of nature. It is shaped by policy choices, by inequality, and by the strength of public health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a stark reminder that spatial diffusion, social inequality, and mobility patterns still determine who lives and who dies during a health crisis, just as they did a century ago.

India’s journey from a high-mortality, low-growth society to a low-mortality, declining-fertility one is one of the most dramatic demographic transformations ever recorded. But it took roughly a century to unfold, and the foundations were laid not by a single breakthrough but by the slow accumulation of marginal improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and disease control after 1921.

What do you think? If colonial policies had prioritised famine prevention and public health investment over grain exports and revenue extraction, how different might India’s demographic trajectory have looked by 1951? And what does the disproportionate death of young women during the 1918 pandemic tell us about how gender inequality can amplify the impact of a health crisis even today?

References

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0262728020944293
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India
3. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
4. https://www.indiaspend.com/uploads/2021/06/25/2020-Tumbe-IIMA-WP-Pandemics-and-Historical-Mortality-in-India.pdf
5. https://www.nber.org/digest/may20/social-and-economic-impacts-1918-influenza-epidemic
6. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22661303/
7. https://www.gatewayhouse.in/1918-flu-india/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4541073/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic_in_India
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3799745/
11. https://ijrar.com/upload_issue/ijrar_issue_518.pdf
12. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6269240/