Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, A.D. 1000–1800 c5.s3.1

c5.s3.1

British administrators and officials in India were definitely interested in Indian demography, and from the nineteenth century many attempts were made to compute the numbers of inhabitants as well as to assess demographic trends in earlier centuries and estimate the population of ancient and medieval times. District officials sometimes held sorts of local censuses in cities, towns, and villages, and reported their findings to Government. So also was done in princely states. Colonel Sleeman's *Rambles and Recollections*⁴ and Reginald Heber's *Journal*⁵ fall under such category of works. Heber has also fixed the proportion of Hindus and Muslims with some amount of accuracy. These writings may be treated as almost contemporary material, for while political changes may be sudden or revolutionary, in the study of social, economic, and even population trends, the materials of 1820 or 1830 may, by and large, speak for 1780 or 1800. When Elphinstone wrote his history⁶ in the middle of the nineteenth century, he also made an attempt to assess the population of earlier times. But Edward Thornton's Gazetteer,⁷ written in pre-census times and published in 1854, is a mine of information for demographic study. It gives population figures of towns and cities gathered on the basis of actual censuses locally held between 1800 and 1851 as well as reports sent out by British officials from India to their home country. This Gazetteer contains total population of Presidencies, provinces and princely states, of districts, towns and sometimes even villages. Furthermore, besides giving the number of Hindu and Muslim inhabitants, it also provides figures of Hindu and Muslim agriculturists and those enganged in non-agricultural professions in rural and urban areas. It need hardly be stated that such pre-census attempts help a great deal in estimating the total population as also the Hindu-Muslim proportion in the India of 1800.