Nothing like a modern census existed before the first such exercise was conducted between 1865 and 1872 and then in 1881 by the English colonial government that ruled India. However, the first reliable Census is considered to be that of 1901 when India’s population was estimated to be close to 30 crores. Before then there had never been either a synchronous or non-synchronous census to enumerate just how many people lived in the subcontinent. Between 1901 and 2011 censuses, there has been an over 350% increase in India’s population which has crossed 1.4 billion. After a delay of over six years India’s latest Census is set to begin in 2026-27.

How then do we possibly understand India’s demography in pre-modern times? As we move further back into the past, the sources of information on population dwindle. There are the usual accounts related to tax collection and land records, particularly during the Mughal rule over much of north and central India. Then there are court chroniclers’ accounts of kings and kingdoms, both extant and extinct, these hoary tales too contain some references to populations and their dispersal due to man-made (wars) and natural reasons (for instance drought and disease). And finally, there are accounts left by travellers to India starting from Fa Hien (4th century CE), Hieun Tsang (7th century CE) to Ibn Batuta (14th century CE), Al Beruni (11th century CE), Barbosa and several others after the 16th century, these travelogues reveal a lot about people and customs that prevailed in the past. Despite these sources the process of ascertaining the populations in the early modern, medieval and ancient past is based on reverse projections i.e journeying from the known to unknown or using today’s numbers to estimate what they might have been in the past.

Both literature and epigraphical evidence i.e texts such as Panini’s Ashtahdyayi, or the Arthashastra or the Jatakas and others provide us a range of tribes, castes, kingdoms, linguistic groups both within and outside India but they are wholly inadequate in understanding the numbers or population of such groups of people or regions where they resided. The Ashokan edicts from the 4th century BCE too contain rich information about kingdoms and various regions, found written in various scripts from Kharoshti in present day Pakistan to local Prakrits in Karnataka, they capture the vast diversity of Indians more than 2,000 years ago, but they too remain silent when it comes to giving quantitative data. The only........

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