Caste, Country Liquor and Company Raj

The year was 1710. The wardens of a European cemetery in Madras wrote to East India Company officials complaining about the nuisance they had to put up with owing to the coconut trees on the property. This was a peculiar complaint; we do not normally imagine coconut trees when we think about sources of public nuisance. The crux of the matter at hand was that the gates had to be kept open all the time so that a certain country liquor could be drawn and sold. Variously described as the homegrown beer or palm wine of the Madras Presidency, the miscreant in question was toddy, the word deriving from the Hindi tari. In this imperial account, the cemetery was rendered noisier than all the punch houses in Madras put together as basket makers, scavengers, buffalo keepers ‘and other Parriars (Paraiyars)’ converged there at night to drink toddy, whereupon inebriated ‘beggars and other vagabonds’ even proceeded to lie down in freshly dug graves. Company officials wrote to the governor recommending replanting the trees elsewhere to relieve the European community of their troubles. The offending coconut trees were promptly removed.

As Company officials increasingly found themselves thrust into the role of a governing body in the Presidency of Fort St George, they found themselves having to develop a coherent response to the issue of alcohol, which eventually became the precursor to the colonial state's alcohol policy. Observations of local drinking cultures that a broad cross-section of European society had contributed became the basis of their response, which evidenced a growing reliance on strategies constituting governmentality over time.

Population and Society: An Introduction to Demography is intended for both undergraduate students and graduate students taking their first course in demography. Population change is related to private decisions, especially in relation to fertility but also to migration and to mortality. This book thus considers in some detail, early in the book, the role of individuals in population decision making. At the level of countries, and even the world, changes in population size have an important effect on environmental and related challenges facing all the world’s inhabitants. These too are discussed. A significant and very necessary component of demography is its techniques. Demography, more so than any of the other social sciences, has a body of methods and approaches uniquely suited for the analysis of its concepts and events. In this book, we present some of the basic techniques that are needed to better understand demographic behavior.

Chapter 6 compares the work of the enslaved poet Ambrosio Echemendía with that of several free authors of African descent, including Juana Pastor (often considered the first woman poet in Cuba), Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, probably the most popular Cuban writer of the century), and África Céspedes (one of the collaborators of Minerva (1888–1889), the first periodical by Black women). Black Cuban writing, the chapter argues, does not begin with Juan Francisco Manzano or Plácido, as most scholars have generally assumed; neither of them reclaimed Blackness in their texts. It makes more sense to argue that it begins with the poetry collection that Echemendía published in 1865 – the first book published in Cuba in which an author self-fashioned as racially stigmatized and questioned this stigma. Through this panoramic view, the chapter traces how a long history of public disidentifications with blackness began to make room for a distinctively Black literature – one that foregrounded and problematized racialized subject positions.

Demography is the social science that studies (1) the size, composition, and distribution of the human population of a given area at a specific point in time; (2) the changes in population size and composition; (3) the components of these changes (fertility, mortality, and migration); (4) the factors that affect these components; and (5) the consequences of these changes. Demography is concerned with how large, or how small, are the populations; how the populations are composed according to age, sex, race, marital status, and other characteristics; and how the populations are distributed in physical space. Demography is also interested in the changes over time in the size, composition, and distribution of human populations, and how these result from the processes of fertility, mortality, and migration. The chapters of this book discuss these topics in much more depth and detail and will provide you with a thorough introduction to demography.

Civil Society and Prohibition

While politics at the national and provincial levels converged to produce prohibition as a political idea and demand, thereby influencing its policy features along the way, it was the concurrent development of a vibrant prohibition culture that imbued the policy with moral force as the demand of the Indian people. Prohibition become an ideal as it filtered through society before crystallising in the provinces as a policy. Indeed, civil society activism reinforced the Congress's demand for the policy as it took shape, bringing a distinct casteist and gendered worldview into alignment with teetotalism-as-patriotism.

Reflecting ‘a convergence of modern science with a synthesis of Victorian morality and established merchant/Bania and Brahman pious norms’, social movements across India had surfaced certain elitist values that gradually became cultural norms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. As they often included the threat of social exclusion, movements that originated and developed within caste communities proved remarkably effective in persuading large numbers of people to turn away from drink – more so, arguably, than state-led prohibition subsequently was. However, there was a key difference between earlier movements and the distinct culture of prohibition that took root between 1920 and 1937. Although the latter was overtly political in its orientation and outlook, it was embedded in a discourse that elevated it above the domain of politics. As an influential Tamil newspaper put it, ‘the political issue need not be mixed up with this. Go to your villages and organise compacts so that there may not be any drunkard therein.’

The three basic sources of demographic data are national censuses, registers, and sample surveys. National censuses and registers differ in that censuses are conducted on a periodic basis, such as every ten years (decennial) or five years (quinquennial), while registers are gathered continuously. Registration data of population events are compiled and published annually or monthly, even though they are gathered continuously as they occur. A census may be likened to taking a snapshot of a population at one point in time, say, once every ten years or so, and in this snapshot getting a picture of the size of the population, its characteristics, and its spatial distribution. Conversely, a register may be thought of as a video that continuously compiles major population events, such as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and sometimes migrations. When a birth or a death occurs, it is registered with the government; the registrations thus occur continuously.

The labor force refers to members of the population above a minimum age who are working or looking for work. An equivalent term is the economically active population. In most societies, there is a lower age limit for inclusion in the labor force. There is no upper boundary, for some people continue to work well beyond what might be considered the normal retirement age. This chapter discusses how the labor force is measured, how the labor force interacts with the basic demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, and changes in the composition of the labor force, especially the dramatic increase over time in women workers. There are also important composition variables that are usually measured within the labor force, such as occupation, industry, and class of worker. The chapter also discusses how the size and composition of the labor force affect the economy, and finally, the future of work.

This final chapter looks broadly at the remaining years of the twenty-first century and the start of the twenty-second. Considered are the implications of a world population in 2100 that approaches or exceeds 10 billion. Some, if not all, of these musings may appear dismal to many. Most certainly the world facing monumental population and environmental challenges. Some of them are addressed in this chapter. There are also demographic implications for governance and civil society, national security, human rights, and international relations. The world is witnessing enormous advances in technology. Both population and noetic exponentialism are becoming even more problematic. The era of the Industrial Revolution is long over. The world is now experiencing the Information Revolution. Population size and change are in the middle of this incredible phenomenon.

Every one of us has been born and every one of us will die. Our final behavior on this earth is our death. The impact of mortality varies significantly according to social and demographic characteristics. People in higher social classes live longer; so do richer people and married people; also, females live longer than males. We discuss these issues later. After addressing issues of measurement, we consider mortality and longevity from an international point of view. Then we discuss the major causes of death in developed and developing countries. Another section is concerned with changes in mortality in the United States, followed by a discussion of a special kind of mortality, that which occurs in infancy. We also speculate about the future course of mortality and improvements in life expectancy.