Demographics of a country play a very important role in shaping its culture and history. India is no exception. It is a land of highly diverse geography, terrain, and climate. Its ethnic composition is even more diverse, with hundreds of distinct peoples inhabiting it and speaking many different languages.
The subject of this post is the demographics of India, with a focus on the Muslim population and its distribution. This aspect of Indian demographics played a significant role in shaping the modern history of India in the twentieth century. The Muslim population and its aspirations were among the most important issues in the five or six decades leading up to independence. When independence came, it was the distribution of the Muslim population that largely determined the borders of the new states in the subcontinent.
For this analysis, I have used data from the 1941 census, the last census conducted before partition. However, the real challenge was to create a map of India during the British Raj. At that time, India was a complicated mosaic of British-ruled provinces and about 565 princely states. These princely states varied greatly in size. The largest of them was Hyderabad, covering an area of 213,000 square kilometers. But hundreds of them were so small that it was almost impossible to show them even on a large map. To complicate matters further, many of them were divided into several non-contiguous territories. I would not be exaggerating if I said that even the Viceroy himself might not have had a map showing all the political units of India in clear detail.
Fortunately, I found a map published by the National Geographic Society in 1946. Even this map shows fewer than 200 princely states. I have used it as the base for the map provided below. While the British provinces are accurately depicted, the princely states, especially the smaller ones, are only roughly represented. Nevertheless, this map gives a reasonably accurate picture of the distribution of the Muslim population in India in 1941.
