The Ideology of Population

Mahmood Mamdani This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a scientific explanation of the rising rates of natural increase in population in most backward capitalist countries and thereby to deepen the critique of neo-Malthusianism and attempt a redefinition of what has been called the 'population problem' The author analyses the reproductive behaviour of two social groups that form the bulk of the population in the Indian social formation : the working peasantry and the unemployed. He tries to delineate those historically created social relations that explain the reproductive behaviour of these groups.