Height and Health in Indian History
Scholars of anthropometric history seek to quantify trends in physical measures of health and economic well-being, notably height and weight. These trends are then explained in terms of changing nutritional intake and changing incidence of disease. What follows is an outline of research at Flinders University on an anthropometric history of India.
By RALPH SHLOMOWITZ
Biologists have shown that although the explanation for the observed variability in heights of a population at any point in time is partly genetic and partly environmental, changes in average heights over time are mainly due to environmental factors, such as changes in the nutritional status of mothers and their children and changes in the incidence of disease (as childhood morbidity can stunt growth). It is also well recognized that improvements in nutrition and the declining incidence of disease during the past century have brought about a secular increase in average height and the earlier maturation of children (so that their final adult height is reached earlier) in many populations.During the past two decades, a large number of historians have investigated the potential of data on height to illuminate trends in health and economic well-being in many countries. They have used time-series data to trace the secular and cyclical patterns of average heights, and they have used cross-section data to show the variation in average height by region and social class. Up to the present, the focus of this research effort has been on the various populations of European countries and the free and slave populations of North American and the Caribbean. In India, however, anthropologists have focused on using height and other anthropometric evidence to investigate the physical differences among India's various social groups: castes, religions, and tribes. These scholars have not made a systematic attempt to investigate whether there has been a secular change in Indian heights over the past two centuries.
My research group at Flinders University has attempted to help fill this gap in the literature. We expand the body of evidence available to evaluate Indian heights by drawing upon the previously untapped emigrant passes of Indian indentured workers who were measured at Calcutta and Madras as they departed for Mauritius, Natal, the Caribbean, and Fiji. Hundreds of thousands of workers were measured between 1842 and 1916, and these measurements were recorded on emigrant passes. Most of these original documents are extant, deposited in the national or provincial archives of Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Up to the present, we have computerized information on the height, age, sex, region of origin, and social group (caste, religion, or tribe) of over eighty thousand of these workers. We have also computerized the published individual-level data of more recent anthropometric surveys: 2,836 individuals in the United Provinces in 1941; 3,240 individuals in Begal in 1945; and 47,835 individuals in the All-India Anthropometric Survey of the 1960s.
Chest size
An important feature of our research is the investigation of possible biases in our body of evidence on indentured workers such as the possibility that recruiting authorities may have employed a minimum height restriction. Two types of evidence, however, suggest that a minimum height restriction was not used: (1) the extant lists of recruiting instructions given to recruiting agents and surgeons indicate that chest size, not height, was used as an indicator of physical ability to work on overseas sugar-cane plantations; and (2) our investigation of the statistical properties of the height distributions show no shortfall of observations in the lower tail of the distributions. We have also employed statistical procedures to evaluate the degree of accuracy of the information on age and height, and we have investigated the problem of sample selection bias. One such bias relates to the variability of average height by recruitment conditions. We show that in times of famine in India, recruiting was made easier and so taller Indians were obtained, while in good times, it was more difficult for recruiters to meet their quotas and so shorter recruits were obtained.
Our major findings are that there were substantial differences in average height by caste: 'higher' castes were taller than the 'lower' castes and these differences have persisted into the post-Independence period; there were relatively small differences in average height between individuals born in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Madras; and there was no secular increase in Indian heights during the past two centuries.
In extensions of our project, we have investigated the height of overseas Indian populations in Fiji and the Caribbean: overseas Indians are much taller than their progenitor populations in India. The increased height is undoubtedly due to improved nutrition and the more benign disease environments of Fiji and the Caribbean. We have also investigated the sex differences in average height: the ratio of male to female height is much higher in North than South India, probably reflecting the greater discrimination against female children in North India in access to food and medical care.
Our most recent research is focused on using data on height and weight in what is called the 'body mass index' (weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) to gain a more sensitive indicator of health: whereas adult height is dependent on the cumulative impact of environmental conditions during the period of growth, weight is an indicator of more recent environmental conditions. We find that there was a substantial widening in the gap between the body mass index of 'higher' and 'lower' caste groups between the 1880s and the 1960s. The absence of a secular increase in height and the increase in inequality (as shown by our body mass index data) provide support for those historians who have argued that British rule did not benefit the health and economic well-being of the Indian population as a whole, and that the lower strata of Indian society were made worse off. *
References
- Brennan, Lance, John McDonald, and Ralph Shlomowitz
The Heights and Economic Well-Being of North Indians under British Rule
In Social Science History,
18:2 (Summer 1994), pp 271-307
- Brennan, Lance, John McDonald, and Ralph Shlomowitz
Towards an Anthropometric History of Indians under British Rule
In Research in Economic History,
17 (1997), pp 185-246
Dr Ralph Shlomowitz was a Senior Visiting Fellow at IIAS from June to July 2000. He can be reached at Flinders University, GPO Box 2100,
Adelaide 5001, Australia.
E-mail: ralph.shlomowitz@flinders.edu.au