Kingsley Davis

Kingsley Davis (August 20, 1908 – February 27, 1997) was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow.

Quotes

• As far back as the 3rd or 4th millennium B.C. and probably much earlier still, India was in possession of a highly developed civilization with large and populous cities.
  • Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton : New Jersey, 1951), quoted in K.S. Lal , Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1973) p 26 [1]

• So in India some three to seven thousand years ago there were peoples possessing a technology sufficiently advanced to support a dense population.
  • Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton : New Jersey, 1951), quoted in K.S. Lal , Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1973) p 26-27

• So putting the evidence from archaeology, literature, and history together, we reach the conclusion that before the Christian era India had a substantial population, first because of its advanced technology and second because of the fertile environment of the application of this technology.
  • Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton : New Jersey, 1951), quoted in K.S. Lal , Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1973) p 28

• Although there were mass conversions, the country was too vast, the invaders too few, and the volume of immigration too small to change the social complex… India, therefore, never became a Muslim nation, but remained simply a Hindu country in which Muslims were numerous.
  • Kingsley Davis, quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims, who are they (2012)

• In six decades (1881-1941)… at no census have the Muslims failed to improve their percentage and the Hindus failed to lose…” [It is due not only to the] “proportion of Muslim women married, but those who are married also have a higher fertility.”
  • Kingsley Davis, quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims, who are they (2012)

About

• However, the seed of the debate on the differential population growth rates of the Hindus and Muslims was planted in the undivided India itself. Kingsley Davis, an eminent demographer, was one of the first to raise a debate on the Hindu-Muslim population growth rates in the sub- continent. In his famous book “The Population of India and Pakistan” (1951), he presented before the world the fact that Muslim fertility was higher than the Hindu fertility. For instance, the decline in the proportion of the Hindus from 75.1 per cent to 72.9 per cent in between the censuses of 1881 and 1901 (Davis, 1951) created strong reaction and fear among the Hindus that the Muslims would become the majority population in India in the future.
  Numerous research and review studies have been done on this area since then. But there seems to be no end to this highly debated topic and it still remains a very popular area for research studies among the research scholars and population scientists.
  • Fertility and Health Behaviour Among Hindu and Muslim Women in Assam : Kishor Singh Rajput · 2011 34 .