In contemporary India, the demographic anxiety associated with Muslim women’s fertility has led to numbers being “normative” – a method of control in the Foucauldian sense of biopower. This fascination with counting is partly a colonial legacy. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues, the colonial state’s “obsession with numbers” in India was never merely administrative in nature, but served to transform fluid identities into quantifiable categories. It was a method of creating new social realities.
The same logic permeates the transformation of Muslim women’s fertility into a moral statistic today. Last rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) show that fertility among Muslim women has declined more than any other religious group, from 4.4 in 1992 to 2.3 in 2019-21, almost equal to the national average of 2.0. But this quantum leap is often missing from public discourse. In the current scenario, data no longer describes reality but determines it. It describes Muslim women’s bodies as ideological battlegrounds for the populist rhetoric of “over-breeding” and turns them into a symbol of excess, difference and threat.
The larger argument here is that fertility is neither a monolith nor a religious constant. It is a social outcome shaped by various socio-economic determinants. However, narratives often reduce it to questions of culture and faith, ignoring the role of crucial factors such as education, employment, income, regional differences, etc.
Source: National Herald
This is best illustrated by the NFHS-5 data, which shows that fertility remains above replacement level not only among Muslims (2.4), but also among Scheduled Castes (2.8), Scheduled Tribes (2.9) and poorer and less educated women in all communities. This distribution proves that high fertility is not a socio-cultural fact or a religious doctrine, but is in most cases a sign of disadvantage.
Therefore, the myth of the “hyperfertile” Indian Muslim woman survives not because it is empirically true, but because it is true politically useful. It flattens a complex social phenomenon into a cultural judgment. By appropriating women’s reproductive lives for ideological rhetoric, statistical red herrings are reduced to mere optics.
Education, not religion, shapes fertility
Deconstructing the NFH-5 data shows that the much-touted fertility gap between Muslims and others breaks down most clearly along the education axis. Data shows that there is a six percent gap between Hindu and Muslim women at the highest levels of education. The average years of schooling for Muslim women in India is only 4.3 years, meaning the average Muslim woman has not even completed primary school. With such evidence, a discussion of “reproductive choice” becomes almost farcical, since choice here presupposes the presence of information, autonomy, or opportunities that are not evenly distributed across communities.
This is best illustrated by the NFHS-5 data, which shows that fertility remains above replacement level not only among Muslims (2.4), but also among Scheduled Castes (2.8), Scheduled Tribes (2.9) and poorer and less educated women in all communities. This distribution proves that high fertility is not a socio-cultural fact or a religious doctrine, but is in most cases a sign of disadvantage.
Research shows that women’s education is a key factor in fertility decline. Scientists such as John Bongaarts have found that women’s schooling, particularly at the secondary level and above, is one of the most consistent predictors of reduced and delayed childbearing. Furthermore, education transforms fertility behavior not only through economic routes, but also through the transformation of knowledge, aspirations and autonomy, giving women greater decision-making power within households and thus enabling greater control over reproductive outcomes.
Therefore, the persistent claim that Muslims have “higher fertility because of their religion” is not only misleading but also intellectually retarded. It sheds light on the actual determinants of fertility behavior, which is predominantly characterized by structural deficits combined with social and cultural aspects.
Information obfuscation
Broadly speaking, the same problems arise in patterns of media and information access. According to NFHS-5, 52.7% of Muslim women are not regularly exposed to any form of mass media, significantly more than Hindu women (39.8%). The trend is consistent with findings on education and shows that 67.1% of uneducated women are completely cut off from mass media. Among those with higher education, this number drops to just 21.3%, while almost 70% report watching television regularly.
Fertility patterns reflect this gradient. Most educationally disadvantaged women lack the most information and are invariably the most likely to have larger families. Therefore, the demographic divergence we see is, to a large extent, a consequence of information exclusion.
Another aspect of this is exposure to family planning messages. Almost one in three Muslim women (29.1%) said they had not seen a single family planning message in the months preceding the survey: neither on television nor on the radio, not in newspapers, not on billboards and not online. This figure rises to 43.2% among uneducated women. For rural women, this figure rises to 29.4%. To misinterpret this as “contraceptive resistance” is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem at hand. This creates a case of asymmetric information sharing, where the issue of policy compliance becomes redundant given the lack of reach and access.
Muslim women as agent subjects
The strongest contradiction to the demographic stereotype comes from Muslim women’s own desires. The data shows that they are actively trying to limit the birth rate. Around 73% of Muslim women with two children no longer want to have children, and 84% of those with three children no longer want to bear any more children. Once women reach even a modest family size, the overwhelming majority, including Muslim women, express a desire to limit future births.
As Zoya Hasan argues, Muslim women’s interests have long been pushed into the narrow framework of identity politics, where they have been repeatedly subjected to cultural essentialisms. The popular fantasy that Muslim women want a large family completely collapses when confronted with empirical evidence. The real question is not the desire itself, but the ability to respond to that desire when education, access, autonomy and information remain fundamentally rationed.
Therefore, there is evidence that Muslim women are not passive bearers of tradition. They are active, rational, and ambitious actors who negotiate, or want to negotiate, reproductive life under deeply fractured conditions. The obstacles are again structural rather than cultural.
A crisis of dignity and infrastructure
The Sachar Committee Report (2006) exposed the material reality of this inequality. It linked Muslim women’s health to Povertylack of sanitation, unsafe drinking water, malnutrition and inadequate access to basic health care. Women living in predominantly Muslim areas often travel long distances to reach even primary health facilities. Many experience discriminatory or degrading treatment in public hospitals, particularly in gynecological care, further pushing them to turn to informal, unqualified private doctors. The acute shortage of female doctors in public institutions makes access to the official health system even more difficult.
There is evidence that Muslim women are not passive bearers of tradition. They are active, rational, and ambitious actors who negotiate, or want to negotiate, reproductive life under deeply fractured conditions. The obstacles are again structural rather than cultural.
Even the most routine population stabilization programs do not reach Muslim women regularly or with dignity, making the “fertility problem” more of a crisis of access, dignity and infrastructure than anything else.
Another paradox dominates this numbers game. The arguments for Muslim infertility are often projected as hyperfertile and remain inadequate.
The work of anthropologist Holly Donahue Singh shows that this invisibility is no accident. The obsession with high fertility, combined with a global discourse that continues to portray India as a perpetually “overpopulated” nation, makes it almost impossible to even imagine Muslim women as infertile.
However, this is not just a contemporary crisis. For decades, Muslims have been portrayed as “pre-modern,” even anti-modern, in their reproductive consciousness. The perspective of infertility is thus rendered illegible within the dominant narrative. It falls out of the political spotlight, escapes health activism and remains largely absent from academic research.
Such large-scale simplifications of population data and the erasure of subtleties blunt this complex phenomenon and risk erasing people and flattening the reality of their lives.
Muslim Demographics: Numbers as Weapons
What emerges from this web of statistics is a difficult reckoning: that the true power of numbers lies not in what they actually show, but in the way they are mobilized. When numbers are taken out of context, they become tools of governance, which is usually evident in stochastic forms of governance.
Women are often portrayed as the nation’s biological and cultural reproducers. This prevents the reproduction from being a private matter. It becomes a political terrain on which national borders are imagined and policed. In India, as Sharmila Rege has shown, these expectations are highly differentiated along caste and religious lines. Upper-caste Hindu women are portrayed as the bearers of the country’s future, while Dalit and Muslim women are seen as excessive, unruly or demographically dangerous. For the Muslim woman in particular, the womb becomes a statistical threat, a place where fears of nationality are projected.
Overly visible as a demographic threat or ignored as an inconvenient exception, public discourse continues to pathologize Muslim women’s fertility rather than address the structural deficiencies that underscore this predicament. The move must be away from narratives of fear and control and toward an honest reckoning with capability deprivation that recognizes that reproductive outcomes reflect not a cultural intent but the unequal distribution of the resources women need to exercise their agency.
