It was the summer of 1970 when a young researcher named Mahmood Mamdani arrived in Punjab — not to teach, but to learn. The air was heavy with harvest dust, and the country still carried the scent of post-Independence optimism. Mamdani had come from abroad to understand what the West had long claimed to understand already: how to control population growth in the developing world.
His destination was Khanna — a market town in central Punjab that had, nearly two decades earlier, become the headquarters of a global experiment in birth control. Harvard researchers, aided by Indian field officers and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, had called it The Khanna Study. It was, in many ways, India’s first laboratory of human fertility.
The study was bold and statistical. Seven villages with around 8,700 people were chosen to receive contraception and counselling. Twelve thousand people from neighbouring villages were left untouched as the “control” group. After a few years, the Harvard researchers declared success — birth rates, they claimed, had fallen in the test villages.
But when Mamdani returned to the same villages years later, his field notebooks told a very different story. Villagers had agreed to contraception in surveys but rarely used it. The gap between “acceptance” and “use” was vast, and what the researchers had measured, he realised, was not a behavioural change but a polite compliance with an outsider’s project.
In his book The Myth of Population Control, Mamdani wrote, “The investigators assumed that the need for population control was self-evident.” They never asked the villagers why they might want or not want to limit their families. “People are not poor because they have large families,” he argued. “They have large families because they are poor.”
In Punjab’s peasant economy, children — particularly sons — were not mouths to feed but hands to till, assets to protect a family from hunger. To impose birth control there, Mamdani wrote, was to misunderstand survival itself.
What he uncovered in the mustard fields of Punjab was not just a failed experiment in contraception, but a deeper truth about development — that poverty could not be measured by the number of births, and dignity could not be engineered by policy.
Decades later, as his son Zohran Mamdani stood before cheering crowds in New York, quoting Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” and walking off stage to the Bollywood anthem Dhoom Machale, history folded in on itself. The son of a scholar who once walked through India’s villages was now mayor of one of the world’s largest cities — carrying, perhaps unknowingly, his father’s legacy of questioning easy answers.
