In contemporary India, the demographic anxiety associated with Muslim women’s fertility has rendered numbers ‘normative’ – a method of control in the Foucauldian sense of biopower. This fascination with counting is, in part, a colonial legacy. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues, the colonial state’s ‘obsession with numbers’ in India was never just administrative, but to convert fluid identities into quantifiable categories. It was a method to produce new social realities.
Today, that same logic pervades the conversion of Muslim women’s fertility into a moral statistic. Recent rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) show that fertility among Muslim women has declined more prominently than any other religious group, from 4.4 in 1992 to 2.3 in 2019-21, almost converging with the national average of 2.0. Yet, this quantum leap is often absent in public discourse. In the current scenario, data ceases to describe reality and instead governs it. It writes down Muslim women’s bodies as ideological battlegrounds for the populist rhetoric of ‘overbreeding’, turning them into a symbol of excess, difference and threat.
The broader argument here is that fertility is not a monolith, nor a religious constant. It is a social outcome shaped by various socioeconomic determinants. Narratives, however, often reduce it to matters of culture and faith, bypassing the role of crucial factors like education, employment, income, regional disparities etc.
This is best elucidated in 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 across communities. This distribution proves that high fertility, instead of being a socio-cultural fact or a religious doctrine, is more often than not a marker of deprivation.
Therefore, the myth of the ‘hyper-fertile’ Indian Muslim woman survives, not because it is empirically true, but because it is politically useful. It flattens a complex social phenomenon into a cultural verdict. By appropriating women’s reproductive lives for ideological rhetorics, it reduces statistical red herrings into mere optics.
Education, not religion, shapes fertility
Deconstruction of NFH-5 data reveals that the much-touted gap between Muslim and others’ fertility collapses most significantly along the axis of education. Data reveals that there is a six per cent gap between Hindu and Muslim women at the highest level of education. The median years of schooling for Muslim women in India is just 4.3 years, meaning that the average Muslim woman has not even completed primary school. With such evidence, a discussion on ‘reproductive choice’ becomes almost farcical, since choice, here, assumes the presence of information, autonomy or opportunity, none of which are parcelled out evenly across communities.
This is best elucidated in 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 across communities. This distribution proves that high fertility, instead of being a socio-cultural fact or a religious doctrine, is more often than not a marker of deprivation.
Research establishes women’s education as a decisive factor in fertility decline. It has been identified by scholars such as John Bongaarts that female schooling, particularly at the secondary level and above, is one of the most consistent predictors of reduced and delayed childbearing. Furthermore, education reshapes fertility behaviour not merely through economic pathways but by transforming knowledge, aspirations and autonomy, by according women greater decision-making power within households, allowing more control over reproductive outcomes.
Hence, the persistent claim that Muslims have ‘higher fertility because of religion’ becomes not merely misleading but intellectually tardy. It shadows the real determinants of fertility behaviour, which is overwhelmingly shaped by structural deficits, compounded with social and cultural aspects.
Information smokescreen
Broadly, the same crunches appear 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 higher than Hindu women (39.8%). The trend aligns with the evidence on education, illustrating that among women with no schooling, 67.1% are completely cut off from mass media. Among those with higher education, this figure drops to just 21.3%, while nearly 70% report regularly watching television.
Fertility patterns mirror this gradient. Most educationally disadvantaged women also happen to be the most information deprived and invariably the most likely to have larger families. Therefore, the demographic divergence that we see is in large part an outcome of information exclusion.
Another aspect of this is exposure to family-planning messages. Nearly one in three Muslim women (29.1%) reported not encountering a single family-planning message in the months preceding the survey: not on television, not on radio, not in newspapers, not on hoardings, and not online. Among uneducated women, this figure climbs to 43.2%. Among rural women, it rises to 29.4%. To misconstrue this as ‘resistance to contraception’ is to fundamentally misjudge the problem at hand. This becomes a case of asymmetric trickling down of information, where the question of compliance with a policy becomes redundant in the face of the deficiencies in its reach and access.
Muslim women as agential subjects
The most powerful contradiction to the demographic stereotype comes from Muslim women’s own reported desires. Data reflects that they actively seek to limit childbearing. Around 73% of Muslim women with two children want no more, and 84% of those with three children wish to stop further childbearing. Once women reach even a modest family size, the overwhelming majority, Muslim women included, express a desire to limit future births.
As Zoya Hasan argues, Muslim women’s interests have long been boxed within the narrow confine of identity politics, where they are repeatedly subjected to cultural essentialisms. The popular fantasy that Muslim women want large families collapses entirely when confronted with empirical evidence. The real question is not of desire itself, but the capacity to act on that desire when education, access, autonomy and information remain fundamentally rationed.
Therefore, evidence confirms that Muslim women are not passive vessels of tradition. They are active, rational, and aspirational agents negotiating, or wanting to negotiate, reproductive life within deeply fractured conditions. The impediments, again, are more structural than cultural.
A crisis of dignity and infrastructure
The Sachar Committee Report (2006) laid bare the material realities of this inequality. It linked the health of Muslim women to poverty, lack of sanitation, unsafe drinking water, malnutrition and inadequate access to basic healthcare. Women living in Muslim-concentrated areas often travel long distances to reach even primary health facilities. Many experience discriminatory or degrading treatment in government hospitals, particularly for gynaecological care, which further pushes them toward informal, unqualified private practitioners. The acute shortage of female doctors in public facilities further deters access to the formal health system.
Evidence confirms that Muslim women are not passive vessels of tradition. They are active, rational, and aspirational agents negotiating, or wanting to negotiate, reproductive life within deeply fractured conditions. The impediments, again, are more structural than cultural.
Even the most routine population-stabilisation programmes fail to reach Muslim women with regularity or dignity, making the ‘fertility problem’ more of a crisis of access, dignity, and infrastructure than anything else.
Another paradox commands this number game. Often projected as hyper-fertile, the case on Muslim infertility remains inadequate.
Anthropologist Holly Donahue Singh’s work reveals that this invisibility is not accidental. The obsession with high fertility, combined with a global discourse that continues to portray India as a continually ‘overpopulated’ nation, makes it almost impossible to imagine Muslim women as infertile at all.
However, this isn’t entirely a crisis of the present time. Over decades, Muslims have been portrayed as ‘pre-modern’ in their reproductive consciousness, even anti-modern. The perspective of infertility, then, is rendered illegible within the dominant narrative. It slips out of policy sightlines, escapes healthcare activism and remains largely absent in academic research.
Such large-scale simplifications of population data and erasure of intricacies make this complex phenomenon obtuse and risk erasing people as well as flattening the realities of their lives.
Muslim demography: numbers as weapons
What emerges from this web of statistics is a troublesome reckoning: that the true power of numbers lies not in what they truly show but in how they are mobilised. When stripped of context, numbers become instruments of governance, usually obvious in stochastic forms of governance.
Women are often framed as the biological and cultural reproducers of the nation. This disallows reproduction to be a private matter. It becomes a political terrain upon which national boundaries are imagined and policed. Within India, as Sharmila Rege has shown, these expectations are sharply stratified along caste and religious lines. Upper-caste Hindu women are cast as bearers of the nation’s future, while Dalit and Muslim women are reimagined as excessive, unruly or demographically dangerous. For the Muslim woman in particular, the womb becomes a statistical threat, a site where anxieties about nationhood are projected.
Hyper-visible as a demographic danger or erased as an inconvenient exception, the public discourse continues to pathologize Muslim women’s fertility instead of confronting the structural deficits that underscore these predicaments. The move must be away from narratives of fear and control and toward an honest reckoning with capability deprivation, which recognises reproductive outcomes as reflecting not cultural intent but the unequal distribution of resources required for women to exercise agency.
