Caste, Kinship and Sex Ratios in India / Tanika Chakraborty, Sukkoo Kim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chakraborty, Tanika.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kim, Sukkoo.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13828.

NBER working paper series no. w13828

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.

Summary:

This paper explores the relationship between kinship institutions and sex ratios in India at the turn of the twentieth century. Since kinship rules varied by caste, language, religion and region, we construct sex-ratios by these categories at the district-level using data from the 1901 Census of India for Punjab (North), Bengal (East) and Madras (South). We find that the female to male sex ratio varied inversely by caste-rank, rose as one moved from the North to the East and then to the South, was lower for Hindus than Muslims, and was lower for the northern Indo-Aryan rather than the southern Dravidian speaking peoples. We also find that the female deficit was greater in wheat growing regions and in areas with higher rainfall and alluvial soil. We argue that these systematic patterns in the data are largely explained by variations in the institution of family, kinship and inheritance.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2008.