Some Preconditions for Fertility Decline in Bengal: History, Language Identity, and an Openness to Innovations

This article argues that looking solely for the immediate causes of reproductive change may distort our understanding of policy options by failing to take into account the historical and cultural factors that affect not only the impact of policies and programs but the very existence and nature of these policies and programs. The article examines the historical origins and spread of " modern " ideas in Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. It concludes that a colonial history in which education and modernization processes took hold very early among the elites in the larger Bengal region was paradoxically accompanied by a strong allegiance to the Bengali language. This strong sense of language identity has promoted secularism because language has competed with religious and other sectarian identities. It has also facilitated and reinforced the diffusion of modern ideas both within and between the two Bengali-speaking regions. Thus, to understand the fertility decline in Bangladesh, for example, one needs to look also at cultural boundaries. In this case, the cultural commonality through language facilitates the spread of new ideas across the two Bengals; and the political and religious separation between them increases the heterogeneity and newness of the ideas thus spread. In turn, the strong sense of language identity has facilitated mass mobilization more easily and intensely within the two Bengals. Through both these processes, Bangladesh and West Bengal today are more " modern " and more amenable to social change than many other parts of South Asia and the Middle East. Declines in fertility in the contemporary world tend to be explained in contemporary terms. Immediate causes are sought and generally center around issues of changing demand and supply. More specifically, the proponents of the importance of changing demand stress the changing structural conditions that alter the costs and benefits of children, while the " supply-siders " give central importance to family planning programs which purportedly increase awareness and practice of contraception so that birth control becomes both desirable and possible. In recent years, these explanations have become enriched by another class of explanations that focus on the spread of positive attitudes toward controlled fertility and to contraception. These attitudes may arise through means that are only tangentially related to changing economic environments or to government population policy. In particular , they may develop through a process of " diffusion " of ideas from individuals already positively inclined …