A dying race: Mukerji's Book that shook Bengal

“The Muslims have a future and they believe in it—we Hindus have no conception of it. Time is with them—time is against us. At the end of the year they could count their gains, we calculate our losses. They are growing in numbers, growing in strength, growing in wealth, growing in solidarity; we are crumbling to pieces. They look forward to a united Muslim world; we are waiting for our extinction.”
~ U. N. Mukerji, A Dying Race (1909)

When U. N. Mukerji penned A Dying Race, he was writing in the shadow of the 1901 Census of India, a document that shocked many Hindu intellectuals of his time. The census revealed a steep decline in the Hindu population across several regions, most strikingly in Bengal (then undivided). Drawing comparisons with the first census of 1872, Mukerji observed that within just three decades the Hindu Bengali population had fallen behind the Muslim Bengali population by nearly 2.5 million.

To Mukerji, these numbers were not mere statistics—they were civilizational portents. He argued that while Muslims possessed a clear sense of collective destiny, Hindus suffered from cultural fragmentation and political inertia. Islam, in his view, supplied its adherents with solidarity, confidence, and a vision of unity across frontiers, whereas Hindu society was splintered by caste divisions, ritual rigidity, and lack of social cohesion. This, he feared, would doom Hindus to perpetual decline unless remedied by reform and awakening.

More than a century later, his anxieties seem eerily prophetic when one looks at demographic transformations in the subcontinent. In present-day Bangladesh, Hindus constitute only 8.2 percent of the population, a sharp decline from the numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Pakistan, where large Hindu communities once flourished, they now account for a mere 2.14 percent. Within India itself, episodes such as the forced exodus of Kashmiri Pandits demonstrate how political and militant pressures can hollow out ancient communities.

Yet, Mukerji’s book was not written in a spirit of despair. A Dying Race is more diagnosis than dirge. His central aim was to awaken self-consciousness among Hindus—to urge them to recognize the social weaknesses, economic stagnation, and religious indifference that left their society vulnerable. He examined the reasons why some Hindus abandoned their faith and converted, exposing the fractures within Hindu society as much as the pressures without.

The impact of his work was significant. By articulating the demographic anxieties of his age in a rigorous, data-driven, and introspective manner, Mukerji struck a chord with nationalist thinkers. His arguments influenced reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj and helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915.

Mukerji’s legacy lies not in foretelling extinction but in challenging complacency. A Dying Race stands as both a warning and a call to renewal—a reminder that civilizations survive not merely by numbers but by unity of purpose, vitality of culture, and clarity of vision.