Census in British India

The first modern census in the United Kingdom (of a much smaller population) had been in 1801, repeated every ten years thereafter, and this provided the pattern for the Indian process, although this threw up many different problems.

There were historical attempts to enumerate the population in parts of the Indian subcontinent as well as to assess landholdings for revenue purposes, which was then a primary consideration, as attested in the writings of Kautilya, Abul Fazl and Muhnot Nainsi.

However, S. C. Srivastava noted that it did not in fact cover all of the country and that it was asynchronous by being conducted between 1867 and 1872 after an initial 1856 decision to introduce decennial enumerations from 1861 had been disrupted by the 1857 Rebellion.

[7] The first synchronous decennial census was conducted in 1881[8] and has continued thus since,[9] but the 1941 exercise was severely curtailed and very little of its data was published due to World War II.

[13] Objections based on various rumours that the censuses were intended to introduce new taxes, aid military or labour recruitment, assist in conversions to Christianity or force migration were not uncommon, at least in the early decades.

The questions and available responses, as well as the statistical and logistical methods, change over time, and the same can be true of geographical boundaries and of population identities, such as race and nationalities.

However, as well as being an administrative tool, a series of censuses can act as a coalescent of the population or at least of parts of it, causing various groups within the whole to form identities in space and over time.

[12][c] Scholars such as Bernard S. Cohn [16] have argued that the censuses of the Raj period significantly influenced the social and spatial demarcations within India that exist today.

[24] Timothy Alborn is somewhat more sceptical, but his primary concern is to refute studies based on the theories of imagined community and objectification that have emerged from the work of Benedict Anderson.

He stated of the claimed objectification of caste: ... such accounts risk overstating the capacity of British census officials to control their subjects through the mere act of counting them.

If age, seemingly one of the most straight-forward features of the census, posed the serious difficulties of biased reports and independent verification, concepts like "objectification" are of especially dubious value in more controversial categories like caste and ethnicity.

They relied heavily on elitist strictures through their interpretation of regional literature[d] and on the advice of Brahmins, who subscribed to a traditional but impractical ritual ranking system, known as varna.

That misconception gave an outlet for aspirational people to seek advancement and caused the evolution, sometimes almost overnight, of completely-new social identities that often adopted the honorific titles of perceived superior groups such as Brahmins and Rajputs as part of their name.

Caste associations were formed to establish the authenticity of such claims, often by inventing traditions allegedly connected to mythology and ancient history, as did the Patidars,[26][e] and they presented what Frank Conlon has described as a "deluge" of petitions for official recognition to the census authorities.

Castes such as Yadav and Vishwakarma appeared out of nowhere and were created as official categories for what had been geographically-disparate differently-named communities that happened to share traditional occupations, respectively as dairymen/grazers and craft artisans such as goldsmiths and carpenters.

The broad caste basing proved not to reflect the realities of social relationships, but it was met with approval from scholars of Sanskrit and ancient texts.

In 1881, Punjab abandoned the primary categorisation by varna that was used in other British Indian jurisdictions in that year and preferred instead to assign more weight to the category of occupation.

The age of marriage, the practice of remarriage, the observance of purdah, the occupations of women, the inheritance of property and the maintenance of widows, even diet, to name a few obvious cases, vary according to the caste and the religious community of the individual.

[7] The definition of Hindu, Sikh and Jain religious beliefs was always blurred, and even the Christian and Muslim believers could cause difficulties with classification although they were usually more easily defined.

Most people in British India did not know their age anyway, and the few who did, mostly Brahmins, were often reluctant to divulge the information with the degree of accuracy that was common in Britain and other Western countries.

Although the registration processes improved over the years, they were significantly disrupted at times, notably when officials were preoccupied in dealing with famines and, from the 1920s onward, by the actions of the Indian independence movement.

Those issues could not easily be corrected because there were also significant variances caused by periodic outbreaks of famine and diseases such as cholera and influenza, as well as the very imperfect system of registering life events.

A supervisor there noted that it "rose in one day from 42 to 67 millions" and that the Lieutenant-Governor "suddenly found that he had unconsciously been the ruler of an additional population more than equal to that of the whole of England and Wales".

[11] The Journal of the Statistical Society of London stated that the 1872 census "must be regarded more as a creditable, and in the main successful attempt to deal with an exceptionally difficult subject, than as a complete or reliable statement of a class of facts".

Among the problems, which were noted as "surely... some grave error", was the seemingly inexplicable figure for the "diseased and starved" population in Orissa, which had suffered a famine that was estimated to have caused the deaths of around a third of its three million people but whose numbers within five years exceeded the pre-famine total.

The information provided for religion was described as "not altogether reliable, the Hindoos being probably over-estimated, the Mahomedans under-rated, and with the exceptions of the Christians, the Jews, and the Parsees, the remainder being more or less conjectural".

Bhagat describes them as "fluid, fuzzy and dynamic historically" and gives as an example the emergence in the early 20th century of the Kamma and Reddy castes through coalescence of like-minded, politically motivated groups.

Eleanor Rathbone, a prominent campaigner for women's rights and a believer that the Raj authorities were not getting to grips with Indian social issues, used figures from the 1931 census to support her misguided claim that such marriages were not in decline and that the act had caused a significant spike in the numbers.