The
Census of India prior to
independence
Independence is a condition of a person, nation, country, or state in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the statu ...
was conducted periodically from 1865 to 1941. The censuses were primarily concerned with administration and faced numerous problems in their design and conduct ranging from the absence of house numbering in hamlets to cultural objections on various grounds to dangers posed by wild animals to census personnel. The censuses were designed more for
social engineering and to further the British agenda for governance than to uncover the underlying structure of the population. The sociologist Michael Mann called the census exercise "more telling of the administrative needs of the British than of the social reality for the people of British India". The differences in the nature of Indian society during the
British Raj
The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent;
*
* it is also called Crown rule in India,
*
*
*
*
or Direct rule in India,
* Quote: "Mill, who was him ...
from the value system and the societies of the West were highlighted by the inclusion of "caste", "religion", "profession" and "age" in the data to be collected, as the collection and analysis of that information had a considerable impact on the structure and political overtones of Indian society.
Administrative background
There were historical attempts to enumerate the population in parts of the
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian O ...
as well as to assess landholdings for revenue purposes, which was then a primary consideration, as attested in the writings of
Kautilya
Chanakya (Sanskrit: चाणक्य; IAST: ', ; 375–283 BCE) was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya o ...
,
Abul Fazl Abul is an Arabic masculine given name. It may refer to:
* Abul Kalam Azad
* Abul A'la Maududi
* Abul Khair (disambiguation), several people
* Abul Abbas (disambiguation), several people
* Abul Hasan
* Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi
* Abu'l-Fazl ibn ...
and
Muhnot Nainsi
Muhnot Nainsi (1610–1670) is known for his studies of the region now encompassed by the state of Rajasthan in India.
He was a contemporary of Rathore ruler Jaswant Singh of Marwar.
He was son of Jaimal Muhnot, who was senior office holder und ...
. The
East India Company
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and South ...
, too, carried out quantitative exercises in various places and at various times prior to the
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the fo ...
after which its authority to govern the country, often referred to as
Company Rule, was replaced by the administrators operating under the auspices of the
British Crown.
The 1865 census of the
North-Western Provinces
The North-Western Provinces was an administrative region in British India. The North-Western Provinces were established in 1836, through merging the administrative divisions of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces. In 1858, the nawab-ruled kingdo ...
is sometimes referred to as the first proper census in India. By 1872, the only administrative area of British India in which there had not been an attempt to conduct a regionwide enumeration was
Bengal Province. The various limited exercises conducted prior to 1869 have been described as "fragmentary, hardly systematic and lack
ng inany uniformity". In 1872, the
British Raj
The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent;
*
* it is also called Crown rule in India,
*
*
*
*
or Direct rule in India,
* Quote: "Mill, who was him ...
authorities concluded the first "all-India census". 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. The first synchronous decennial census was conducted in 1881 and has continued thus since, but the 1941 exercise was severely curtailed and very little of its data was published due to
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
. The 1931 census is often considered be the last British-administered census. The report of the 1881 census comprised three volumes; that of 1931 comprised 28.
British India
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...
ceased to exist in 1947, when
Partition
Partition may refer to:
Computing Hardware
* Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive
* Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job
Software
* Partition (database), the division of a ...
occurred. Throughout the British Raj, and onwards until 1961 in the
Republic of India, responsibility for census operations lay with temporary administrative structures, which were established for each census and then dismantled.
Those tasked with gathering the data faced various unusual situations. Matters of culture affected even simple processes such as house numbering, with
Bhil
Bhil or Bheel is an ethnic group in western India. They speak the Bhil languages, a subgroup of the Western Zone of the Indo-Aryan languages. As of 2013, Bhils were the largest tribal group in India.
Bhils are listed as tribal people of t ...
people objecting on the grounds of superstition and Burmese people on the grounds of artistry. Enumerators also faced dangerous situations, including instances of being attacked by tigers. According to the 1891 Census Commissioner, the respondents were almost all illiterate and often "unwilling and obtuse". 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. There were also incidents of violence although they tended to occur in places where tensions between native people and the British were already high.
Role of the census
Ram Bhagat points out that a demographic census is an exercise in the ''classification'' of a population and it is inherently constrained. For example, the questions required non-overlapping responses, and both the questions and the lists of response options were guided by preconceptions resulting from political desires or needs. The political forces may emanate from within the government machine or from interest groups that seek recognition and self-advantage. 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. The ability of people to classify themselves can both reinforce and create classifications with which they identify.
While the above is true of all population censuses, the nature of society in British India posed particular problems. Even the geographically-smaller post-Partition India contains a
myriad of languages and cultures, ethnicities and religions, many of which have evolved over several millennia. The 1931 census enumerated nearly 20 percent of the world's population, spread over ;
G. Findlay Shirras said in 1935 that was the largest such exercise in the world but "also the quickest and the cheapest". Scholars such as
Bernard S. Cohn have argued that the censuses of the Raj period significantly influenced the social and spatial demarcations within India that exist today. The use of enumerative mechanisms such as the census, which were intended to bolster the colonial presence, may indeed have sown the seeds that grew to be independent India, but not everybody accepts that. Peter Gottschalk has stated of that cultural influence:
The first British attempts to analyse demographic data in a social context preceded the all-India censuses and were designed with the intent of ending the practice of
female infanticide
Female infanticide is the deliberate killing of newborn female children. In countries with a history of female infanticide, the modern practice of gender-selective abortion is often discussed as a closely related issue. Female infanticide is a m ...
and
sati
Sati or SATI may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Sati'' (film), a 1989 Bengali film by Aparna Sen and starring Shabana Azmi
* ''Sati'' (novel), a 1990 novel by Christopher Pike
*Sati (singer) (born 1976), Lithuanian singer
*Sati, a character in ''Th ...
, both of which were distasteful to the colonial authorities and were thought to be most common among the
Rajput
Rajput (from Sanskrit ''raja-putra'' 'son of a king') is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating from the Indian subcontinent. The term Ra ...
s. The censuses that came later were much broader and, according to Crispin Bates, "more sophisticated" attempts at
social engineering.
Denzil Ibbetson
Sir Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson (30 August 1847 – 21 February 1908)Talbot (2012). was an administrator in British India and an author. He served as Chief-Commissioner of the Central Provinces and Berar from 1898 to 1899 and Lie ...
, the Deputy Superintendent of the census in
Punjab Province in 1881, stated in his official report: Administrative needs were indeed a necessity, and the imperative increased with a recognition that the 1857 Rebellion had been a significant challenge to Britain's presence in India. The shock of that caused the end of the Company Rule and also caused influential members of the
Indian Civil Service
The Indian Civil Service (ICS), officially known as the Imperial Civil Service, was the higher civil service of the British Empire in India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947.
Its members ruled over more than 300 million p ...
, such as the folklorist
Richard Carnac Temple
Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Old Frankish and is a compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' and ''*hardu-'' 'strong, brave, hardy', and it therefore means 'str ...
, to think that if further discontent was to be avoided, a better understanding of the colonial subjects was needed. The censuses formed one aspect of a wider series of
ethnographic studies, the categorisations of which became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism. Of those categorisations,
caste was regarded as being "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society", according to the 1901
Census Commissioner H. H. Risley. The role of Risley has sometimes drawn particular attention, with
Nicholas Dirks
Nicholas B. Dirks is an American academic and the former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. ...
stating, "Risley's anthropology worked not so much to retard nationalism as to render it communal. In so doing, it also left a bloody legacy for South Asia that continues to exact a mounting toll".
Caste
Caste and religion still form the most significant social constructs in India and the former, in particular, has been influenced by the Raj census efforts. Although there were certainly some enumerations of caste prior to the arrival of the British, some modern academics, such as Cohn and Dirks, have argued that the British, through their census and other works, effectively created the caste system as it exists today. Others, such as
Dipankar Gupta, reject that idea, which Gupta considers to imply that Indians had "no identity worth the name" prior to the colonial period, but he acknowledges that the Raj had a significant role in how caste is now practised. Timothy Alborn is somewhat more sceptical, but his primary concern is to refute studies based on the theories of
imagined community
An imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book '' Imagined Communities'' to analyze nationalism. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially-constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as ...
and objectification that have emerged from the work of
Benedict Anderson
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book '' Imagined Communities'', which e ...
. He stated of the claimed objectification of caste:
From the outset in 1872, there was never a formal definition of the census categories for caste, race or tribe. For example, in 1891, the
Jat
The Jat people ((), ()) are a traditionally agricultural community in Northern India and Pakistan. Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, Jats migrated north into the Punjab region in late medieval times, and su ...
s and
Rajput
Rajput (from Sanskrit ''raja-putra'' 'son of a king') is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating from the Indian subcontinent. The term Ra ...
s were recorded as castes and as tribes, but the category of tribe was not formally adopted until the 1901 census. The recorded details changed in every census from 1872 to 1941 and the administrators struggled to comprehend Indian culture. They relied heavily on elitist strictures through their interpretation of regional literature and on the advice of Brahmins, who subscribed to a traditional but impractical ritual ranking system, known as
varna
Varna may refer to:
Places Europe
*Varna, Bulgaria, a city in Bulgaria
**Varna Province
**Varna Municipality
** Gulf of Varna
**Lake Varna
**Varna Necropolis
*Vahrn, or Varna, a municipality in Italy
*Varniai, a city in Lithuania
* Varna (Šaba ...
. The reliance on elites formed part of a colonial strategy to create attachment to a national identity in an arbitrarily-defined highly-disparate whole. The Raj aimed to gain favour with the elites, whose position would then lead to the idea of Indian nationhood percolating through the remainder of society. However, even the concept of Brahmanic elites is tricky:
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the fir ...
has demonstrated that
Bengali Brahmins
The Bengali Brahmins are Hindu Brahmins who traditionally reside in the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent, currently comprising the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh.
The Bengali Brahmins, along with Baidyas ...
were more similar to other castes in Bengal than to any Brahmin groups elsewhere.
There was a general presumption that the caste of a person was immutable and unchanging and that it could only apply to
Hindus
Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...
although
Jains
Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle being ...
were also thus categorised from 1901. In 1911, the caste of Christians and Muslims was recorded if given by them.
John Henry Hutton
John Henry Hutton FRAI (27 June 1885 – 23 May 1968) was an English-born anthropologist and an administrator in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) during the period of the British Raj. The period that he spent with the ICS in Assam evoked an interes ...
, who was Census Commissioner in 1931, stated that "tribe was provided to cover the many communities still organised on the basis in whose case the tribe has not become a caste; it was likewise determinate enough, and no attempt was made to define the term race which was generally used so loosely as almost to defy any definition". That assumptions such as immutability were inadequate was acknowledged, for example, by the 1911 Commissioner,
E. A. Gait, who commented on the demonstrably obvious processes of fusion and fission in social groups that gave rise to new group identities. Similarly, Hutton noted:
Hutton was observing the effects of a popular belief that the purpose of the census was to define the relative position of people in society. Therefore, respondents would often claim to be of a socially-superior community to that which they actually were. 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
Patidar
Patidar ( Gujarati: ) is an Indian landlord and agrarian caste found mostly in Gujarat but also in at least 22 other states of India. The community comprises at multiple subcastes, most prominently the Levas and Kadvas. They form one of the ...
s, and they presented what Frank Conlon has described as a "deluge" of petitions for official recognition to the census authorities. Through such recognition, they thought that they could later make political and economic gains even though, as with the
Goud Saraswat Brahmin
Gaud Saraswat Brahmins (GSB) (also Goud or Gawd) are a Hindu Brahmin community of the north. The Konkani speaking Gaud Saraswat of Goa and southern India claim to be descendents of these Gaud Saraswat Brahmins of the north that migrated to K ...
s (whose claim to Brahmin status itself is contested), their associations might comprise very disparate socioeconomic groups. Frequently, the enumerators just took what people claimed for granted.
The theories of Risley, which broadly assumed that caste and race were related and were based on now-discredited methods of
anthropometry
Anthropometry () refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various at ...
and
scientific racism
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority.. "Few tragedies ...
, loomed large in attempts by
Indogists and the colonial authorities to impose a
Western
Western may refer to:
Places
*Western, Nebraska, a village in the US
*Western, New York, a town in the US
*Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western world, countries that id ...
paradigm on the census caste categories. The census administrators themselves also created caste communities in which none existed previously. In Bengal,
Chandala, which was commonly used as a generic description for all low-caste people, was mistakenly used as a specific caste name by the authorities. That caused much resentment and attempts to achieve recognition as
Namasudra
Namasudra, also known as Namassej, is an ''Avarna'' community originating from eastern and central Bengal. The community was earlier known as ''Chandala'' or ''Chandal'', a term usually considered as a slur. They were traditionally engaged in fis ...
. Castes such as
Yadav
Yadav refers to a grouping of traditionally non-elite, Quote: "The Yadavs were traditionally a low-to-middle-ranking cluster of pastoral-peasant castes that have become a significant political force in Uttar Pradesh (and other northern state ...
and
Vishwakarma
Vishvakarma or Vishvakarman ( sa, विश्वकर्मा, Viśvakarmā, all maker) is a craftsman deity and the divine architect of the devas in contemporary Hinduism. In the early texts, the craftsman deity was known as Tvastar and the ...
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 Yadavs were also another example of a group that invented tradition in the process often referred to as
Sanskritisation
Sanskritisation (or Sanskritization) is a term in sociology which refers to the process by which castes or tribes placed lower in the caste hierarchy seek 'upward' mobility by emulating the rituals and practices of the dominant castes or upper ...
. They claimed descent from the mythological
Yadu and a Kshatriya status. Their creation as a caste was aided also by the Raj's policy of grouping people who bore similar names.
Linguistic differences also presented difficulties, with different spellings and pronunciations for similar castes and administrative attempts to create language-based caste categories that had not been known.
George Grierson
George Allison Grierson (April 11, 1867–October 18, 1931) was a politician in Manitoba, Canada. He served in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1914 to 1922, and was a cabinet minister in the government of Tobias Norris. Grierso ...
's ''Linguistic Survey of India'' had recorded 179 languages and 544 dialects, while the 1931 census, which covered a somewhat more extensive area, noted 225 languages.
The 1872 and 1881 censuses attempted to classify people fundamentally according to the Varna mentioned in ancient texts. The broad caste basing proved not to reflect the realities of social relationships, but it was met with approval from scholars of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
and ancient texts. It also did not apply throughout the country. Furthermore, as Ibbetson and others in the Punjab realised after 1872, the Brahmanic system had no practical purpose from an administrative point of view. 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. In 1891, the other jurisdictions followed suit.
Attempts continued to recognise the broad socio-economic implications of the varna system, but they were also applied inconsistently.
William Chichele Plowden, the Commissioner in 1881, designated categories of Brahmans, Rajputs, Castes of Good Social Position, Inferior Castes and Non-Hindus or Aboriginal Castes; in 1921, the category of "depressed classes" was used; and in 1931 the nomenclature became "exterior classes".
The 1901 census recorded 1646 distinct castes, which increased to 4147 in 1931.
Religion and occupation
The significance of religion, as well as caste, was considerable. Hutton said in his census report for 1931 that
Despite the general ruling that caste was restricted to Hindus, which was later modified to include Jains, there were over 300 recorded Christian castes, and more than 500 castes were Muslim. 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.
Koli
Koli may refer to:
Places
* Koli, Finland, a hill in Finland
* Koli National Park, a national park in Finland
* Koli, Iran (disambiguation), several places in Iran
* Koli Airfield, a former airfield in the South Pacific
Other uses
* Koli peopl ...
s in
Bombay
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second-m ...
worshipped both Hindu idols and the Christian
Holy Trinity, and
Kunbi
Kunbi (alternatively Kanbi , Kurmi ) is a generic term applied to caste system, castes of traditional farmers in Western India. These include the Dhonoje, Ghatole, Hindre, Jadav, Jhare, Khaire, Lewa (Leva Patil), Lonare and Tirole communities ...
s in
Gujarat
Gujarat (, ) is a state along the western coast of India. Its coastline of about is the longest in the country, most of which lies on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gujarat is the fifth-largest Indian state by area, covering some ; and the ninth ...
were known to follow both Hindu and Muslim rituals and caused the census to classify them as socially Hindus but Muslim by faith. The Raj had also introduced constitutional changes that gave certain groups political representation. That led to events such as that in the 1931 census. According to Shirras,
1881 Census
1891 Census
Recording age
As with caste, recording age in the census amounted to a problematic attempt to impose Western values on the population. 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. The nature of time had a different meaning to the people of India, who considered age to be a bureaucratic device and were more concerned with practical measures of time, such as the demarcations of natural disasters, a tendency to measure life by harvests and the cultural impact of puberty that starkly differentiated adults from children. Other cultural influences included the
zodiac
The zodiac is a belt-shaped region of the sky that extends approximately 8° north or south (as measured in celestial latitude) of the ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of the year. The pat ...
and a tendency among Brahmins to understate the age of unmarried late-teenage daughters because for them not to have been married by that time implied a dereliction of parental and religious duty, which would consign the parents to a torrid period between death and reincarnation. Also, Indians were not very good at estimating the age of others, which made it difficult for census enumerators to assess or to correct the information with which they were supplied.
In parallel with the introduction of censuses, the campaign to end infanticide led to the first formal attempts to register births, marriages and deaths. Legislation for that purpose was enacted between 1866 and 1872, but the system was underresourced and reliant on village officials. 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
The Indian independence movement was a series of historic events with the ultimate aim of ending British Raj, British rule in India. It lasted from 1857 to 1947.
The first nationalistic revolutionary movement for Indian independence emerged ...
.
The problems of registration, age irrelevance and ignorance were known to the census authorities, whose officials produced tables that demonstrated statistically-implausible spikes and age distributions from the 1880s onward. They came to recognise that the issues were exacerbated by a misunderstanding, with the populace often being unconvinced that the submitted data was not used at a personal level but was rather aggregated for analysis. 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. Attempts at correction were made, but the figures remained unreliable throughout the Raj period, and perhaps worse, the attempts to correct them in the official reports were not always based on sound methodology.
Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, econom ...
is among those who have been criticised for allegedly failing to appreciate the underlying statistical problems in the published data. Noting that some of the officials queried even trying to impose the age category, Alborn noted:
Outcomes
The outcomes of the census exercise were sometimes startling. For example, the 1872 census in Bengal suggested that the population was considerably greater than had been believed. A supervisor there noted that it "rose in one day from 42 to 67 millions" and that the
Lieutenant-Governor
A lieutenant governor, lieutenant-governor, or vice governor is a high officer of state, whose precise role and rank vary by jurisdiction. Often a lieutenant governor is the deputy, or lieutenant, to or ranked under a governor — a " second-in-com ...
"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". Proposed benefits such as improvements in public health and targeted famine relief, but they were often not realised in those particular instances because the poor data relating to age (mortality rates, as an example) prevented the sort of mapping of the population that over time was improving the well-being of the British populace.
''
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
Odisha (English: , ), formerly Orissa ( the official name until 2011), is an Indian state located in Eastern India. It is the 8th largest state by area, and the 11th largest by population. The state has the third largest population of S ...
, 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". The figures for caste and nationality were also described as "for the most part conjectural". The 1872 census was, in the opinion of Crispin Bates,
That caste should not be treated as a fixed designation is now commonly recognised since new groups come and go, and there are movements between groups. Bhagat describes them as "fluid, fuzzy and dynamic historically" and gives as an example the emergence in the early 20th century of the
Kamma
Kamma may refer to:
*Kamma (caste), a caste or social group found largely in Southern India
*Kamma, India, village in Punjab, India
*The Pali and Ardhamagadhi term for karma
*Bava Kamma, a traditional Jewish civil law procedure (1st volume of Nezi ...
and
Reddy
Reddy (also transliterated as ''Raddi'', ''Reddi'', ''Reddiar'', ''Reddappa'', ''Reddy'') is a caste that originated in India, predominantly settled in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. They are classified as a forward caste.
The origin of the ...
castes through coalescence of like-minded, politically motivated groups.
Despite its variability, the published information relating to age caused significant angst among social reformers, notably in relation to the
Child Marriage Restraint Act
The Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, passed on 28 September 1929, in the Imperial Legislative Council of India, fixed the age of marriage for girls at 14 years and boys at 18 years. In 1949, after India's independence, it was amended to 15 for ...
(Sarda Act) of 1929. The legislation had been supported by the 1931 Census Commissioner, Hutton, who had noticed a declining trend in the custom of child marriages and saw the act as encouraging the decline.
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. She claimed that there had been a 50 percent increase in wives under the age of 15 and a quadrupling of wives under 5 years old since 1921, and that the lives of women were being blighted. She thought Indians incapable of helping themselves and in need of firmer instruction from British authorities, who should enforce change, rather than merely encourage it. In turn, debates such as those, based on untrustworthy information, informed opinions about
Indian nationalism and the role of Britain generally in the country. Rathbone herself was confronted by Rama Rau, an Indian feminist, who said that the British were simply not well-placed to understand
Indian culture
Indian culture is the heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, artifacts and technologies that originated in or are associated with the ethno-linguistically diverse India. The term al ...
and that "educated Indian women were working in every province of their country to eradicate social evils and outmoded customs and prejudices, and we refused to accept the assertion that the removal of social evils in Indian society was the responsibility of the British".
See also
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Government of India Act 1858
The Government of India Act 1858 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (21 & 22 Vict. c. 106) passed on 2 August 1858. Its provisions called for the liquidation of the British East India Company (who had up to this point been ruling ...
References
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Further reading
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External links
Census of India, 1921 ''Volume I''
{{Census of India
Government of British India
History of the government of India
Censuses in India
Censuses in Pakistan
Ethnology