![]() Despite the evidence that suggested the diverse nature of the Indian society, Samarendra notes that British officials still sought to emphasise the existence of a pan-Indian caste structure. The empirical approach of the census in colonial India relied upon social realities rather than textual definitions to define people’s castes. Padmanabh Samarendra posits that the term “caste” is a Western import, derived from the Portuguese casta, which has been erroneously equated with jati and varna. ![]() Therefore, the European origin is not only defined on the basis being white but also on patriarchal lines keeping in view the fact that the progeny of a European woman or Anglo-Indian woman by an Indian Christian will vitiate the racial pool of Europeans of white origin.Ģ) The Census Introduced the Category of ‘Caste’ In 1921, an Anglo-Indian was described for census purposes as persons of mixed European and Indian descent, but in 1931 census a slightly different definition was used defining an Anglo-Indian as a person whose father, grandfather or other progenitor in male line was a European since it was assumed that others would probably prefer to be returned as Indians. The concern is evident in the changing definition of Anglo-Indians in the census. The preoccupation of the census with Anglo-Indians was mainly to segregate the Europeans or people of white origin and to know their intermixing with the Indians. Bhagat argues that this was done by the British to prepare an ethnographic account of the Indian people in order to further the colonisation agenda religion influenced state functioning and the category of “race” was created exclusively to separate the whites and Christians from the “natives.” R B Bhagat notes that racial and ethnic classifications in a census are an attempt to “categorise national population in neatly non-overlapping categories.” India’s population census (non-synchronous), conducted in 1872, included categories such as race, tribe, caste, and population. This world population day, we explore the process of data collection under the British rule and the effects of creating binaries between communities with a history of shared relations. The existence of empire by imparting a sense of urgency to the process spurred on this creation of knowledge and at the same time the unequal power relationships of imperialism helped shape the categories within which that knowledge was constructed.Īs this reading list explains, the British developed the census to include racial and religious categories-which was unlike the census of any other country at the time-as a method to bring “order” to the Indian colony. ![]() The study of India was thus made part of a larger scholarly enterprise in which the Victorians, as children of the Enlightenment, sought rational principles that would provide a comprehensive and comprehensible way of fitting everything they saw in the world around them into ordered hierarchies. However, India’s first synchronous nationwide census was conducted in 1881 by the British Raj to achieve their imperialist agenda-they needed to categorise and classify the population in order to formulate separate policies. The reorganisation of states post-independence on the basis of linguistic identity, the creation of electoral constituencies, and also the allocation of resources from the centre to the states is based on population density and requirements. ![]() The partition of India was based on census data. The census has played an integral role in contemporary Indian history.
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