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Caste Confusion and Census Enumeration in Colonial India, 1871-1921

Pretty illuminating..about the British understanding of caste and how they conducted their census.

[..] Caste data also failed to meet the goals of uniformity and comparability. Most Muslims listed their caste even though they were assumed not to have one. Part of this confusion was due to enumerators not following instructions: “the enumerators must understand that they have nothing whatsoever to do with Caste Classification, this will be done afterwards by the Compilers, and, in this column, they are to enter the Caste or Class as it is given to them by, or for, each individual.”41 Another problem with knowledge of India that emerged through this process was that local colonial officials patterned their own cate- gorization on pre-existing understandings of caste, which were not nationally consistent. From these data, Waterfield could only conclude that the “caste system is perhaps as prevalent among the Mahomedans as among those pro- fessing the Hindoo religion.”42 Even Christians listed their caste, Waterfield lamented, which led him to explain that those who did list their caste must be Hindoo converts.
In addition to people’s skill at manipulating the caste lists were the highly dis-
43
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no sides in these feuds.
Waterfield concluded that the main problems with caste calculations were
“due partly to the intrinsic difficulties on the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification.”46 Commenting on the 1871 census effort, C. Elliot, Secretary to Government for the Northwestern Provinces, wrote:
[T]he caste statistics are the most unsatisfactory part of the return. Greater accu- racy than before has been aimed at, and probably obtained, but still there is much error and confusion in the figures. A really scientific and sound classification is hardly possible in the face of the general ignorance of this subject which prevails among the people themselves, the frequency with which the same caste is called by different names in different places, and the tendency to confuse caste with occupa-
47
Frustrations in the first set of censuses stemmed from procedural problems compounded by the lack of suitable conceptualization. The grand expectation that colonial census commissioners would need only to collate caste data was thwarted by widespread uncertainty in India about what caste was.[..]

[..] There was also growing unrest concerning caste categories among India scholars and activists. By the time of India’s third national census in 1891, “many Indian political activists had become extremely census-savvy and were beginning to debate the definitions of the terms being used to describe them.”63
The fact that the census introduced new labels for various groups did not automatically transform Indian reality. There is evidence, however, to suggest that people were subscribing to census definitions and that they attached impor- tance to how they were classified. Quite often, to the irritation of enumerators, respondents would “describe themselves as anything but what they are.”64 This was the opposite of the sort of self-identification for which census planners had hoped. On this note, J. A. Baines argued in 1899 census correspondence that “I am inclined to advise the omission of caste from the Imperial schedule, and to make use of the returns of 1891 as a standard until 1911.”65 There still remained a great deal of confusion among all involved in the census project about how to classify caste. In his report on the 1891 census of India, E. Maclagan wrote, “The instructions I issued are in many parts word for word the same as those issued in 1881 . . . they were not, however, free from faults . . . the terminology was in many cases different from that of the translation issued to enumerators, and many of the superior officials were much puzzled at the inconsistencies of the two sets of orders.”66 Inefficient enumeration and lack of consensus on a definition of caste fostered more confusion. The tension between the pragmat- ics of administration on the ground and the imperial objectives of accumulating knowledge for the governance of populations led commissioners Plowden and Baines to suggest removing caste from the census.[..]