Census of India 1901

1903 · Ethnographic Census Volume · Work 695 of 1,871

Census of India 1901, 1903, Ethnographic Census Volume

A thick quarto volume of 1903 lying closed and flat on a teak table in a colonial survey office in Calcutta, the book thirty centimetres tall, its front cover plain grey paper-board worn smooth from edge to edge, its spine turned away from the lens, the edges of its paper tropically browned, tucked into the back of the book a large map of linen-backed paper folded shut into a thick packet with worn creases, its outer face bare browned linen, in the foreground beside the book a pair of brass spreading calipers with curved arms and a steel sliding caliper, a stack of folded petitions tied with tape held down by a river stone, a cloth punkah fan hanging from the ceiling, sunlight falling in stripes through slatted shutters from the right, whitewashed wall.

What it was used for
The census of British India recorded about 294 million people in March 1901. The report was published in 1903 by the Superintendent of Government Printing in Calcutta, written by Herbert Hope Risley and Edward Albert Gait. It collected population, age, sex, religion, education, occupation, infirmities, languages and caste, with retrospects on famine, cholera and malarial fever from earlier censuses. Risley, the Census Commissioner, pushed further what the 1891 census had already attempted: he had the castes not merely counted but ranked — by their standing in social precedence, province by province, with marriage circles and commensality as the test. To this he added body measurements; the nasal index, the ratio of nose height to nose width, he took for a stable racial marker.
What was new
What was new was the extent to which the category being counted was changed by the counting. Risley's ranking did not reach the counted as information but as a verdict that could be appealed — and appealed it was. The most elaborate memorial came from the Khatris of the Punjab and the United Provinces, who objected to being classed as Vaishyas; Risley reclassified them as Kshatriyas, and other memorials were settled on similar lines. He distinguished 2,378 main castes and tribes and 43 races or nationalities. The barb: the census thereby created an incentive to organise as a group in order to improve one's own classification. The historian Bernard Cohn held the racial reading of caste to be Risley's own "theoretical axe to grind"; the samples behind the measurements ran from 30 to 100 people and were, on the UCLA account, selected to fit his theory of seven racial types.

What the sources leave open: Risley's report was not consulted in the original; title, publisher, year and the population figure come from the Internet Archive catalogue entry for the original printing. The statements on the memorials and on 2,378 castes come from a 2012 senior thesis (ICLS) and have not been cross-checked. Cohn's judgement is given as reported by UCLA, not from Cohn's own publication.

Further reading