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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Classifying caste: census surveys in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Padmanabh Samarendra a a S.A. Jaipuria College.

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2003 To cite this Article: Samarendra, Padmanabh (2003) 'Classifying caste: census surveys in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 26:2, 141 - 164 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/085640032000089762 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/085640032000089762

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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, n.s., Vol.XXVI, no.2, August 2003
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Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries*
Padmanabh Samarendra S.A. Jaipuria College
The decennial census surveys conducted by the state in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a vast corpus of knowledge on caste. But the motives of the colonial state in launching this vast enumeration project had more to do with governance than science.1 Caste and religion were understood by British ofcials to hold the sociological keys to understanding the Indian people.2 More specically, in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857, the state wanted to know the customs of the land, so that it could face more prudently the vexed question of social reform,3 and desired to enhance its knowledge about the internal divisions of Indian society, in order to identify its allies who could be played effectively against the enemies.4 Hence the prominence accorded to caste in the census reports. Recognising the potential of caste as a divisive force,5 the British imperial state politicised this socio-cultural dichotomy6 with a view to consolidating its subcontinental hegemony. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has written extensively and intelligently on this issue, but he has in my view given insufcient attention to the diversities and discontinuities
* I am grateful to the late Dr Arvind N. Das, Dr Dilip K. Menon and Prof. Neeladri Bhattacharya for their comments on an earlier version of this paper that appeared as a chapter in my doctoral thesis. That chapter could not have taken the present form of an article without Dr Lakshmi Subramanians initiative. Sangeeta DasGupta has shared and shaped the ideas presented herein from the very beginning. I also thank Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and the two anonymous referees whose comments helped me enrich the arguments. 1 The roots of the census in India, writes Kenneth W. Jones, are to be found in the rst half of the nineteenth century as an expanding foreign government sought to gather information on the individuals and territory under its control. K.W. Jones, Religious Identity and the Indian Census, in N.G. Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1981), p.77. The opinion is also shared by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay who, while outlining the objectives of Risleys ethnographic experiments, writes: Information is an essential tool of social control. And it is all the more necessary for an alien ruler. S. Bandyopadhyay, The Raj, Risley and the Tribes and Castes Of Bengal, in India Past and Present, Vol.II, no.1 (1985), p.41. Rashmi Pant, similarly, underlines the utility of a knowledge of caste for the British administrative strategyof managing masses. R. Pant, The Cognitive Status Of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review Of Some Literature on the North West Provinces and Oudh, in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XXIV no.2 (Apr.June 1987), p.150. 2 B. Cohn, The Census, Social Structure and Objectication in South Asia in his An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p.242. 3 S. Bandyopadhyay, Caste in the Perception Of the Raj: A Note Of the Evolution Of the Colonial Sociology Of Bengal, in Bengal Past and Present, Vol.CIV, nos.1989 (Jan.Dec. 1985), p.57. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p.62. 6 Ibid., p.63. ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/03/020141-24 2003 South Asian Studies Association of Australia DOI: 10.1080/085640032000089762

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in the colonial discourse on caste. The premeditated political intent ascribed to the colonial state by Bandyopadhyay has imposed an ahistorical continuity and uniformity on such discourses. Instances such as the recommendation by the Census Committee of 1877 to exclude caste from the purview of the census surveys,7 or the decision to drop the practice of hierarchising castes according to their presumed social status after the census of 1901the feature of the process that generated the most lively public debateor the disinclination of Edward Gait, the census commissioner in 1911, to speculate about the origins of the caste system in the pages of his report,8 do not support the contention that the state constantly endeavoured to politicise the divisive potential of caste. Finally, since his attention is xed on the supposed agenda of the state, Bandyopadhyay has little interest in analysing the modes of comprehending caste as these appeared over the years in colonial sociology. Susan Bayly has illustrated the varied conceptions of caste in the literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but not before she purges these of the homogenising inuence of colonial politics. Caste was not invented, asserts Bayly, in the so-called colonial discourse.9 Rather, caste constituted a meeting ground between Indian reality and colonial knowledge and strategy.10 This interaction produced an astonishing diversity in the literature on Indian castes, tribes, races and nations, and very little of it conforms to the familiar stereotypes about narrow, self-contained, so-called hegemonic knowledge and data-collection.11 Implied in the presence of this diversity was the absence of a dening colonial will. To demonstrate that the discourses on caste were uncontaminated by power relations obtaining in India, Bayly further links these to the intellectual traditions evolving in the West. Caste, she argues, was only of subsidiary interest for the ethnographers who found race to be a much more pervasive concept in the analysis of Indian society.12 Indeed the ethnographers in Bayleys view were as much scholars as ofcialsmen who sought to make their mark in a wider learned world which had come to be dominated by ethnological debate.13 Much of this scholarship, she concludes, was not colonial at all in the usual senses being conceived as a contribution to broad debates in social theory and scientic ethnology, rather than being focused solely on questions of how to know and subjugate Indians as the ethnographic other .14 Edward Saids concept of Orientalism offers a more comprehensive insight into
7 8

Cited in J.A. Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, Vol.I (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883), p.133. E.A. Gait, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.I: India, Part I: Report (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1913), p.387. 9 S. Bayly, Caste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography Of India, in P. Robb (ed.), The Concept Of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p.166. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 214; and see also ibid., pp.167, 183, 190, 205. 12 Ibid., pp.168, 214. 13 Ibid., p.167. 14 Ibid., p.214.

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the modes of imagining caste as delineated in the census reports and their implications for Indian governmentality. Orientalism symbolised a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinctionbetween the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident .15 The relationship between Occident and Orient, explains Said, was a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.16 Orientalism was a discourse by which European culture was able to manageeven producethe Orient.17 Within the nexus of knowledge and authority as identied by Said, several issues, however, remain unexplored. What is specic in the Western representation of the Orient in a colonial context? How did the obligation to administer, as in the case of the ethnographers, mediate a scholarly or classical representation of the Orient?18 Said insists that the presence of empire or political imperialism in the nineteenth century governed an entire eld of imagination.19 However, by reducing the varied Orientalist imaginations to a single discourse of imperial endorsement, Said has denied culture its varied representations, autonomy and even politics. Saids cognition of the relationship between culture and politics, between Orientalism and political empire, is thus marked by ambivalence. Culture is endowed with politics, but it is overwhelmed by the politics of empire. The conclusion is ironical: the more we saturate Orientalist writings with imperial politics, the less we know about the strategies through which these commanded authority. The project of Said is to establish the political signicance of the cultural, but this cannot be done by insisting on a continuous relationship between culture and politics, or between Orientalist scholarship and empire. Only by fracturing this continuity, by locating a discontinuous relationship between the two, by freeing culture of institutional politics, can we recover and formulate the politics of culture. In fact, the colonial situation critically modied the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident as conceived by Said. The colonisers exported to India the institutions and ideologies they were acquainted with in the metropolis. It is not surprising, then, that Kenneth Jones found that: In form both the British and Indian censuses appear nearly identical.20 But the similarities were not just formal ones. The decennial census surveys are deeply imbued with ideas of materialist evolution and racial hierarchy. The institution of caste seemed, to the British census ofcials, to have attributes that made it amenable to these Western explanatory models.

15 16

Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions Of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p.2. Ibid., p.5. 17 Ibid. 18 Scholarly or Classical are the terms used by Said to characterise German Orientalism during the rst two thirds of the nineteenth century. Germany in this phase possessed no colonies; there was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India. Ibid., p.19. 19 Ibid., pp.1314. 20 Jones, Religious Identity and the Indian Census, p.78.

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Of course they were wrong. Western concepts lost their integrity in the colonial milieu. But that, too, was grist to the ofcial mill, for it underlined the unchanging Oriental character of the institution. Further, the uneven impact of intellectual traditions on enumerators produced divergences in the cognition of caste even within a set of census reports for the same year. The Final Report on a census survey always contained a greater explication and application of academic theories. The enumerators in the localities, on the other hand, tended to draw much more upon local traditions and customs. Finally, the ethnographers interpretations always had to conform broadly to the parameters set by the state. The decennial census surveys in India thus produced discourses on caste marked equally by continuity and rupture. In these varied discourses the colonial state contended to discover the colonised, and re-present them in ways that reinforced its moral and material claims to rule. While other conceptions of caste existing beyond the arena of the state were not effaced, the ofcials in the process of selecting, comparing and classifying fundamentally altered the customary ways of identifying and dening caste. Caste was exteriorised: its features were objectied and made visible; it was wrenched from the domain of received tradition and subjected to public discussion. And from the pages of the governmental records, the colonial conception of caste percolated down into society. Not only did people begin to use new terms to describe their own identity: even the way they thought about itto paraphrase Cohnshowed signs of change.21

The Beginning of Enumeration The decennial survey of population started in India from 1871 to 1872.22 In the beginning, it was primarily thought of as a statistical exercisethe subject population was to be enumerated to facilitate a more efcient mode of administration.23 Nevertheless, one of the requisites of the project was to count and classify the myriad array of Indian castes by clubbing together analogous castes and arranging these hierarchically according to their respective ranks. However, the outcome was not satisfactory, concluded Henry Watereld of the Statistics and
21 22

Cohn, The Census, p.228. The early attempts at enumeration and classication of population preceding the census operations have been detailed by Bernard Cohn and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. See Cohn, The Census, pp.2338; and Bandyopadhyay, Caste in the Perception Of the Raj, pp.5861. 23 It was the administrative inconvenience caused by the want of more precise information regarding the numbers of the people, Beverley wrote, that led the Secretary of State to issue instructions that arrangements should be made for a general census of the population in the year 1871. Without information on this head, he added, the basis is wanting on which to found accurate opinions on such important subjects as the growth and rate of increase of the population, the sufciency of food supplies, the incidence of local and imperial taxation. H. Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872), p.1. Underlining the importance of numerals in colonial imaginaire, Appadurai writes that the exercise of bureaucratic powerinvolved the colonial imagination andin this imagination number played a crucial role. The referential purpose that the numbers concerning communities served, Appadurai elaborates, was far less important than their discursive importance in supporting or subverting various classicatory moves and the policy argument based on them. A. Appadurai, Number in the Colonial Imagination in C. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp.315, 321.

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Commerce Department, owing partly to the intrinsic difculties of the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classication, each writer adopting that which seemed to him best suited for the purpose.24 Thus, forty-eight principal castes of the Central Provinces were placed in eleven groups, while in Madras various castes of the Hindoos were arranged in seventeen sets.25 In Bengal, sixty-nine castes were grouped into superior Hindu castes, intermediate castes, trading castes, pastoral castes, castes engaged in the preparation of cooked food, agricultural castes, service castes, artisan castes, weaver castes, labouring castes, castes engaged in selling sh and vegetables, boating and shing castes, and dancer, musician, beggar and vagabond castes.26 Seen primarily as a statistical inquiry, the census of 187172 made no attempt to offer an explanation of caste structure. At the same time, the varying methods of classifying caste pursued in the reports anticipated future developments. For instance, the varna arrangement of castes found favour in the summary of the census reports from the different provinces: In all modes of classication, the rst rank is held by the Brahmin or priestly caste. Next in rank come the Kshatriyas, Rajpoots, or warrior caste . The third of the primitive castes was the Vaisyawhile the great majority of the Hindu population was indiscriminately thrown together into the fourth, namely the Soodra or servile class.27 The varna schema was also present in the census report of Bengal, but its restricted application here marked the beginning of attempts by colonial ofcials to explain the structure of caste without depending on Brahmanical tradition. The two criteria adopted in the Bengal report were racial origin and occupation.28 The racial identity of a caste was gleaned from textual traditions. The origin of the Brahmans and Kshatriyas could be traced to the pure-blooded Hindu race or the Aryan race. Placed below them were functional castes, said to be of mixed racial origin. But the functional hierarchy implicit in the varna model proved of little assistance in deciding the status of these castes. The vagabond caste, for example, was placed on the lowest rung, not because the varna schema prescribed that position for it, but because it bore no resemblance to the traditional function of any caste. Until 1881, census enumerations in India were undertaken at different times and by independent agencies, and with little attempt to secure uniformity in the arrangement of their ndings.29 To ensure future uniformity, a Census Committee
24

H. Watereld, Memorandum on the Census Of British India Of 187172 (London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1875), p.20. 25 Ibid., p.21. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p.22. 28 Race, in this report, was not used as a biological category. The term overlapped with that of nationality and also referred to religious groups. Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, Resolution, p.3. Bayly has pointed out that the term race was widely used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its meaning was linguistic and cultural, rather than ethnological in the later Victorian sense, when notion of progressive evolution had emerged as a generalized theory of human racial type . Bayly, Caste and Race , p.172. The term in its present connotation was applied even beyond the early nineteenth century, as is evident from the census report of 1872. 29 W.C. Plowden, Report on the Census Of British India Taken on the 17th Of February 1881 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883), Vol.1, p.1.

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was constituted in 1877 to frame a common programme for the forthcoming census operations. The Committee recommended that the Hindus should be shown as Brahmins, Kshatryas, and Others.30 A pan-Indian representation of caste structure was thus proposed by aggregating castes, smothering their specicitieshierarchical and interactional, occupational, etc.and universalising certain characteristics on the basis of which castes from disparate localities could be rendered comparable. The diversity in the composition of caste society in the provinces and the differing principles identied by the ethnographers as underlying such social arrangements denied the uniformity in caste classication envisaged by the Census Committee. In Bengal, Bourdillon had wanted to follow the classication adopted by Beverley in 1872, but the paramount necessity of maintaining uniformity in the system of caste classication throughout India compelled the Census Commissioner [for India in 1881] to negative [sic] the request.31 Yet the practical difculty of carrying out on any uniform principle[the] grading of castes in the manner suggested by the census commissioner was found to be so great that even this had to be abandoned.32 Plowden, the census commissioner, had decided that the various castes should be arranged in ve categories: Brahmans, Rajputs, Castes of Good social Position, Inferior Castes and Non-Hindus or Aboriginal Castes.33 But in Bengal, all the castes were divided into ve great classes, namely, Brahmins, Rajputs, Other Hindu castes, Aboriginal castes and Hindus not recognising caste; following these was the indeterminate caste not stated.34 The necessity of nding an organising principle of caste structure was forced upon the ethnographers when the Census Committee rejected the four-varna model as primeval and obsolete.35 Subsequent investigations demonstrated that the ethnographers could neither form a unanimous opinion on the subject nor exclude completely the inuence of the Brahmanical model from their explanations. As in the preceding census report for Bengal, Bourdillon, in 1881, employed the two criteria of descent and occupation to classify caste. The inhabitants of Bengal, he believed, comprised the Hindus, the aborigines and a large population which throngs the debateable land between the Hindus and the pure aborigines.36 The pure Hindus in Bengal were the Brahmins and the Rajputs, the castes that had retained the purity of their Aryan descent.37 While Bourdillon refers to ethnological38 distinctions to separate the Hindus from the aborigines, the category did not yet assume a biological connotation. That had to await H.H. Risley.39 In the 1881
30 31

Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, pp.13940. Ibid., p.140. 32 Ibid. 33 Cohn, The Census, p.245. 34 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.133. 35 Ibid., p.139. 36 Ibid., p.140. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 See below.

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report, descent was discerned from language, customs and faith.40 The members of the Other Hindu castes and the Aboriginal castes were those aboriginals who had been conquered by the Aryans and relegated tolowest grades and employed inmost menial ofces.41 These classes had lost their racial purity in the wake of their absorption within Hinduism; hence, their social status was to be decided by the services rendered by them. A similar method of classication of caste was followed in Bombay Presidency where Baines cited the eponymic occupation of all classes below those of Brahman and Rajput as indicative of [their] social position.42 Descent from the Aryan race, on the other hand, secured the Brahmins and the Rajputs the rst two positions in a list of thirteen classes.43 The role of race as one of the dening elements of caste society was, however, rejected in the census report of 1881 for Punjab. Deuzil Ibbetson, who prepared the report, contended that the whole basis of diversity of caste was diversity of occupation. The old division into Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Sudra, and Mlechchha or outcaste who is below the Sudra, he explained, is but a division into the Priest, the warrior, the husbandman, the artisan and the menial.44 By giving the whole sanction of religion to the principle of the hereditary nature of occupation45 the Brahmins had cleverly safeguarded the elevated status of these castes. The commencement of the next census operations in 1891 was preceded by critical changes in the approach of the colonial state to the enumeration of caste. The census operation had started out as a counting exercise. However, variations in the scheme of classication or between the surveys of 1872 and 1881 made it difcult to compare absolute numbers. In compiling tables for Bengal, Bourdillon admitted that considerable differences exist between the caste totals of 1872 and 1881, which it is now impossible to reconcile.46 Investigating the circumstances responsible for this discrepancy, the census ofcer pointed out that there must have been radical differences in the system upon which the castes, and especially the subdivision of castes, were classied in 1872 and 1881.47 These errors could be avoided, he suggested, by the preparation of a report on the castes of Bengal which shall show their origin and classication, as well as the ramications of the same caste in different parts of the country, and will give
40 41

Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.140. Ibid., p.141. 42 Plowden, Report on the Census Of British India Taken on the 17th Of February 1881,Vol.III, Appendix H: Mr. Baines on Caste and Other Social Division in the Bombay Presidency, p.xcix. 43 The following thirteen classes were mentioned by Baines: Brahmin, Rajputs, Writers, Traders, Artizans, Agriculturists, Shepherds, Fishers and Sailors, Personal Servants, Minor Professions, Devotees, Depressed Castes, Labourer and Miscellaneous. Ibid., pp.xcxcii. 44 D.C.J. Ibbetson, Report on the Census Of the Panjab Taken on the 17th Of February 1881, Vol. 1. (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883), p.173. 45 Ibid. 46 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.142. 47 Ibid., p.141.

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an exhaustive list of the subdivisions of each caste and of their numerous synonyms.48 The Census Committee of 1877 had also stressed the necessity of a detailed investigation into the structure of caste, even while questioning the merit of including the subject within the purview of the census reports. (A census report, it opined, was a statistical document relating properly to the enumeration of the people.49) Similar advice was tendered in 1882 by the census commissioner, following which the government of Bengal appointed H.H. Risley, in 1885, to conduct an ethnographic survey of the tribes and castes of the province.50 This conscious decision to initiate a scientic enquiry to collect more precise information regarding caste reected a desire on the part of the colonial state to know how the caste system worked. Summarising the advantages expected to ow from Risleys ethnographic survey, C.E. Buckland, ofciating secretary to the government of Bengal, wrote: The more Government ofcers know about the religious and social customs of the people of their districts, the better able they will be to deal with either the possible social problems of the future, or with the practical questions arising in their ordinary work, such as the relations of different castes to the land, their privileges in respect of rent, their relations to trade, their status in civil society, their internal organization, their rules as to marriage and divorce, and as to the giving and receiving of famine-relief.51 At the heart of this new endeavour lay not only some practical administrative benets but, as is evident from the following statement of Buckland, the very hegemonic aspirations of the colonial state: Much inuence for good over the people can be obtained by both Executive and Judicial ofcers by acquiring, and having a reputation for possessing, an intimate knowledge of the circumstances and surroundings of their actual life.52 Colonial ofcials who had never had the advantage of reading Edward Said understood, nevertheless, that there was a correlation between knowledge and control. Accordingly, they strove to discover caste in all its intricacies and to encompass it within an explanatory paradigm. Search for a Theory of Caste The census of 1891, though distinct from its predecessors in many respects, was not without its linkages to the past. One was the appointment of J.A. Baines as the chief census commissioner. As census commissioner for Bombay in 1881, Baines
48 49 50

Ibid. Ibid., p.133. Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.55, May 1892, Enquiry into Castes and Occupations Of the People Of Bengal, Bihar State Archives, Patna [hereafter BSA]. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. (emphasis added).

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had been a stalwart protagonist of the view that descent and occupation were the dening criteria of caste status.53 But Baines directed that the caste groups be organised within the 1891 imperial tables on a principle based mainly upon function.54 What was aimed at in this method, the census commissioner wrote, was as much uniformity as the nature of statistics will show, so that the return of each province might be dealt with on the same basis.55 Function, agreed ODonnell, census commissioner for Bengal, was the only possible basis of classication [of caste].56 ODonnells views were informed by the formulations of Neseld presented in his Brief View Of the Caste System Of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. The two inter-related aspects of Neselds hypothesis were as follows: rst, the intermixture of races since the time of the Aryan invasion had led to a complete unity of the Indian race,57 and hence, no perceptible physiological differences existed among the Hindus; second, the division of caste was a functional division. ODonnell cited historical parallels with Western societies to corroborate Neselds hypothesis. The three upper classes, he wrote, were in fact parallel to the patres et populus Romanus of ancient Latium, one in race and blood, but partially differentiated by rank, founded on occupation.58 The population of Bengal was segregated by ODonnell into two main groups: the Vaishyas or Aryan Settlers; and the Subject Tribes. The former was further divided into three sub-groups: the Patrician Clans comprising Brahmans and Rajputs; the Vaishya proper or Plebeian middle class which included castes like the Baidya, Baniya, Kayastha, etc.; and the Shudras or the Lower classes, the last being further split into the Nabasakh or pure functional groups and the Unclean castes.59 The classication of caste in the report exhibits traces of the varna division, particularly in respect of the Brahmans and Rajputs, but also in respect of the Vaishyas proper who were assigned trade as their traditional occupation.60

53

J.A. Baines, Census Of India, 1891, General Report (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893), p.185. See also pp.1823. 54 Ibid., p.188. The caste population was divided into the following groups in the imperial tables: A. Agriculture, B. Professional, C. Commercial, D. Artizans and Village Menials, E. Vagrants, F. Races and Indenite Titles. Ibid. 55 Ibid., p.189. The arrangement proposed by Baines was accepted with minor modications to classify caste in Madras Presidency. The following were the classes mentioned in the census report of 1891 for Madras, within which the caste population was distributed: A. Agriculture, B. Professional, C. Commercial, D. Artisan and Village Menials, E. Vagrant, Minor Artisans and Performers, etc., F. Races and Nationalities, G. Indenite and Unknown. H.A. Stuart, Census Of India, 1891 (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1893), Vol.XIII, pp.20910. 56 Ibid., p.250. 57 Cited in C.J. ODonnell, Census Of India, 1891 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893), Vol.III, p.251. 58 Ibid., p.253. 59 Ibid., pp.2656. 60 It was only a shadow of the varna model that was retained in the census report. The character of the classes in the fourfold division had been irrevocably altered in the course of enumeration. The class of Brahmans, for instance, incorporated many deemed sub-castes that actually occupied a low rank on the social ladder. The Gayawals and the Dhamins of Gaya district in the province of Bihar (earlier Bengal), for example, were not admitted in the network of social interaction with the twice-born castes, and yet, these were incorporated as the sub-castes of Brahmans in the district census report. District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District, BSA, p.11.

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The census reports of 1891 seemingly obliterated the gap between the Orient and the Occident. Caste had been equated with the structure of social classes in ancient Rome. Concealed in this equivalence, however, was an assertion of Occidental superiority. The present of the Orient could match only the past of Europe. History had progressed in Europe; in India it had not travelled much beyond Roman times. Europe was thus the future of India, European history that inexorable trajectory of universal history which Oriental societies had to tread. The Oriental image of India was made explicit as soon as the theory of materialist evolutionism was confronted with the problem of explaining how the functional guilds of ancient times were transformed into endogamous castes. Explaining the reasons for caste endogamy, ODonnell wrote: Like their Italian congeners the patricians of Hinduism soon discovered that a rigorous law of exclusive marriage was the most effective means of protecting themselves from plebeian intrusion. The Brahman, however, went further than the Roman lords, whose exclusiveness was founded on wealth and noble birth rather than on sacred ofce.61 Yet why was the Brahmanical stratagem accepted by other functional groups? At this point the theory of materialist evolutionism receded into the background and the distinctiveness of the Oriental character came into play: The acceptance of endogamy by the other castes was, no doubt, chiey due to their adoption of a practice, which their pastors and betters found good for themselves. In nothing is mankind, and especially the half-civilized Asiatic, so imitative as in regard to social custom.62 The image of caste as constituted by the doctrine of materialist evolutionism appears, fragmented, in a set of District Census Reports prepared during the 1891 census surveys. These reports indicate that enumerators at the local level used a wide range of indices, many of them actually at variance with those recommended at the provincial level. Generally, it was the varna model, not the functional classication of caste as proposed by ODonnell, that was preferred by ofcers at the local level to categorise castes. To arrange the different castes and sub-castes in order of social precedence, wrote the census ofcer for the Gaya district, no better classication could be adopted than by using the one universally recognized and sanctioned by religious writings, viz: Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Sudras.63 Not every enumerator agreed with this approach; but most did to some extent. As the census ofcer for Monghyr (Munger) district argued: the classication of castes in order of social precedence can be effected with precision only in cases of the twice-born. When we come to make the same attempt [for the other castes], we nd that opinions differ widely.64 The large number of non-twice-born Sudra castes constituted something of a
61 62

ODonnell, Census Of India, 1891, Vol.III, p.253 Ibid. 63 District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District, BSA, p.11. 64 District Census Report, 1891, Monghyr District, BSA, p.12.

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problem for the enumerators because the varna system lumped these castes together. How should they decide the respective rank of the castes enclosed within the Sudra category? The district enumerators tried to resolve this problem by alluding to a whole range of social interactions involving these castes. The description of the Gwala caste, placed on a fairly high rung within the Sudra classication, tells us about what kind of social conduct indicated status in their eyes. The caste occupation of the Gwalas, wrote the census ofcer of Bhagalpur district, was rearing cows, but a large part of them engage in agriculture and are generally occupancy raiyats [tenants]. Many of them are considered zamindars [landlords]Brahmans take water from their hand.65 The report added that like many of the middle castes of Bihar, the Goars [a name used for the Gwalas] allow widow-remarriage according to the sagai or chuman form.66 There were three local groupings of this caste living in the district of Bhagalpur: the Majrauthi; the Kishnauti; and the Dahiara. The last was held to be the lowest in standing because the rst and second will on no account mix water with milk and hence do not prepare Dahi [curd] or Chhana (cheese). These are only made by the last section.67 The relative position of the Gwala caste was thus xed by assessing whether customs discouraged by the high castes, such as widow-remarriage, were prevalent or not among them; and by establishing whether Brahmans accepted water from them. Other ranking criteria employed by the enumerators in respect of the Sudra castes included whether the caste in question was of criminal, litigious or peaceful disposition; the attitude of high castes towards it; and the period of impurity observed by its members following the death of a kin. The functional theory of the origin of caste was abandoned during the census surveys of 1901. Risley, census commissioner in 1901, argued that the preceding census had provided only a patchwork classication in which occupation predominates, varied here and there by considerations of caste, history, tradition, ethnical [sic] afnity, and geographical position.68 Because of this inconsistency, he concluded, the classication accords neither with native tradition and practice, nor with any theory of caste that has ever been propounded by students of the subject.69 This critique of the census reports of 1891 reveals the two goals Risley had set for himself: to propound a theory of caste; and to represent native tradition and practices accurately in this proposition. Risleys rst attempts at a theory of caste were formulated in the course of his Enquiry into Castes and Occupations Of the People of Bengal in 1885. Encouraged by the response to that enquiry, Risley submitted a fresh proposal, in December 1890, for continuing similar researches in the Lower Provinces, and for extending them to other parts of India.70 The project was still at the discussion
65 66 67

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District Census Report, 1891, Bhagalpur District, BSA, p.6. Ibid. Ibid. 68 H.H. Risley, Census Of India, 1901 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903), Vol.I, p.538. 69 Ibid. 70 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.55, May 1892, Enquiry into Castes and Occupations Of the People of Bengal, BSA.

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stage, however, when in 1901 the government of India, at the instance of British Association for the Advancement of Science, sanctioned a scheme for a general ethnographic survey in India.71 The proposal submitted by Risley admittedly tted their requirements. Risleys new role as census commissioner was also perfectly adapted to the task of compiling a scientic survey of the subject populations of the subcontinent. Risley went to work with the thoroughness of a scientist, too. He examined the hypotheses of Ibbetson, Neseld, Senart and others before deciding that race was the real basis of the caste system, and that anthropometry was the appropriate tool for discovering it. In the process, Risley dismissed the traditional varna classication as little more than a grotesque scheme of social evolution.72 The subsequent deliberations in the general census report of 1901 demonstrate how the image of the Orient was constructed and authorised through the interplay of scientic learning and the prerogatives of colonial authorship. A caste, wrote Risley, was known by a common name, it had a common occupation and claimed a common totemic origin. But most importantly, a caste was almost invariably endogamousmarital linkages proved the membership of an individual in a caste.73 The growth of caste sentiment through the formation of endogamous groups, Risley postulated, was rooted in a basis of fact and a superstructure of ction. The basis of fact obtained widely if not universally; the superstructure of ction was peculiar to India.74 The fact referred to the concern of the invading Aryans to maintain their racial purity, as was common for dominant races in other parts of the world. The Aryans, however, were forced to take women from indigenous sections since Aryan women could not accompany their men in the conquering expeditions. A total amalgamation with inferior races could be avoided solely because the Aryans only took women and did not give them. These less-than-pure Aryans became the founders of Rajput and pseudo-Rajput houses all over India. Racial distinction was thus held to be the ultimate basis of caste.75 Nevertheless, Risley allowed that some blurring of the boundaries had taken place over the centuries. The fact of racial distinction, he noted, had been ctionalised by the Orientals. This had resulted in a proliferation of castes. In the census commissioners own words: Once started in India the principle [of distinction of race] was strengthened, perpetuated, and extended to all ranks of society by the ction
Cited in Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.386. Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.547. 73 Ibid., p.517. 74 Ibid., p.555. Risleys discourse, points out Inden, presupposes a dichotomy of the material and ideal, the empirical and the metaphysical, base and superstructure. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p.64. For insightful analyses of Risleys writings, see ibid., pp.5866; and N.B. Dirks, Castes Of Mind, in Representations, no.37 (Winter 1992), pp.6872. 75 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.556.
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that people who speak a different language, dwell in different districts, worship different godsmust be so unmistakably aliens by blood that intermarriage with them is a thing not to be thought of.76 Yet why did the people choose to conne themselves to endogamous groups on the pretence of ctional difference? Why, to use the census commissioners term, did they ctionalise their lives in this way? What science could not explain, Orientalism did. The growth of caste sentiment, Risley condently asserted: must have been greatly promoted and stimulated by certain characteristic peculiarities of the Indian intellectits lax hold of facts, its indifference to action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated reverence for tradition, its passion for endless division and sub-division, its acute sense of minute technical distinction, its pedantic tendency to press a principle to its furthest logical conclusion, and its remarkable capacity for imitating and adapting social ideas and usages of whatever origin. It is through this imitative faculty the myth of the four castes, evolved in the rst instance by some speculative Brahman, and reproduced in the popular versions of the epicshas attained its wide currency as the model to which Hindu society ought to conform. That it bears no relation to the actual facts of life is in the view of its adherents an irrelevant detail. It descends from remote antiquity, it has the sanction of the Brahmans, it is an article of faith, and every one seeks to bring his own caste within one or other of the traditional classes. Finally as M. Senart has pointed out, the whole caste system with its scale of social merit and demerit and its endless gradations of status is in remarkable accord with the philosophic doctrine of transmigration and Karma. Every Hindu believes that his spiritual status at any given time is determined by the sum total of his past liveshe is born to an immutable karma, what is more natural than that he should be born into an equally immutable caste?77 Risleys conception of caste did not exactly reiterate the image of a xed and immutable Orient. On the contrary, the author highlighted the processes of creation of new castes through changes of custom, migration, adoption of new functions, etc. Yet it was precisely the processes of change in the caste system and not its xity that convinced the census commissioner of the inherent and immutable irrationality of the Orientof its otherness. Risley ascribed the peoples passion for endless division and sub-division to the characteristic peculiarities of the Indian intellect that would be obvious at a glance. These obvious characteristics of the Indian intellect were its phenomenal memory, its feeble grasp of questions of fact, its subtle manipulation of impalpable theories, its scanty development of the critical faculty. The strength of the Indian intellect, Risley concluded,
76 77

Ibid. Ibid.

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lies in other lines of mental activity, in a region of transcendental speculation which does not lead to the making of history.78 Risley was a man of science, and science called for the demonstration of the fact of caste sentiment. Accordingly, he proposed that the racial types in the indigenous population should be discovered through measurements of head, nose and bodily stature, in accordance with a scheme developed some years earlier by Sir William Flower of the British Museum and Professor Topinard of Paris.79 Risley advanced the following reasons for adopting anthropometry as a tool for uncovering the fact underlying the organisation of caste. In India, historical evidence can hardly be said to exist;80 further, the distinct cultural characteristics of social groups had been lost due to the wholesale borrowing of customs and ceremonies which goes onin India. When norms obscured the truth, one could recover it only through natural or physical indices. Moreover, anthropometry was particularly suited to the Indian situation because of the existence of the caste system. Risley wrote: Nowhere else in the world do we nd the population of a large continent broken up into an innite number of mutually exclusive aggregatesthis absolute prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth now as its [caste structures] essential and most prominent characteristic. In a society thus organized, a society putting an extravagant value on pride of blood and the idea of ceremonial purity, difference of physical type, however produced in the rst instance, may be expected to manifest a high degree of persistence, while methods which seek to trace and express such differences nd a peculiarly favourable eld for this operation.81 In Risleys thought, India was Orientalised, disengaged from the (European) world and converted into a eld. Elaborating upon the suitability of India as a eld for anthropometrical experiments, Risley wrote: In this respect India presents a remarkable contrast to most other parts of the world, where anthropometry has to confess itself hindered, if not bafed, by the constant intermixture of types obscuring and confusing the data ascertained by measurements. In fact all the recognized nations of Europe are the result of a process of unrestricted crossing which has fused a number of distinct types into a more or less denable national type. In India the process of fusion has long ago been arrested and the degree of progress which it had made up to the point at which it ceased to operate is expressed in the physical characteristics of the
78 79

Ibid., Ibid., 80 Ibid., 81 Ibid.,

p.546. p.494. p.489. p.496.

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groups which have been left behind. There is consequently no national type and nation in the ordinary sense of the word.82 This was, in effect, a science for colonies. With the help of anthropometry Risley identied three main races in India: the Aryan; the Dravidian; and the Mongoloid. Leading European scholarsFlower, Beddoe, and Haddon in England, Topinard in France, and Virchow, Schmidt and Lollmann in Germanyapparently approved Risleys ndings.83 Risley had admitted that there was nothing in the racial prole to merit a gradation of races: people with long heads cannot be said to be cleverer or more advanced in culture than people with short heads.84 But the census commissioners endeavours were to be of little value if he demonstrated only the racial typology of different castes. The colonial state that sponsored these researches needed to classify castes by rank. The issue of hierarchy thus assumed seminal importance for Risley. In pursuit of this he ventured well beyond the neutral domain of science, and became a learned propagandist for empire.85 Risley had expressed surprise at the curiously close correspondence between the gradations of racial type indicated by the nasal index and certain social data ascertained by independent inquiry. Elaborating upon the phenomenon, he suggested that, if one took a series of castes in Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, or Madras, and arrange[d] them in order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the nest nose shall be at the top, and that with the contrast at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence.86 Risleys scientic inquiry had now curiously assumed cultural connotations. He concluded it by laying down a law: for those parts of India where there is an appreciable strain of Dravidian blood it is scarcely a paradox to lay down as a law of the caste organizations that the social status of the members of a particular group varies in inverse ratio to the mean relative width of their noses.87 The method of
Ibid. Ibid., p.494. Not everyone involved in the census accepted Risleys racial hypothesis. For example, the ofcer in charge of census operations in Madras Presidency observed that it was exceedingly doubtful whether cranial measurements (though they will doubtless separate the jungle-man from the trader classes, and the latter from the more Aryan Brahmans and immigrants from North India), will ever succeed in differentiating the very many Semi-Dravidian castes of which the bulk of the population consists. In fact he went further, and asserted the impossibility of dening scientically what should be considered to be a caste. W. Francis, Census Of India, 1901 (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1902), Vol.XV, p.126. Enthoven faced a similar problem in Bombay Presidency in racially separating the Marathas from Kunbis. R.E. Enthoven, Census Of India, 1901 (Bombay: The Government Central Press, 1902), Vol.IX, p.185. 84 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.497. 85 Risley, signicantly, had arranged the castes alphabetically, not hierarchically, in the four volumes of The Tribes and Castes Of Bengal published in 1891. 86 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.498. 87 Ibid.
83 82

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afxing status to race, as should be clear from the passages quoted above, was ironical in its simplicity: the high caste was the same as the high race. Risley had so far investigated race to explain caste; he now reversed his approach: the status of caste determined the status of race. The following example illustrates the super-imposition of caste status on racial division. The head measurement in Bihar, the census commissioner wrote, corresponded substantially with the scale of social precedence independently ascertained. At the top of the list are the Bhuinhars [Bhumihars] who rank high among the territorial aristocracy of Hindustan and Bihar; then come the Brahmans, followed at a slight but yet appreciable interval by the clerkly Kayasths.88 In fact, in the caste hierarchy of Bihar, the Bhumihars came after the Brahmans. Head and nose measurements did not, though, remove the ongoing uncertainties concerning the hierarchisation of caste. The same caste enjoyed differing social status in different regions, while castes apparently originating from the same racial stock did not always share a common rank either. There was thus an asymmetry between the rigidity of the nasal index/identity of the races and the social diversity of the castes. The former could not decide the latter. Further, the number of castes enlisted in the report had increased considerably, making the exercise of hierarchisation even more intractable. Evidently the task could not satisfactorily be left to the discipline of science: perhaps intervention by the state was required to solve the problem? In the event, a new sub-section made its appearance in the chapter on caste in the census report of 1901: a genealogy of the states prerogative in the matter of caste was traced, beginning with the right of kings in the Hindu period. E.A. Gait, the census commissioner for Bengal, wrote: Under the Hindu regime the social precedence of different castes was settled by the monarch himself. There are numerous stories regarding the interference of Ballala Sena in caste matters, how he degraded the Subarnabaniks and jugis andhow he settled the grades of several high castes including that of the Brahmans themselves.89 The implication of this allusion is obvious: if kings decided caste related issues in the Hindu period, why could the colonial state not do so? The colonial state, however, made a very reluctant king; it had professed not to intervene in the social and religious affairs of the people. Hence an indirect method of hierarchising caste was adopted by the census commissioner that decisively ushered this institution into the arena of public debate. Risley decided to accept in the census reports the classication [of caste] by social
88 89

Ibid., p.504. E.A. Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.1 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903), p.365. Gait in his report as the census commissioner in 1911 had underlined the role traditional temporal authorities played in caste matters at the time. As he later wrote: In Muhammadan times this jurisdiction [of a king in caste maters] was largely exercised by the local Chiefs and zamindars, such as the Maharaja of Krishnanagar. At the present day the rulers in Native states, and various zamindars of ancient descent in British territory, often exercise a great deal of control in caste matters. Gait, p.393.

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precedence as recognized by the native public opinion at the present day.90 Public opinion concerning the status of a caste manifested itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Hindu system; that Brahmans will take water from certain castesthat the status of certain castes has been raised by their taking to infant marriagethat the status of others has been modied by their pursuing some occupation in a special or peculiar way.91 Risley admitted that it was not possible to draw a general scheme of hierarchy of castes applicable to the whole of India. Nevertheless, he directed the provincial census ofcers to prepare a list with the help of the highest native authorities that would command general acceptance92 in the respective regions. The representatives of the native public opinion were identied by Edward Gait in his report on the census of Bengal. The test laid down by the Census Commissioner for xing the scale of social precedence is not the rank assigned by the pedantry of pandits, but Hindu public opinion at the present day , Gait wrote. He was soon faced, however, with the problem of ascertaining precisely what constituted Hindu public opinion. The Hindus, he complained, are strangely indifferent to the circumstances of castes that do not clash with their own. Those of good position know very well from whom they can take water and those whose touch deles, but they neither know nor care much regarding their relative position.93 Accordingly Gait concluded that decisions about caste precedence would have to rest with enlightened opinion, and not with public opinion generally.94 It was clear from the very beginning that the enlightened opinion was going to unite, rarely if ever, on the question of social precedence. Gait, however, contended that there were certain well recognized tests of social position, by the consideration of which a fairly accurate scale of social precedence can be drawn up.95 The rst great test is whether good Brahmans will serve as priest, and if not, whether the caste is served by any Brahmans at all.96 The discovery of the critical role of the Brahmans in dening the status of a caste was arrived at by means of a selective reading of indigenous traditions. For instance, the section on Social Precedence Of Castes in the Bengal provincial census report shows how Gait read the Hindu past: At rst each class of the community had a variety of occupations open
90 91 92

Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.538. Ibid., pp.5389. Ibid. 93 Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.VI, p.366. 94 Ibid., p.354. 95 Ibid., p.367. 96 Ibid., p.3689.

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to it, but by degrees the process of differentiation spread further and particular occupations were gradually restricted to particular groups. As the Brahmans and Kshatriyasgradually grew into different groups a long struggle for mastery arose which is reected in the legends that cluster round the name of Parasurama, the great protagonist of the Brahmans. The result, as we know, was that the priest triumphed over the warrior, and from that time to the present day the supremacy of the Brahmans had become one of the cardinal doctrines of Hinduism, and is the main test by which we decide whether members of the non-Aryan tribes are to be classed as Hindus or Animist.97 The notion of Brahmans as arbitrators, and of the authority of Brahmanical traditions, was reproduced not only in the provincial census report, but in most others as well. A comparison between the various provincial reports convinced Risley of the predominance throughout India of the inuence of the traditional system of four original castes. In every scheme, he continued, the Brahman heads the list. Then come the castes whom popular opinion accepts as the modern representative of the Kshatriyas, and these are followed by the mercantile groups supposed to be akin to the Vaisyas.98 The irony of Risleys scientic schema was now complete: the ghost of the varna classication, repeatedly banished since the time of the Census Committee of 1877 and again by Risley in 1901, had reappeared through a privileging of the Brahmanical traditions. While reviewing the Indian theory of castebefore he had devised his ownRisley had concluded that the principles of Manu had no foundation in fact. He acknowledged, though, that Manus arrangement was accepted as an article of faith by all orthodox Hindus. As such it had become, he concluded, a sort of fact in itselfone which played a large part in the shaping of Indian society.99 Once anthropometry had failed to deliver a design of caste hierarchy and Risley had turned to public opinion for guidance, the reinstatement of the varna model was perhaps inevitable. However, Risley was prepared to accommodate only a ghost of the varna classicatory framework in his census report. The colonial state could not relinquish its authority to classify caste at a juncture when its knowledge of the subject was both comprehensive and scientic. The Brahmanical traditions were thus subverted, redened and selectively appropriated; and native opinion was moulded to meet ofcial requirements. For instance, the category of Brahman was widened in the census report to include all castes whose names contained the word Brahman as a sufx irrespective of whether their touch was polluting to the twice-born castes. Referring to such discrepancies, Risley wrote:

97 98 99

Ibid., p.365. Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.539. Ibid., p.546.

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As everyone knows, there are Brahmans and Brahmans [in Bengal], of status varying from Rarhi, who claim to have been imported by Adisura from Kanauj, to the Barna Brahmans who serve the lower castes, from whose hands pure Brahmans will not take water. No attempt has been made to deal with these multifarious distinctions in the Table. It would be a thankless task to attempt to determine the precise degree [of such differences].100 The multifarious distinctions within the caste structure could not remain immune to the needs of administration. In drawing up their tables, the enumerators of 1901 redened caste to suit their purposes, objectifying its features and exteriorising the institution.

Hindu Caste After Risleys opus, ofcial interest in the structure of caste was replaced by an effort to link caste and religion. As Edward Gait, the new census commissioner, wrote: the question [of the origin of caste] has passed beyond the stage at which any direct contribution to it could usefully be made ina census report, where attention should be directed primarily to the presentation of facts rather than the elaboration of theories.101 A link between caste and Hindu identity had indeed been established in the course of the census surveys of the late nineteenth century; but it was left to the census reports of 1911 to fully induct Hindu symbols and practices into the ofcial discourse about caste. It is paradoxical that even when caste had been consistently addressed with the prex Hindu in the census reports from the very beginning, the signicance of this prex was not amply clear to the enumerators. In fact no comprehensive inquiry into the social organisation or caste structure of Hinduism had taken place before the census operations of 1901. Why this lacuna? First, Hinduism, like other religions, was seen as an undifferentiated faith that could be identied with reference to specic gods and rituals alone. Second, the main concern of the early enumerators was to separate the aboriginals from the Hindus, hence, they were content to demarcate the Hindu community from without. Third, there was no simple denition of Hinduism available to the census ofcials that could help them investigate the social constituents of the faith. The discussion over who are and who are not Hindoos102 had featured as early as in 1872 in the Report on the Census Of Bengal. Responding to the dilemma, the early enumerators invariably slid into asking: what is Hinduism? The problem can only be satisfactorily solved by a clear denition of what we mean by Hinduism,103 declared Beverley in his report of 1872. As an ism, the term Hindu was explicated
100 101

Ibid., p.540. Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.387. 102 Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, p.129. 103 Ibid.

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with reference to gods, rituals, beliefs, etc. In the denition given by Alfred Lyall, cited by Bourdillon in the Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, Hinduism stood for a tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, ghost and demons, demi-gods and deied saints; household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal god.104 These imprecise religious motifs had to be given a solid social content before any rm link could be established between Hinduism and the caste structure. The process of construction of the social dimension of Hinduism in the subsequent census reports can be best illustrated in the way Lyall was selectively quoted by the census enumerators. Although Risley regarded Lyall as the rst living authority on the subject of Hinduism he turned to him not for evidence of religious chaos, but for conrmation that Hinduism was the religion of all the people who accepted the Brahmanic Scriptures.105 The cognition of the Brahmans as the supreme expositors of scripture seemed to meet Risleys own conclusions about the position of this caste in society. From this point Risley had little difculty jumping logically to the conclusion that the ordinary Hindu was someone who accepted the Brahmanical supremacy and the caste system.106 This social aspect of Hinduism was further elaborated by Gait in the general report of 1911. Lyall, said Gait, used the term Hindu to denote not exclusively a religious denomination, butalso a country and, to a certain extent, a race.107 By now the tangled jungle had disappeared. In its place stood a Hinduism endowed with three denotationsreligion, race and country. To these Gait later added, following Risley, the criterion of social organisation: a man who does not belong to a recognized Hindu caste, cannot be a Hindu.108 The problem with this new denition was that it appeared to y in the face of empirical reality since the general tendency of the Hindu gentlemen consulted by the census ofcers was to regard Hinduism as a matter of belief rather than of social or even religious practice.109 Yet in the rst decade of the twentieth century, any doubt about the authenticity of ofcial knowledge regarding the religious identity of the people was hardly permissible. The provision of separate electorates in the MorleyMinto reforms of 1909 rested rmly on assumptions about Hindu and Muslim religious identity, which were linked to entitlements to political power. It follows that the state had to dene and delimit these religious communities. Accordingly Gait issued a circular to his enumerators that contained a set of questions about what

104 105

Cited in Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.71. Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.357. 106 Ibid., p.360. 107 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, pp.1156. 108 Ibid., p.116. Commenting on the transformation that had come in the mode of conceiving Hinduism, Jones wrote: the census reports provided a new conceptualisation of religion as a community, an aggregate of individuals united by a formal denition and given characteristics based on qualied data. Religion became communities mapped, counted, and above all compared with other religious communities. Jones, Religious Identity, p.84. 109 L.S.S. OMalley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1913), p.229.

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might disqualify a caste from entering the Hindu fold. The indices of deviation from a standard Hindu norm, and the disabilities that might consequently be present in the social interactions of the castes, were outlined in the questionnaire as follows: 1. [Members of my caste] deny the supremacy of the Brahmans; 2. do not receive the mantra [sacred formulae] from a Brahman or other recognized Hindu guru [teacher]; 3. deny the authority of the Vedas; 4. do not worship the great Hindu gods; 5. are not served by good Brahmans as family priests; 6. have no Brahman priests at all; 7. are denied access to the interiors of ordinary temples; 8. cause pollution a. by touch b. within a certain distance; 9. bury their dead; 10. eat beef and do not reverence the cow.110 The response to the questionnaire was varied. Gait noted in his report that in the Central Provinces and Berar a quarter of the persons classed as Hindus deny the supremacy of the Brahmans and the authority of the Vedasa third are denied access to templesand two-fths eat beef.111 The custom of beef eating did not always cause degradation in status, and even when it did the extent was not uniform. Thus, Gait continued: Of the thirteen castes whose touch causes pollution, nine do not eat beef, while of the eight who eat beef, four are not regarded as polluting, and two are allowed access to temples.112 Such ambiguities, of course, did not prevent the census ofcials from deciding what constituted the dening features of the Hindu persona. In spite of their divergences, concluded OMalley, Hindus have a common religion of which there are two salient features, viz: 1. religious objection to the slaughter of cows, and 2. veneration, or at least acknowledgement of the supremacy of Brahmans.113 Herewith, the cow was ofcially proclaimed as the cardinal symbol of Hinduism. The other indices mentioned in the questionnaire also assumed signicance through the process of ofcial deliberation. Castes claiming noble Hindu status, it was noted, invariably endeavoured to demonstrate it by having Brahmans present at their religious ceremonies, or by observing Vedic injunctions. Appeals and Petitions The census existed not merely as a passive recorder of data, writes Kenneth Jones, but as a catalyst for change as it both described and altered its environment.114 In the course of classifying caste and mapping it on a national or provincial level, the census surveys redened the hierarchy and made it visible. Further, the frequent changes in the criteria of classication adopted during the
110 111

Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.117. Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 OMalley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.234. 114 Jones, Religious Identity, pp.734.

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subsequent surveys and the cataloguing of the pointers of status exposed the susceptibility of the caste hierarchy to modications. The literate representatives of different castes, as well as the burgeoning caste associations, were quick to take advantage of the situation. Citing caste characteristics that were acknowledged as evidence of status in the census reports, they led petitions with the government requesting that they might be known by new names, be placed higher in the order of the precedence, be recognized as Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, etc.115 The petitions illustrate what OMalley called a stereotyped plan. The rst step in this plan was to obtain favourable vyavasthas, or rulings, from complaisant pandits. These refer, OMalley explained, to the present occupations and manner of life of the caste, and quote verses from ancient works to show that they are like those of the varna from which the caste claims to be an offshoot.116 Yet far from being merely emulative, the caste representatives were often extremely innovative. They had to negotiate the differing worlds: they interacted with the state; but they also had to speak in a language with which the society in general and their caste members in particular were familiar. Hence, while repeating the indices of high status recognised in the census reports, the petitions also went beyond them. Further, the elites did not always remain dependent on the Brahmans for receiving vyavasthas; the authoritative texts cited in the petitions to endorse the claims of a caste included books of older as well as of recent origin. The contestation of, and modication in, the criteria of status as proposed in the census reports can be evidenced in an application submitted by the Babhan (also known by the name Bhumihar Brahman) caste. Numerically prominent both in Bihar and the eastern part of the United Provinces, the Babhans formed an important agrarian caste with many landlords in their rank. Though listed as a dwija (twice-born) caste, they were placed below the Brahmans in the census report of Bihar for 1901. Refuting this non-Brahman designation, Prabhu Narayan Singh, maharaja of Benares, recognised leader of the caste, informed the lieutenant-governor of Bengal in August 1911 that: The Bhumihar

115

OMalley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440. Applications claiming a higher status were submitted by castes from different parts of the country. The rank of Kshatriya varna was sought by the Nadars of Tamilnad and by the Rajbanshis of Bengal. See Robert L. Hardgrave, The Nadars Of Tamilnad: The Political Culture Of a Community in Change (Bombay: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p.133; and Sibasankar Mukherjee, The Social Role Of a Caste Association, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XXXI, no.1 (Jan.Mar. 1994), p.91. The Mahtons in Punjab, writes Cohn, wanted to be recorded in the census of 1911 as Rajputs. Cohn, The Census, p.248. In many instances, the census authorities were persuaded to record new caste names signifying higher status in place of the prevailing ones. The Chandalas of Bengal, suggests Imtiaz Ahmad, wanted to be addressed as Namasudras, while the Chasi Khaibarta from the same province preferred Mahisya as their new name. The number of castes advancing new status claims in the regions of United Provinces, Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and Orissa and Central Provinces and Berar, Ahmad informs us, went up from 21 to 148 between 1901 and 1931. Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste Mobility Movements in North India, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.VIII, no.2 (June 1971), pp.1701. For further illustration of the impact of the census operations on caste mobility, see G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979), pp.2789; M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1972), pp.94100; and David Washbrook, The Development Of Caste Organization in South India 1880 to 1925, in C.J. Baker and D.A. Washbrook (eds), South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 18801940 (Delhi: The Macmillan Company of India Limited, 1975), p.154. 116 OMalley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440.

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Brahmans were Brahmans pure and simple who do not follow the craft of priesthood and live on land.117 Of course, this assertion was directly counter to the orthodoxy that Brahmans were all members of the priesthood, but the maharaja had no hesitation in dismissing the conjunction as erroneous. This notion, he wrote, has been so much engrafted upon the minds of Europeans that they class many such communities as Brahmans who have no good claim to that title except that they receive alms. According to Hindu religious books, on the contrary, a Brahman as far as possible should refrain from accepting indiscriminate religious gifts and alms.118 Ram Gopal Singh Chowdhary, the secretary of the Pradhan Bhumihar Brahman Sabha, Patna, followed up in 1912 by citing a range of texts which endorsed the Brahmin proper status of his caste in a letter to the chief secretary of Bihar and Orissa. All, signicantly, were compendia of European knowledge about India: Memoirs on the History of Folklore and the Distribution of the Races of the North Western Provinces of India, Vol. I by Henry M. Eliot, Hindu Tribes and Castes as represented in Benares by M.A. Sherring, The Golden Book of India by Roper Lethbridge, The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company, Vol. I, and People of India by H.H. Risley.119 Indigenous opinion, these instances reveal, could not be co-opted within the colonial discourses on caste. Nevertheless, in the course of negotiation with the latter, the mode of imagining the caste identity and hierarchy as shared by the people was altered.120

Conclusion The classication of caste in order of social precedence was abandoned after the census of 1901. The state found it impossible to comply with the requests121 for change of caste status that had poured in following the decision by Risley to invite public opinion on the subject. The people, complained OMalley, had failed to understand the purpose of the census surveys. The erroneous belief prevailing in Bengal was that the object of census is not to show the number of persons belonging to each caste, but to x the relative status of different castes.122 Notwithstanding OMalleys comments, however, the purpose of the census did not stay the same from decade to decade. The agenda has gradually broadened and in
117 118

Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.42 and KW, Oct. 1911, BSA. Ibid. 119 Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department, Census Branch, File no.VC-7 of 1912, BSA. 120 It is difcult to specify, Appadurai suggests, the degree to which the effort to organize the colonial project around the idea of essentialized and enumerated communities made inroads into the practical consciousness of colonial subjects in India. Though the projects of enumeration of communities, he continues, were by no means wholly successfulthe fact is that the colonial gaze, and its associated techniques, have left an indelible mark on Indian political consciousness. Appadurai, Number in the Colonial Imagination, pp.3345. 121 OMalley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440. 122 Ibid.

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the process the ofcial modes of conceptualising and representing caste in the reports had, by 1911, undergone a transformation. Finding out the number of the subject population for administrative convenience was the object with which the census operations had begun in India. But even that limited objective involved an element of interpretation. Knowing the numerical strength of a caste required, in the rst place, dening the identity of that caste. On the other hand the early census reports, given their restricted focus, devoted little space (barring few exceptions, like the census report of Punjab for 1881 prepared by Ibbetson) to an analysis of the institution of caste per se. The absence of any foundational knowledge in turn led to divergence in the classication of caste within and across the census surveys. The problem was further compounded during the census of 1881 when the varna divisionwhich alone carried the imprimatur of a pan-Indian systemwas formally rejected as a classifying principle. The consequent lack of consistent and continuing caste and classicatory names in the census reports rendered the task of calculating, comparing or verifying numbers uncertain. Consistency in the classication of caste depended on the certitude of ofcial knowledge. The same knowledge enabled the state to claim and exercise hegemony over the colonised. Hence, in the decades following the census of 1881, Indian society was subjected to meticulous academic analysis by the census enumerators. Nevertheless, science was forced to take a back seat to policy. The Western intellectual tools of materialist evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism were not allowed to retain their intellectual integrity in the colonies, because they did not altogether suit, in their pristine form, the agenda of the state. The colonial knowledge produced by the state still, however, needed to explain the features of caste comprehensibly and demonstrate a correspondence between general explanations and the notions of identity and status held by the people. The enumerators failed on both counts. Subsequently, Manu as well as the varna division were selectively incorporated within the materialistic and scientic expositions of caste, while at the same time, Oriental peculiarities deemed inherent in the institution of caste were invoked to explain those features that eluded the explanatory reach of these paradigms. The petitions submitted before the enumerators to proclaim the high varna status of the concerned castes illustrated the propensity of the caste representatives to modify and redene the criteria of status as presented in the census reports. Once the listing of castes according to their respective rank was given up after the census surveys of 1901, the caste associations adopted new strategies to achieve their goals. The census authorities were requested by petitioning associations to enlist their members under names that often used words like Kshatriya or Brahman as sufxes.123 The colonised in this way responded to, and manipulated, the colonial project of enumeration to secure recognition and authority within society.
123 Thus the associations of the Koeris and Kurmis in Bihar petitioned the provincial census authorities to redesignate these castes as Kushawaha Kshatriya and Kurmi Kshatriya, respectively. See Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department, Census Branch, File no.VC-89/31 of 1931, and VC-4/32 of 1932.