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Classifying caste: census surveys in India in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuriesPadmanabh Samarendra a

a S.A. Jaipuria College.

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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,

n.s., Vol.XXVI, no.2, August 2003

Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India inthe 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. Butthe 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 officials to hold ‘the sociological keys to understanding the Indian people’.2

More specifically, 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 dichotomy’6 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 insufficient 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 commentson an earlier version of this paper that appeared as a chapter in my doctoral thesis. That chapter could not have takenthe present form of an article without Dr Lakshmi Subramanian’s initiative. Sangeeta DasGupta has shared and shapedthe ideas presented herein from the very beginning. I also thank Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and the two anonymousreferees 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 first half of the nineteenth centuryas 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: NewPerspectives (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1981), p.77. The opinion is also shared by Sekhar Bandyopadhyaywho, while outlining the objectives of Risley’s ethnographic experiments, writes: ‘Information is an essential toolof social control. And it is all the more necessary for an alien ruler’. S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Raj, Risley and theTribes and Castes Of Bengal’, in India Past and Present , Vol.II, no.1 (1985), p.41. Rashmi Pant, similarly, underlinesthe utility of a knowledge of caste for the ‘British administrative strategy…of managing masses’. R. Pant, ‘TheCognitive Status Of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review Of Some Literature on the North West Provinces andOudh’, 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 Objectification 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.198–9 (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



142 SOUTH ASIA

in the colonial discourse on caste. The premeditated ‘political’ intent ascribed to the

colonial state by Bandyopadhyay has imposed an ahistorical continuity and unifor-

mity 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 1901—the feature of the process that generated themost lively public debate—or 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 fixed 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 influence 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 defining colonial will. To demonstrate that the discourses on

caste were uncontaminated by power relations obtaining in India, Bayly furtherlinks 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 ethnog-

raphers in Bayley’s view were as much scholars as officials—‘men 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 “scientific” ethnology, rather than being focused solely

on questions of how to “know” and subjugate Indians as the ethnographic

“other” ’.14

Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ offers a more comprehensive insight into

7 Cited in J.A. Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, Vol.I (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883),p.133.8 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.



CLASSIFYING CASTE 143

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 distinction…between “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 whichEuropean culture was able to manage—even produce—the Orient’.17

Within the nexus of knowledge and authority as identified by Said, several issues,

however, remain unexplored. What is specific 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 field 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. Said’s 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 significance 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 modified the ‘ontological and epistemolog-

ical 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 officials, to have attributes that made it

amenable to these Western explanatory models.

15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions Of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p.2.16

Ibid ., p.5.17

Ibid .18 ‘Scholarly or Classical’ are the terms used by Said to characterise German Orientalism during the first two thirdsof the nineteenth century. Germany in this phase possessed no colonies; there was ‘nothing in Germany to correspondto the Anglo-French presence in India’. Ibid ., p.19.19

Ibid ., pp.13–14.20

Jones, ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’, p.78.



144 SOUTH ASIA

Of course they were wrong. Western concepts lost their integrity in the colonial

milieu. But that, too, was grist to the official 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 applicationof 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 beyondthe arena of the state were not effaced, the officials in the process of selecting,

comparing and classifying fundamentally altered the customary ways of identifying

and defining caste. Caste was exteriorised: its features were objectified 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 it—to

paraphrase Cohn—showed signs of change.21

The Beginning of EnumerationThe decennial survey of population started in India from 1871 to 1872.22 In the

beginning, it was primarily thought of as a statistical exercise—the subject

population was to be enumerated to facilitate a more efficient mode of admini-

stration.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 Waterfield of the Statistics and

21 Cohn, ‘The Census’, p.228.22 The early attempts at enumeration and classification of population preceding the census operations have beendetailed by Bernard Cohn and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. See Cohn, ‘The Census’, pp.233–8; and Bandyopadhyay,‘Caste in the Perception Of the Raj’, pp.58–61.23 It was the ‘administrative inconvenience’ caused by the ‘want of more precise information regarding the numbersof the people’, Beverley wrote, that led the Secretary of State to issue ‘instructions that arrangements should be madefor a general census of the population in the year 1871’. ‘Without information on this head’, he added, ‘the basis iswanting on which to found accurate opinions on such important subjects as the growth and rate of increase of thepopulation, the sufficiency of food supplies, the incidence of local and imperial taxation’. H. Beverley, Report onthe Census Of Bengal, 1872 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872), p.1. Underlining the importance of numeralsin colonial imaginaire, Appadurai writes that ‘the exercise of bureaucratic power…involved the colonial imaginationand…in this imagination number played a crucial role’. The ‘referential purpose’ that the numbers concerningcommunities served, Appadurai elaborates, was ‘far less important than their discursive importance in supporting orsubverting various classificatory moves and the policy argument based on them’. A. Appadurai, ‘Number in theColonial Imagination’ in C. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp.315, 321.




Commerce Department, ‘owing partly to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject, and

partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification, 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 fish and vegetables, boating and fishing castes,

and dancer, musician, beggar and ‘vagabond’ castes.26

Seen primarily as a statistical inquiry, the census of 1871–72 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 classification, the firstrank 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

Vaisya…while 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 officials 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 findings.29 To ensure future uniformity, a Census Committee

24 H. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census Of British India Of 1871–72 (London: George Edward Eyre and WilliamSpottiswoode, 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’ andalso referred to religious groups. Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, ‘Resolution’, p.3. Bayly has pointedout that the term race was ‘widely used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its meaning waslinguistic and cultural, rather than “ethnological” in the later Victorian sense, when notion of progressive evolutionhad emerged as a generalized theory of human racial “type” ’. Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” ’, p.172. The term in itspresent 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 andSpottiswoode, 1883), Vol.1, p.1.



146 SOUTH ASIA

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 specificities—hierarchi-

cal and interactional, occupational, etc.—and universalising certain characteristics

on the basis of which castes from disparate localities could be rendered compar-able.

The diversity in the composition of caste society in the provinces and the differing

principles identified by the ethnographers as underlying such social arrangements

denied the uniformity in caste classification envisaged by the Census Committee.

In Bengal, Bourdillon had wanted to follow the classification adopted by Beverley

in 1872, ‘but the paramount necessity of maintaining uniformity in the system of

caste classification throughout India compelled the Census Commissioner [for India

in 1881] to negative [sic] the request’.31

Yet ‘the practical difficulty of carrying outon 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 five 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 five 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 finding 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 ethnog-

raphers could neither form a unanimous opinion on the subject nor exclude

completely the influence 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 hadretained the purity of their Aryan descent.37 While Bourdillon refers to ‘ethnolog-

ical’38 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 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, pp.139–40.31

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.




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 to…lowest

grades and employed in…most menial offices’.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 classification 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 first two positions in a list of

thirteen classes.43

The role of race as one of the defining 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

occupation’45 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 classification or between the surveys of 1872 and 1881 made

it difficult 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 circum-

stances responsible for this discrepancy, the census officer pointed out that

‘there must have been radical differences in the system upon which the castes,

and especially the subdivision of castes, were classified in 1872 and 1881’.47

These errors could be avoided, he suggested, ‘by the preparation of a report onthe castes of Bengal which shall show their origin and classification, as well as

the ramifications of the same caste in different parts of the country, and will give

40 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.140.41

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.xc–xcii.44 D.C.J. Ibbetson, Report on the Census Of the Panjab Taken on the 17th Of February 1881, Vol. 1. (Calcutta: BengalSecretariat Press, 1883), p.173.45 Ibid .46 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.142.47

Ibid ., p.141.



148 SOUTH ASIA

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, itopined, 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 ‘scientific enquiry’ to collect ‘more precise

information’ regarding caste reflected a desire on the part of the colonial state to

know how the caste system worked. Summarising the advantages expected to flow

from Risley’s ethnographic survey, C.E. Buckland, officiating secretary to the

government of Bengal, wrote:

The more Government officers 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 organi-

zation, 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

benefits but, as is evident from the following statement of Buckland, the very

hegemonic aspirations of the colonial state: ‘Much influence for good over the

people can be obtained by both Executive and Judicial officers by acquiring,

and having a reputation for possessing, an intimate knowledge of the circumstances

and surroundings of their actual life’.52 Colonial officials 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 explanatoryparadigm.

Search for a Theory of CasteThe 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 Ibid .

49 Ibid ., p.133.

50 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.55, May 1892, ‘Enquiryinto Castes and Occupations Of the People Of Bengal’, Bihar State Archives, Patna [hereafter BSA].51

Ibid .52

Ibid . (emphasis added).




had been a stalwart protagonist of the view that descent and occupation were the

defining 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 O’Donnell, census commissioner for Bengal, was ‘the only

possible basis of classification [of caste]’.56 O’Donnell’s views were informed by

the formulations of Nesfield presented in his Brief View Of the Caste System Of the

North-Western Provinces and Oudh. The two inter-related aspects of Nesfield’s

hypothesis were as follows: first, 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 div-

ision of caste was a functional division. O’Donnell cited historical parallels withWestern societies to corroborate Nesfield’s 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 occu-

pation’.58

The population of Bengal was segregated by O’Donnell 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’, thelast being further split into the ‘Nabasakh or pure functional groups’ and the

‘Unclean castes’.59 The classification 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 alsopp.182–3.54 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 Indefinite Titles’. Ibid .55

Ibid ., p.189. The arrangement proposed by Baines wasaccepted with minor modifications to classify caste in MadrasPresidency. The following were the classes mentioned in the census report of 1891 for Madras, within which the castepopulation 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. Indefinite and Unknown’. H.A. Stuart,Census Of India, 1891 (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1893), Vol.XIII, pp.209–10.56

Ibid ., p.250.57 Cited in C.J. O’Donnell, Census Of India, 1891 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893), Vol.III, p.251.58

Ibid ., p.253.59

Ibid ., pp.265–6.60 It was only a shadow of the varna model that was retained in the census report. The character of the classes inthe 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 theDhamins 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 inthe district census report. ‘District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District’, BSA, p.11.



150 SOUTH ASIA

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 historythat 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, O’Donnell 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

office’.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, chiefly 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

classification of caste as proposed by O’Donnell, that was preferred by officers at

the local level to categorise castes. ‘To arrange the different castes and sub-castes

in order of social precedence’, wrote the census officer for the Gaya district, ‘no

better classification could be adopted than by using the one universally recognized

and sanctioned by religious writings, viz: Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Su-dras’.63 Not every enumerator agreed with this approach; but most did to some

extent. As the census officer for Monghyr (Munger) district argued: ‘the

classification 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 find that opinions differ widely’.64

The large number of non-twice-born Sudra castes constituted something of a

61 O’Donnell, Census Of India, 1891, Vol.III, p.25362 Ibid .63 ‘District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District’, BSA, p.11.64

‘District Census Report, 1891, Monghyr District’, BSA, p.12.




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

classification, tells us about what kind of social conduct indicated status in theireyes. The ‘caste occupation’ of the Gwalas, wrote the census officer 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 ‘first and second will on no account mix water with

milk and hence do not prepare Dahi [curd] or Chhana (cheese). These are onlymade by the last section’.67 The relative position of the Gwala caste was thus fixed

by assessing whether customs discouraged by the high castes, such as widow-re-

marriage, were prevalent or not among them; and by establishing whether Brah-

mans 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 censussurveys of 1901. Risley, census commissioner in 1901, argued that the preceding

census had provided only ‘a patchwork classification in which occupation predom-

inates, varied here and there by considerations of caste, history, tradition, ethnical

[sic] affinity, and geographical position’.68 Because of this inconsistency, he

concluded, the classification ‘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.

Risley’s first 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. Encour-

aged 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 ‘District Census Report, 1891, Bhagalpur District’, BSA, p.6.66

Ibid .67

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, ‘Enquiryinto Castes and Occupations Of the People of Bengal’, BSA.



152 SOUTH ASIA

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 fitted

their requirements. Risley’s new role as census commissioner was also perfectly

adapted to the task of compiling a scientific 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, Nesfield, 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

classification 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

scientific 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 endogamous’—marital 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 fiction’. The basis of fact obtained widely if not universally; ‘the superstructure

of fiction’ 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 takewomen 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 ‘fictionalised’

by the ‘Orientals’. This had resulted in a proliferation of castes. In the census

commissioner’s own words:

Once started in India the principle [of distinction of race] was strength-

ened, perpetuated, and extended to all ranks of society by the fiction

71 Cited in Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.386.72 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.547.73

Ibid ., p.517.74

Ibid ., p.555. Risley’s discourse, points out Inden, ‘presupposes a dichotomy of the material and ideal, the empiricaland the metaphysical, base and superstructure’. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990),p.64. For insightful analyses of Risley’s writings, see ibid ., pp.58–66; and N.B. Dirks, ‘Castes Of Mind’, in

Representations, no.37 (Winter 1992), pp.68–72.75 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.556.




that people who speak a different language, dwell in different districts,

worship different gods…must 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 confine themselves to endogamous groups on the

pretence of fictional difference? Why, to use the census commissioner’s term, didthey ‘fictionalise’ their lives in this way? What science could not explain,

‘Orientalism’ did. The growth of caste sentiment, Risley confidently asserted:

must have been greatly promoted and stimulated by certain character-

istic peculiarities of the Indian intellect—its lax hold of facts, its

indifference to action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated rever-

ence 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 remarkablecapacity 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 first instance by some speculative Brahman, and repro-

duced in the popular versions of the epics…has 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 systemwith its scale of social merit and demerit and its endless gradations of

status is in remarkable accord with the philosophic doctrine of trans-

migration and Karma. Every Hindu believes that his spiritual status at

any given time is determined by the sum total of his past lives—he is

born to an immutable karma, what is more natural than that he should

be born into an equally immutable caste?77

Risley’s conception of caste did not exactly reiterate the image of a fixed 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 fixity that convinced the census commissioner of the inherent and immutable

irrationality of the ‘Orient’—of its ‘otherness’. Risley ascribed the people’s

‘passion for endless division and sub-division’ to the ‘characteristic peculiarities of

the Indian intellect’ that would be ‘obvious at a glance’. These ‘obvious’ character-

istics of the Indian intellect were ‘its phenomenal memory, its feeble grasp of

questions of fact, its subtle manipulation of impalpable theories, its scanty develop-

ment of the critical faculty’. The strength of the Indian intellect, Risley concluded,

76 Ibid .

77 Ibid .



154 SOUTH ASIA

‘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 indige-

nous 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 uncover-

ing 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 on…in 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. Risleywrote:

Nowhere else in the world do we find the population of a large

continent broken up into an infinite number of mutually exclusive

aggregates…this absolute prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth

now as its [caste structure’s] essential and most prominent character-

istic.… 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 first instance, may be

expected to manifest a high degree of persistence, while methods which

seek to trace and express such differences find a peculiarly favourable

field for this operation.81

In Risley’s thought, India was Orientalised, disengaged from the (European) world

and converted into a ‘field’. Elaborating upon the suitability of India as a ‘field’ 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 notbaffled, 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 definable

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 Ibid ., p.546.

79 Ibid ., p.494.80

Ibid ., p.489.81

Ibid ., p.496.




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 identified three main ‘races’ in India: theAryan; the Dravidian; and the Mongoloid. Leading European scholars—Flower,

Beddoe, and Haddon in England, Topinard in France, and Virchow, Schmidt and

Lollmann in Germany—apparently approved Risley’s findings.83 Risley had admitt-

ed that there was nothing in the racial profile 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 commissioner’s 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 learnedpropagandist 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 sug-

gested 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 finest nose shall be at the top, and thatwith the contrast at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order

substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social pre-

cedence.86

Risley’s scientific 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

82 Ibid .83 Ibid ., p.494. Not everyone involved in the census accepted Risley’s racial hypothesis. For example, the officer incharge of census operations in Madras Presidency observed that it was ‘exceedingly doubtful whether cranialmeasurements (though they will doubtless separate the jungle-man from the trader classes, and the latter from themore Aryan Brahmans and immigrants from North India), will ever succeed in differentiating the very manySemi-Dravidian castes of which the bulk of the population consists’. In fact he went further, and asserted the‘impossibility of defining scientifically 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 inBombay 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, significantly, 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 .



156 SOUTH ASIA

affixing 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 socialprecedence 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 hierarch-

isation 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 state’s 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 and…how 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 socialand 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 ‘classification [of caste] by social

88 Ibid ., p.504.

89 E.A. Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.1 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903), p.365. Gait in his report as thecensus commissioner in 1911 had underlined the role ‘traditional’ temporal authorities played in caste matters at thetime. As he later wrote: ‘In Muhammadan times this jurisdiction [of a king in caste maters] was largely exercisedby the local Chiefs and zamindars, such as the Maharaja of Krishnanagar. At the present day therulers 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.




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 represen-

tatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Hindu system;

that Brahmans will take water from certain castes…that the status of certain castes has been raised by their taking to infant marriage…that

the status of others has been modified by their pursuing some occu-

pation 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 officers to prepare a list with the help of the ‘highest native authorities’ that

‘would command general acceptance’92 in the respective regions.

The representatives of the ‘native public opinion’ were identified by Edward Gait

in his report on the census of Bengal. The ‘test laid down by the Census

Commissioner for fixing 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 defiles, but they neither know nor care much regarding their relative

position’.93

Accordingly Gait concluded that decisions about caste precedencewould 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 consider-

ation of which a fairly accurate scale of social precedence can be drawn up’.95

The ‘first 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 defining 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 first each class of the community had a variety of occupations open

90 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.538.91

Ibid ., pp.538–9.92

Ibid .93 Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.VI, p.366.94 Ibid ., p.354.95

Ibid ., p.367.96

Ibid ., p.368–9.



158 SOUTH ASIA

to it, but by degrees the process of differentiation spread further and

particular occupations were gradually restricted to particular

groups.… As the Brahmans and Kshatriyas…gradually grew into

different groups a long struggle for mastery arose which is reflected in

the legends that cluster round the name of Parasurama, the great

protagonist of the Brahmans. The result, as we know, was that thepriest 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 convincedRisley of ‘the predominance throughout India of the influence 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 Risley’s scientific schema was now complete: the ghost of the varna

classification, 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 caste’—before he

had devised his own—Risley had concluded that the principles of Manu had ‘no

foundation in fact’. He acknowledged, though, that Manu’s arrangement was

‘accepted as an article of faith by all orthodox Hindus’. As such it had become, he

concluded, a sort of ‘fact in itself’—one 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 classificatory 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 ‘sci-

entific’. The Brahmanical traditions were thus subverted, redefined and selectively

appropriated; and ‘native opinion’ was moulded to meet official 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 suffix irrespective of

whether their touch was polluting to the ‘twice-born’ castes. Referring to such

discrepancies, Risley wrote:

97 Ibid ., p.365.98 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.539.99

Ibid ., p.546.




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 theprecise 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

redefined caste to suit their purposes, objectifying its features and exteriorising the

institution.

Hindu CasteAfter Risley’s opus, official 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 in…a 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 official discourse about caste.

It is paradoxical that even when caste had been consistently addressed with the

prefix ‘Hindu’ in the census reports from the very beginning, the significance of

this prefix 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 identified with

reference to specific 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 definition of Hinduism available to the census officials that could help theminvestigate the social constituents of the faith.

The discussion over ‘who are and who are not Hindoos’102 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 definition of what we mean by Hinduism’,103

declared Beverley in his report of 1872. As an ‘ism’, the term Hindu was explicated

100 Ibid ., p.540.

101 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.387.102 Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, p.129.103

Ibid .



160 SOUTH ASIA

with reference to gods, rituals, beliefs, etc. In the definition 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

deified saints; household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal god’.104 These

imprecise religious motifs had to be given a solid social content before any firm

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 first living authority’ on the subject of

Hinduism he turned to him not for evidence of ‘religious chaos’, but for

confirmation 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 Risley’s own conclusions about the position of thiscaste in society. From this point Risley had little difficulty 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, but…also 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 denotations—religion, 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 definition was that it appeared to fly in the

face of empirical reality since the ‘general tendency of the Hindu gentlemen’

consulted by the census officers ‘was to regard Hinduism as a matter of belief

rather than of social or even religious practice’.109

Yet in the first decade of the twentieth century, any doubt about the authenticity of

official knowledge regarding the religious identity of the people was hardly

permissible. The provision of ‘separate electorates’ in the Morley–Minto reforms of

1909 rested firmly on assumptions about Hindu and Muslim religious identity,

which were linked to entitlements to political power. It follows that the state had

to define and delimit these ‘religious communities’. Accordingly Gait issued a

circular to his enumerators that contained a set of questions about what

104 Cited in Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.71.105 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.357.106

Ibid ., p.360.107 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, pp.115–6.108

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 unitedby a formal definition and given characteristics based on qualified data. Religion became communities mapped,counted, and above all compared with other religious communities’. Jones, ‘Religious Identity’, p.84.109

L.S.S. O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1913), p.229.




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. donot 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 theCentral Provinces and Berar ‘a quarter of the persons classed as Hindus deny the

supremacy of the Brahmans and the authority of the Vedas…a third are denied

access to temples…and two-fifths 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 pol-

lution, 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 officials from deciding what constituted the defining

features of the Hindu persona. ‘In spite of their divergences’, concluded O’Malley,

‘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 officially proclaimed as the cardinal symbol of Hinduism.

The other indices mentioned in the questionnaire also assumed significance through

the process of official 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 environ-

ment’.114 In the course of classifying caste and mapping it on a national or

provincial level, the census surveys redefined the hierarchy and made it visible.

Further, the frequent changes in the criteria of classification adopted during the

110 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.117.111

Ibid .112 Ibid .113 O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.234.114

Jones, ‘Religious Identity’, pp.73–4.



162 SOUTH ASIA

subsequent surveys and the cataloguing of the pointers of status exposed the

susceptibility of the caste hierarchy to modifications. 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 filed petitions with the government

‘requesting that they might be known by new names, be placed higher in the orderof the precedence, be recognized as Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, etc’.115 The petitions

illustrate what O’Malley called ‘a stereotyped plan’. The first step in this ‘plan’ was

to obtain favourable vyavasthas, or rulings, from complaisant pandits. ‘These refer’,

O’Malley 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 ex-

tremely 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 modification 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 O’Malley, 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 theRajbanshis of Bengal. See Robert L. Hardgrave, The Nadars Of Tamilnad: The Political Culture Of a Communityin Change (Bombay: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p.133; and Sibasankar Mukherjee, ‘The Social Role Of a CasteAssociation’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XXXI, no.1 (Jan.–Mar. 1994), p.91. The Mahtonsin Punjab, writes Cohn, ‘wanted to be recorded in the census of 1911 as Rajputs’. Cohn, ‘The Census’, p.248. In manyinstances, the census authorities were persuaded to record new caste names signifying higher status in place of theprevailing ones. The Chandalas of Bengal, suggests Imtiaz Ahmad, wanted to be addressed as Namasudras, whilethe Chasi Khaibarta from the same province preferred Mahisya as their new name. The ‘number of castes advancingnew status claims’ in the regions of United Provinces, Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and Orissa and Central Provincesand Berar, Ahmad informs us, went up from 21 to 148 between 1901 and 1931. Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘Caste MobilityMovements in North India’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.VIII, no.2 (June 1971), pp.170–1.For further illustration of the impact of the census operations on caste mobility, see G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Racein India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979), pp.278–9; M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Bombay:Orient Longman, 1972), pp.94–100; and David Washbrook, ‘The Development Of Caste Organization in South India1880 to 1925’, in C.J. Baker and D.A. Washbrook (eds), South India: Political Institutions and Political Change,1880–1940 (Delhi: The Macmillan Company of India Limited, 1975), p.154.116

O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440.




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 exceptthat 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, significantly, 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

ConclusionThe classification of caste in order of social precedence was abandoned after the

census of 1901. The state found it ‘impossible to comply with the requests’121 for

change of caste status that had poured in following the decision by Risley to invite

public opinion on the subject. The people, complained O’Malley, 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 fix the relative status of different castes’.122

Notwithstanding O’Malley’s comments, however, the purpose of the census did not

stay the same from decade to decade. The agenda has gradually broadened and in

117 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.42 and KW, Oct. 1911,BSA.118 Ibid .119 Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department, Census Branch, File no.VC-7 of 1912, BSA.120 It is difficult to specify, Appadurai suggests, ‘the degree to which the effort to organize the colonial project aroundthe idea of essentialized and enumerated communities made inroads into the practical consciousness of colonialsubjects in India’. Though the projects of enumeration of communities, he continues, ‘were by no means whollysuccessful…the fact is that the colonial gaze, and its associated techniques, have left an indelible mark on Indianpolitical consciousness’. Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, pp.334–5.121 O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440.122

Ibid .



164 SOUTH ASIA

the process the official 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 numericalstrength of a caste required, in the first place, defining 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 classification of caste

within and across the census surveys. The problem was further compounded during

the census of 1881 when the varna division—which alone carried the imprimatur

of a pan-Indian system—was formally rejected as a classifying principle. The

consequent lack of consistent and continuing caste and classificatory names in the

census reports rendered the task of calculating, comparing or verifying numbersuncertain.

Consistency in the classification of caste depended on the certitude of official

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 colonialknowledge produced by the state still, however, needed to explain the features of

caste comprehensibly and demonstrate a correspondence between general explana-

tions 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 ‘scientific’ 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 explana-

tory reach of these paradigms.

The petitions submitted before the enumerators to proclaim the high varna statusof the concerned castes illustrated the propensity of the caste representatives to

modify and redefine 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

suffixes.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 redesignatethese 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.

Classifying Caste Padmanabh

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