1

The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c.
1600-1990
Author(s): Sumit Guha
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 148-167
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879485
Accessed: 24-08-2017 04:11 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Comparative Studies in Society and History
This content downloaded from 14.139.45.241 on Thu, 24 Aug 2017 04:11:32 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Politics of Identity and
Enumeration in India c. 1600-1990
SUMIT GUHA
Brown University
INTRODUCTION: WAS THE COLONIAL CENSUS A TEMPLATE
FOR COMMUNITIES?
An important part of the by now enormous literature on nationalism has focu

on its conditions of possibility, on what we may call the processes of pre
formation that underlay the explosive rise of those "imagined communities
the modem era. How indeed has modernity (however defined) impacted on
mechanisms by which identities-including national ones-are formed,
and enacted? This question has frequently been addressed in recent decades,
pecially as studies of nationalism have broadened their ambit to take in the no
Western world. This expansion has certainly generated major works-most
famously, of course, the first edition (1983) of Benedict Anderson's Imagin
Communities which made the stimulating suggestion that print capitalism
a central pre-formative institution for incipient nations.
This, of course, raised the issue of how nationalism came to be in regio
where literacy and print-capitalism were but weakly present, such as much
the colonial world. An answer came in the expanded second edition of And
son's book (1991) which introduced a trinity of institutions of power: the m
the museum and the census, as underpinning colonial nationalism.1 It may
argued that these in some degree substituted for print capitalism as a prepa
tory institution for nationalism. Bernard Cohn had already proposed in 1
that the British colonial census played an important part in South Asian ide
ty formation-a hypothesis strengthened by the fact that, unlike the map
the museum, it was an institution that every adult male would encounter duri
his lifetime.2 In the largely illiterate colonial countryside, it is also likely th
large fraction of the few literate adult males available would serve as enum
ators. Many of them would have wider social and political roles as literati, c
municators, and culture-brokers. Comprehensive censuses were taken in all
provinces of British India between 1868 and 1872, again in 1881, and at t
year intervals thereafter.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the issue of the census led to significant So
Asian work in this area.3 Most contributors have tacitly or explicitly agreed t
0010-4175/XX/148-167 $9.50 C 2003 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
148
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND ENUMERATION IN INDIA I49
the advent of modernity (typically represented in south Asia as coeval

nineteenth-century colonialism) radically altered the conditions of identity
mation but most have not, to my knowledge, sought to examine the pro
of identity definition before and during the great divide, and have general
fined themselves to scrutiny of the conveniently accessible colonial re
This is not solely an antiquarian's criticism. It is obvious that any hist
study that deduces that huge changes occurred under colonial rule needs
the pre-colonial as a baseline. But scholars such as Kaviraj insouciantly
scribe "traditional" society without adducing any relevant evidence from
all.5 This cavalier dismissal of the past would be defensible if we believe
nothing remained of the world before the Flood, and that either colonia
course or the everyday practices rooted in industrial material civili
emerged from the colonizer's Ark and thereafter generated the identitie
still order the world.6 This could be true, but it is by no means self-evid
Anderson, at any rate, was aware, if only gesturally, of the long pre-c
past in Southeast Asia-a past in which people were enumerated by ruli
thority. He writes that the "real innovation of the census-takers of the
was, therefore, not the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but
in their systematic quantification." This novel grid, Anderson argues, fo
from early (unquantified?) tax-rolls and levy-lists but differed from them i
it did not have limited and comprehensible purposes like taxation and
scription. From 1850, he continues, the colonial states imposed an imag
grid that gradually sprouted institutions of bureaucratic governance that, i
"gave real social life to the state's earlier fantasies." Thus previously flu
digenous categories hardened, like waffles, around the alien grid, and
maintain a brittle identity even when detached from it. The only identity
empts from this is religious affiliation. This "served as the basis for ver
very stable imagined communities not in the least aligned with the se
state's authoritarian road-map"'7 This description shows a very limited u
standing of the mechanisms of power in many pre-modern societies. As we
see later, taxation and labor-service were not extracted from homogeno
isolated individuals by an independent bureaucracy. Instead, these exac
were finely calibrated to the many aspects of status and power, organ
through extant social collectivities and delivered to a range of power-hol
many levels of the social hierarchy. These demands and performances
highly expressive of the power of individuals and households, and quit
trally connected to the social processes that gave them identity and stan
Again, Anderson does not consider how religious identities were social
produced and propagated-as they must have been to survive. A tradition
ligious identity does not, after all, adhere like a forgotten bumper sticker:
to be performed anew in order to live. It involves daily ritual, styles of
rules of marriage, periodic gatherings at festivals, obligations of pilgrim
and so on. In societies of limited literacy, it is these signs and behaviors
150 SUMIT GUHA
manifest membership of the community: both to fellow members and t

siders. They are renewed every day, and every generation. If therefore, the
sisted stably through colonial rule, then how certain can we be that othe
tities were exclusively structured by the colonial grid? Should we not
whether the reproductive processes that renewed religious identity m
have been generating other social identities as well?
Returning to theme in the late 1990s, Anderson seeks to "reframe the
lem of the formation of collective subjectivities in the modem world by
sideration of the material, institutional and discursive bases that nece
generate two profoundly contrasting types of seriality, which I will cal
bound and bound." For Anderson, the standardized conception of politics
was propagated by the West in all parts of the world reflected "the eve
practices, rooted in industrial material civilization, that have displaced th
mos to make way for the world."8 While repudiating derivative discour
"imitation," his analysis still fundamentally locates all significant impu
change in governmental practices imposed by the West. This location of
he then has in common with scholars such as Sudipto Kaviraj who also s
tal changes in mentality and perception occurring as a consequence of g
mental action, with the enumerated community replacing the fuzzy trad
But while Anderson sees global capitalism as the material base in whic
new practices are rooted, Kaviraj sees material life as relatively unalte
colonialism, while the bounds of the thinkable change dramatically. This in
is part of a global process: "[h]istorically, it is quite evident that modernity
something quite fundamental to the logic of identities, to the ways in whic
ple fashion self-descriptions."10 But in contrast to Anderson, Kaviraj see
gious communities as fundamentally altered in content and behavior b
novel institution of enumeration.
Thus Kaviraj declares that the pre-modern fuzziness of community "would
arise because traditional communities, unlike modern ones, are not enumerat-
ed." This evidently made for peaceful coexistence-as "they did not ask how
many of them there were in the world, they could not consider what they could
wreak upon the world for their collective benefit-through collective action."11
This belief, as we shall see, is founded on nothing more solid than the author's
assumption that numbers correlate directly with the capacity for self-interested
collective action.12 The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai also sees politicized
modern identities as deriving from colonial censuses. He is aware that the
Mughal regime did quantify but declares that the British colonial state em-
ployed quantification in its rule of the Indian sub-continent in a way that was,
(in some unspecified way) "different." In the long run, "these [colonial] enu-
merative strategies helped to ignite communitarian and nationalist identities
that in fact undermined colonial rule."13 In a similar vein Ayesha Jalal states
that various provincial censuses of the 1850s "cast the die making religion the
central factor superceding all forms of social relationships."'4 Nicholas Dirks
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND ENUMERATION IN INDIA 151
largely concurs, although he times the change differently, and holds

anthropology beyond the census responsible for this effect. "Risley's a
pology worked not so much to retard nationalism as to render it comm
so doing, it also left a bloody legacy for South Asia that continues to
mounting toll."15
Ultimately therefore, these major scholars all share a paradigm in wh
historical agency is fundamentally Western. As Norbert Peabody has
out, the common assumption has been that the colonized were either "
on-lookers" or "unwitting imperial praetorians."16 Does the historical
support this understanding? To answer this question, let us now turn t
tual definition of identities and their enumeration in early modern Sou
CENSUSES AND IDENTITIES
In this paper I focus on enumeration-often adduced as

state-building and identity formation. But since units
identified before they can be counted, enumeration is
upon identity. So I hope to develop an understanding of
nale of enumerations before colonialism, look closely at
derwent in the transition to colonial rule, and survey the f
colonial regimes. But my object is to adduce evidence
responded to and participated in these activities. Only a
think, allow us determine how significant these comp
were in different socio-political regimes. Unearthing t
participation in the process of identifying and counting
understanding of the significance of enumeration in de
ing various social boundaries through time.
I shall begin by looking at the fiscal and political sign
ministrative practices and their eighteenth-century leg
level, and then move to the areas of Western and Centra
most familiar. The diversity of early colonial practice
this regional focus down to the late nineteenth century
ing homogeneity of enumerative practices causes a retu
through into the post-independence period in the Repu
with a single case-study, using state-level data from We
communities could communicate, coalesce and change,
fiat, and independent of the census.
IDENTIFYING AND COUNTING IN MUGHAL INDIA
By the late seventeenth century the Mughal empire domin

while this dominance was short-lived, its administrative p
nology were widely appropriated by contemporary and s
Identities must be defined to make enumeration possible. W
ample (c. 1600 c.e.) of their systematic presentation in the
152 SUMIT GUHA
bar (reigned 1556-1605), the real founder of the Mughal empire. This mass
compilation contains a statistical description of twelve provinces of the em
in which we find the landholding gentry of various regions classified by the
nic community to which they belonged. The numbers of horsemen, infantry
sometimes guns and boats that they mustered are then listed. As far as the
perial Chancery was concerned, an estimate of their squeezability-the st
dard tax assessment-was a sufficient numeric representation of the rest of
population." As individuals, they did not count. The ethnic classification
powerful gentry (qaum, pl. aqwam) was most obviously relevant to polit
calculation-it was usually an indicator of the potential breadth of marita
liances and clan mobilization-one of the most solid forms of political
gagement in that epoch.
But the locally dominant ethnicity was, by definition, a dominant aristoc
ic minority. Hence it was that the identities and military followings of the d
inant ethnicity that were recorded in the Imperial chancery. But precisely
cause of its economic and political significance, aristocratic identity was
subject to efforts to gain political leverage by its manipulation, and we can
ument efforts on these lines. Thus the Gond tribal raja of Deogarh in Cen
India converted to Islam and took the name Bakht Buland. In 1719 his gran
son received a military appointment. He is described as "Sheikhzada by c
..."18 But the Mughal empire collapsed, the Deogarh/Nagpur kingdom wa
taken over by the Marathas, and the family found it expedient to return t
regional alliances and ethnic roots. So, in the mid-nineteenth century the
eage maintained hypergamous marriage links with "Hindu" Rajgond chiefd
and was regarded as "pure Rajgond."'9 Ethnicity mattered for common sold
too, as D.H.A. Kolff has shown.20 It frequently appeared in payrolls: for
ample, "nafaran Hindustani Rajput tirandaz" or north Indian Rajput bow
in a muster of 1691 C.E.21 It determined recruitment opportunities: baffle
the difficult terrain of Western India's Maval region, the Mughal court is
an order to recruit the local Mavli infantry (pyadeha-e qaum Mavli), but
those of other communities.22
Even if the imperial records ignored them, lower-level records contain
ple evidence that communities counted and were counted even amongst hu
ble subjects. For lower-level administrators (often employed by regional g
try) for example, the identity of the dominant land-holders in individual vill
was important, and easily imagined and ascertained. Many records of this t
exist from the mid-seventeenth century onward.2 Once identities had been
tablished they could be aggregated, regulated and, of course, taxed. Their s
ascribed identities might be curbed by state action: so in the late eighteenth c
tury an unknown informant reported to the Maratha court that members of
tailor caste who had taken to dyeing were mixing and marrying with the m
bers of the indigo-dyer caste. The local officer warned them to desist and ma
tain community boundaries laid down by Shahu Chatrapati sometime bef
1750.24 Thus what likely began as an intra-community dispute over social prac
tice was sought to be resolved by the invocation of royal authority.
But why did the court come down in favor of segmentation rather than oth-
erwise? Was this because administrative processes require unambiguous clas-
sification? When the Emperor Aurangzeb re-imposed the poll-tax on his non-
Muslim subjects in 1679, officials obviously had to identify those liable to the
tax.25 Enumerated communities are quite often aggregatively presented as in
description of the city of Jodhpur c. 1670:
1. 2000 houses of mahajans [Bankers and traders]-Oswal, Mahesri, Hubad, Chitoda,
Nagdaha, Narsinghpura, Porvad.
2. 1500 houses of Brahmans
3. 500 houses of Pancholis-many Bhatnagars [literati and officials] ...
8. 9000 houses other castes (punjat).26
Incidentally, this refutes Appadurai's opinion that "the Mughal state imagi-
naire" did not include "the enumeration of group identities."27 The round num-
bers indicate that these are estimates but probably based on some analogue of
the house lists which were routinely prepared by regional states in the eigh-
teenth century.28 Thus the fixing of identities and attributes was an important
part of routine administration at the Imperial and local levels, and it was often
accompanied by enumeration. This was of more than fiscal significance: the
enumeration of infantry and cavalry and the ethnic affiliation of local gentry
was obviously motivated by military concerns of the sort vividly described by
D.H.A. Kolff in Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy.29 Gentry uprisings were a chronic
problem and ultimately contributed to the decline of the empire. But in addi-
tion to political calculation, another major motive at the local level was fiscal-
various collectivities had diverse burdens to bear, and the vigilant tax-collector
needed information on them. But the differential demands on various groups
were themselves calibrated to the power, numbers, and status of communities
that had an existence independent of the registers and tax-rolls.
So dominant communities often won exemption from taxes, while special
levies existed on subordinate ones. This obviously required the policing of
community boundaries to prevent migration from one to the other. The Nagpur
city records of 1811 listed communities and dues ward-by-ward. Grocers,
grain dealers, tobacco vendors, sellers of colored powder, lac dealers, low-
caste weavers, other weavers, etcetera, all were enumerated and taxed at differ-
ent rates.30
Therefore when Appadurai writes of "precolonial" regimes that their enu-
merative activities were tied to taxation but not to group identity he is operat-
ing within an anachronistic modern imaginaire in which taxation and account-
ing are in the distinct domain of the economic while social regulation is the
business of some other office.31 In fact, these processes were integral parts of
statecraft. One example: there was a prolonged (and expensive) feud over sta-
tus between the tailors of two neighboring towns in the 1770s. A high-level
154 SUMIT GUHA
community council assembled at Pune under state supervision. In March 17

declared the Pune tailors to be in the wrong and fined them the considerable
of 15,000 rupees-this in an era when a farm laborer was paid forty or fifty
pees a year. The tailors of Sasvad had to pay 10,000 rupees as a thank-offering
the state.32 Membership of the winning or losing community would have t
accurately determinable for such sums to be levied. Equally, the case illustr
the interpenetration of social identity, social regulation, and royal fiscality.
Mutual defense sometimes depended on the support of one's caste fello
and business issues could also be organized on caste lines: in 1795 the Vani m
chants of Jejuri offered to pay a hundred rupees to the local official if the
jarati shopkeepers were ejected from the village.33 The idea of the enumer
community was widely understood. Thus a Kavar tribal chief, Ajit Singh
Pendhra on the remote forest fringe of Central India could tell a visiting o
cial in 1821 that: "by estimate, there are 940 houses of the Kavarjati [caste
this subdivision, 500 in Kenda, Pendhra, Uproda and Matin together; 200
Korba, 15 in Chapha, 25 in Kafa, 200 in Chhari. ... But in our jati, pardah [
male seclusion] is very strict; women of the great households do not set foot
of their houses, and even the wives of the poor only work at home." Howe
the enumeration was preliminary to establishing a relation of ritual inferio
and social subordination. "... The Dudhkavar [pure Kavar-the informa
identity] are few in these eight talukas; five or seven houses here and fiv
seven there. The Kavar of the other four sorts (jati) are cheap and may be ter
children of female slaves."34
This deposition illustrates the strategies of community inclusion followed
subordination at work. Ajit Singh was a recognized petty chief, and his la
and perquisites were sanctioned by the Maratha governor of the province. It w
to him that Vinayakrao, assistant to a powerful colonial official came whe
needed a description of the history and customs of the Kavar. His heads
would also manifest itself in the settlement of disputes, and in "representi
the community to higher authority. But his authority depended upon the ma
tenance of structures of deference and inferiority within the community.
was important for him to both represent the size and reach of the commu
he headed, and assert the predominance of his natal and affinal kin within
All though rural south Asia, it was such rustic potentates (and their literati
ployees) who functioned as enumerators and record-keepers for higher aut
ity. A mass of documents dealing with rustic disputes around caste member
was, in fact selected by Oturkar from the records of the Purandare fam
hereditary officials and landowners of the small town of Saswad in Wes
India. Very similar people-village accountants, schoolmasters, educated la
owners-were enlisted as enumerators and compilers in the colonial censu
that began in the nineteenth century. They too continued their historical pre
cessors' function of mediating, translating, and representing between local
ciety and the larger world.
Let us now sum up the material surveyed so far. We see that enumerations of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed real lines of social cleav-
age-divisions that determined individual life-chances and created blocs im-
portant for social survival and reproduction. The state and its agencies certain-
ly penetrated and modified society itself, but they entered it as tree-roots grow
into rock-along its extant fractures and potential flaws. Dissatisfied claimants
and feuding subalterns often sought such intervention against their enemies. So-
cial groups usually knew and sometimes had to account for their members, and
enumeration was used and understood.
But numbers of course, were not the sole determinant of power or political
entitlement. Contrary to Kaviraj's assumption, it was not necessary to enumer-
ate large communities in order to imagine their rivalry. The Maratha historian
Sabhasad imagined in 1693 that upon hearing the news of Shivaji's coronation
in 1674, the emperor Aurangzeb went into the inner quarters of his palace,
rubbed his hands on the earth, invoked his God and sorrowfully said "God has
taken the empire from the Muslims and given it to the Marathas."35 These max-
imal communities could also easily be imagined in alliance with each other
against British rule: the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah's call to anti-colonial
war on 25 August 1857 stated that he had "erected the standard of Mohammed,
and persuaded the orthodox Hindoos, who had been subject to my ancestors,
... to raise the standard of Mahavir."36 The invocation of iconic symbols was
sufficient in this view to mobilize and identify communities, without any enu-
meration being required to ignite it.
EARLY COLONIAL ENUMERATIONS
The arrival of colonial rule did not initially change classificat

dures too much. In much of India, the same structure of village l
was commissioned to collect the information required by the n
tion, and continued to do so in much the same ways. But the
brought with them the intellectual baggage of eighteenth-cent
tably its interest in 'political arithmetic and statistic' as an inst
ernance. The soldier and administrator Vauban c. 1707 recomme
XIV a model based on the Chinese system of grouping househ
and other surveillance. He expatiated that "it is certain that his [t
cipal interest is the conservation of his people, and ensuring
because the greatest evil that can befall his state, is that they
enumerations in this scheme were not to have the anonymous se
derson posits: rather the sovereign was to have the satisfaction
merely the numbers but also the names of all nobles, as well t
other classes, the numbers and locations of non-Catholics, an
work remained unpublished in Vauban's lifetime and was imme
when posthumous publication was attempted under the Regen
C.E.). It is possible that the provincial estates and the nobility r
156 SUMIT GUHA
of such assertion of royal control. Perhaps a parallel could be drawn to the sit-
uation in South Asia, where limited information moved up the hierarchy to the
Imperial records, and much detail remained in the custody of local worthies. It
took the French Revolution and the advent of a colonial regime (respectively)
before more centralized institutions of enumeration could make their appear-
ance.
A century later after Vauban, the development of demograph

allowed James Mackintosh, speaking at the founding of the Lit
Bombay (1804) to be more specific in his analysis of the source
change. He recommended inquiries into the "numbers of the pe
ber of births, marriages and deaths; the proportion of children
to maturity; the distribution of the people according to their
castes; and especially according to the great division into agricu
ufacturing; and the relative state of these circumstances at dif
which can only be ascertained by permanent tables, are the bas
tant part of the knowledge."38 Some estimates began to be made i
of British India in the next few decades and the intelligentsia b
these well before the regular censuses began in 1868-1872.39
This outlook brought about a major change in the style of enum
all previous administrations had thought it sufficient to enumera
closures, the British government wanted to enumerate their hum
vidually.4" In passing, I would suggest that the difference in prac
tributed to the mobility of population in South Asia making migr
determinant of population size in specific realms. Practically ev
settlement originating in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Ind
ulation as due to the influx of settlers attracted by tax concession
trative benevolence. The West European concern with fecundit
absent; equally, it was not necessary for such an administration to
the household to ascertain its demographic contents. (The Unit
of 1790, interestingly, did not seek information on the ages of w
sought the numbers of men above and below sixteen years of a
above and below military age. Such limited data would have b
quate to calculate nuptiality, fertility, or other predictors of natu
new nation looked to immigration.) So for indigenous rulers the
counting houses was adequate to monitor trends in population an
The British administration was however, especially suspicious o
migrants,41 and in any case drew on European commonsense n
appropriate objects for enumeration. They wanted to know the nu
women and children, not merely of households.
This puzzled local officials used to the old modes of counting,
luctance to pry into relations within the metaphoric enclosure aro
hold.42 The record of their puzzlement can be found in the ma
returns from Central India that they submitted to a touring offici
from 1820 to 1822. Bemusement is manifest in the very titles of some of th

ports. Thus the first, that relating to Umrad subdivision is headed "Hous
and looms and oil-presses and a head-count of men, wives, kept women, y
children etc." The tabular statement's column headings are houses, looms,
presses, men, women, boys, girls, slave women and, for fear of missing o
information needed by this inexplicable new master, even persons in the w
The rows list sixty communities. In another subdivision, the local officia
sorted to attributing caste or community to the houses, but did not ente
thorny issue of the social identities of their inmates, something highly amb
ous in the case of slaves, slave-women and the slave-born. The Arabic co
tive noun qaum reappears in these lists as khum.43 Further west, in the Bo
Presidency, W. H. Sykes, Statistical Reporter to the Government of Bom
was grappling with another problem: the returns that he received from s
dinate Indian officials comprised a multiplicity of identities, creating bulk
unmanageable statistical tables. Furthermore, the returns were statisticall
verse and reflected the local identities that confronted officials in spec
places. More comprehensive categories were needed, and Sykes, no doubt
ed by Brahman scholars, simply divided the people into Muslims and Hin
and the latter into Brahman, Rajput, Shoodruh, or Maratha, and Ati-Shud
outcastes.44 Interestingly enough, a similar aggregation was independent
vised by temple priest in Central India at the same time. In 1822 the four
dias who presided over the shrine of Amarkantak at the source of the Nar
river were asked about the population of their hamlet, and they promptly so
to arrange it according to the four-varna structure of classical Hinduism (
man, Ksatriya, Vaisya, Sudra) but then had to add a fifth-Gosain (profe
ly Vaisnava ascetic). The Pandias later provided a more detailed enumera
with Brahman distinguished into northern Sariyupari and southern Daksin
Ksatriya into Rajput and Sikh, the Vaisya comprised of carpenters and
keepers, and ten communities (including Gosain) now classed as Sudra.45
the confused effort to thrust theoretical categories onto extant social group
not confined to colonial officialdom, and a distorted version of a theoretic
vision from the Sanskrit normative texts was drawn over the diversities of a
complex and fractured society.
Twenty years after Sykes' census of 1826, the Government of Bombay once
again asked its Indian officials to enumerate the population. The basic ordering
seems to have been religious: people were first of all classed as Hindu, Mus-
lim, Jain or Shravak, Zoroastrian, Jew and Christian. Within Hindu, it was found
that the number of castes reported varied in number from twelve to seventy in
different districts of the same region. In the Southern districts, a long-running
feud between Citpavan and Saraswat (Senvi) Brahmans led to the latter being
classified separately from "Brahmans." Various linguistic clues indicate that
local-language returns were being roughly translated into English. It is also fair-
ly evident from internal evidence that the organization and compilation of the
158 SUMIT GUHA
census had been largely in the hands of Indian officials, and metropolitan ideas
intruded mainly in the its penetration beyond the walls of the household to enu-
merate the inmates within.
Political anxieties impacted on census categories. The 1845-1846 Census
was conducted in a period when outbreaks of insurgency among the forest tribes
had seriously perturbed the government of the province. Reviewing the census
returns, the Governor of Bombay commented that it was "a great object to as-
certain the different classes of the population with reference to their habits and
occupation. With this view all classes who are considered turbulent and preda-
tory should be distinctly shown... " One is reminded of the early Mughal em-
pire's careful enumeration of the cavalry and infantry attached to the different
gentry communities. It is likely that many of the same social groups would have
showed up in the "turbulent and predatory" list envisaged by the Governor.
The Governor-in-Council proposed therefore that instead of the confused med-
ley of communities, the next census should classify the people into eight
groups: I. Hindoos, II. Wild Tribes, III. Low Caste, IV. Shravaks or Jain, V. Mus-
sulman, VI. Parsee, VII. Jews, and VIII. Christians.46
The careful separation of Brahmans of different sub-castes made in the 1845
count was ignored in this proposal, and race was noticeably absent from the
classification, whose major axis was evidently religious, though cross-cut by an
anxiety about law and order issues. This changed after the great anti-colonial
uprising of 1857-1858 and the inter-racial bitterness that followed. Racial iden-
tities and the balancing of religious identities in the interest of British rule be-
came matters of central concern.4 Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India
wrote in 1859: "Keep your Sikh regiments in the Punjab and they will be ready
to act against the Hindoos, keep your Hindoos out of the Punjab and they will
be ready to act against the Sikhs. ... Depend upon it the natural antagonism of
races is no inconsiderable element of out strength. ... If all India was to unite
against us how long could we maintain ourselves?"48
Nonetheless, the different regions maintained their chaos of categories. In
1865 the compilers of the Statistical Abstract relating to British India sought
to present a consolidated table of the populations of Calcutta, Bombay, and
Madras. But the table betrays the incoherence of the concepts underlying it.
Calcutta distinguished Europeans from Indo-Europeans (people of mixed de-
scent), but mingled "Native Christians" with the latter, while in Madras the
Indo-Europeans were amalgamated with the Europeans but Native Christians
distinguished from them. The Greeks in both Bombay and Calcutta had the dig-
nity of a separate macro-identity-neither European, nor Indian nor African,
but simply Greek.49 A few years later the Central Provinces Gazetteer of 1870
classified the population along lines of descent and (potential for rebellion?)
into: I. Europeans and Eurasians, II. Parsees, III. Hindus of all classes, IV. Mus-
sulmans, V. Gond and other aboriginal tribes.50
The later nineteenth century saw a substantial filling out of the statistical
sis of British administration as new cadastral and revenue surveys, record
rights, and systems of registration of transactions built up the knowledge-
of a new style of administration. Meanwhile, the old services and dues att
ing to specific communities were commuted, allowed to lapse, or replaced
devices such as the license tax and the income tax. So the administrative ratio-
nale of the indigenous-style records gradually withered away. At the same time,
the need for aggregated population counts was emphasized for measures such
as famine relief in the wake of the catastrophic famine of 1866 and several sim-
ilar calamities. But even if unenumerated, the community remained a social re-
ality, and, in some cases took on new functions such as funding Western-style
education and creating residential clusters in the expanding urban centers of
British India.51
Meanwhile, the Western race-science project grew with the worldwide spread
of colonial science.52 Many of the bright young men competitively selected-
after 1854-for the Indian Civil Service, aspired to academic fame as well as
administrative distinction; and ethnographic and statistical study was often a
route to both. The value of ethnographic credentials to a bureaucratic career was
sufficiently evident in the late nineteenth century for Rudyard Kipling to sati-
rize it in Under the Deodars.53 As ambitious ethnographers helped each other
up the bureaucratic ladder it was almost inevitable that the machinery of the
Government of India would be adapted to generate the data they needed. This
is particularly evident in the all-India censuses of 1901 and 1911. During the
preparations for the Census of 1901 the Government of India wrote to the Sec-
retary of State for India:54 "India is a vast storehouse of social and physical data
which need only be recorded in order to contribute to the solution of the prob-
lems which are being approached in Europe with the aid of material which is
much inferior in quality to the facts readily accessible in India ..." The new
ethnography certainly found an interested audience in the nascent Indian pub-
lic. As early as 1890 a north Indian newspaper, Oudh Akhbar, presented the fol-
lowing account of Risley's survey, which apparently revealed "the existence of
different races of men in Bengal, namely the Aryan and the aboriginal. The for-
mer is represented by the Brahmans, Rajputs and Sikhs. These generally have
tall forms, light complexion and fine noses, and are in general appearance su-
perior to the middle class of Europeans. The Kols are a specimen of the latter.
They have short stature, dark complexion and snub noses, and approach the
African blacks in appearance.... the higher [a man's] origin, the more he re-
sembles the Europeans in appearance."55
Meanwhile, the enumerations that had previously been confined to locally
held manuscripts were now being sorted, aggregated over the sub-continent and
printed. This gave them an authority and salience that, as Cohn observed thir-
ty years ago, created another arena for status competition.
I6o SUMIT GUHA
POLITICAL FRAMEWORKS AND IDENTITY STRATEGIES UNDER
COLONIALISM AND AFTER
The political norm in pre-British times was that of vertical

tion that converged on the absolute monarch. The aristocrat
best, were necessarily few in number. So fewness, exclusivity,
or. Aristocracy then translated into leadership and honor (an
mature colonial regime inevitably undermined these structu
colonial masters, distinctions among black people were not h
to the average British official or officer.56 But at the same tim
rums, including a more active press, were leading to a more
of identity in the public sphere. When limited Provincial Co
established in the 1880s, the object was to create representati
terests such as British businessmen, the trading, professiona
classes, and the landed aristocracy.57 Furthermore, the colon
control led to the allocation of seats in such a way that the g
had an "official majority." Nonetheless, weighting was achi
tion/nomination process, and majority voting decided matt
semblies and councils. The early nationalists internalized th
jority decisions prevailed, and fought vigorously for electe
decision-making bodies. This political culture was crystallizin
the great Imperial Censuses (1881-) and logically extended t
ity predominance in adversarial situations to the larger polit
This could be challenged both by questioning the signific
numbers, but ultimately also by enlarging the apparent size
Thus the Aga Khan presented a "Muslim Address" to the Vi
1906; the signatories were 'representative' in the old sense:
signed nobles, jagirdars, talukdars, lawyers, zemindars, merc
representing a large body of the Mahomedan subjects of hi
They were representative because they were the dominant an
of their putative community. Their argument was hybrid,
rhetoric of political power and historic significance alongsid
and equality. It continued: "the position accorded to the Ma
nity in any kind of representation ... should be commensurat
their numerical strength but also with their political import
of the contribution they make to the defense of the empire
that your Excellency will in this connection be pleased to gi
tion to the position which they occupied in India a little mo
years ago [when they supposedly shared in Mughal sovereign
But these ci-devant aristocrats were soon ousted by more p
tors, whose claim to leadership was premised on their identi
than being superior to other members of the community. Th
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND ENUMERATION IN INDIA I61
communities, and a widening franchise-culminating in adult suffrage after in-

dependence-intensified this trend.
Thus twentieth-century changes in the political system required a homoge-
nization of communities whose dominant elements had previously sought to
differentiate and structure them.59 The relevant communities increasingly came
to be religious in character. The 1941 Census was taken during the Second
World War, and financial stringency compelled the government to limit the tab-
ulations to only those deemed most essential-these were towns, villages, and
cities, and towns arranged territorially with population by communities (reli-
gious, tribal, and scheduled caste). The voluminous ethnographic studies of the
earlier censuses were thus jettisoned. Thus, almost no one who is alive today
has ever participated in a complete caste/community census.
The next census was taken in the Republic of India. Specific communities
were declared in need of special protection, and they were listed in special
schedules-hence termed "Scheduled Castes" and "Scheduled Tribes." The
Census of India then dropped the caste question except for scheduled castes and
tribes. As far as the rest of the population went, socio-economic categories were
foregrounded, and ascriptive communities omitted. The ruling idea was that
economic changes would soon render them irrelevant. Well before Said, the
Census Commissioner seems to have decided that if social categories were gen-
erated by the Orientalist gaze, they could be abolished by an Oriental aversion
of gaze. Alas, this did not suffice: the social processes of identity formation con-
tinued independent of the official classifications. Political life in India in the
1980s and 1990s came to be increasingly conceived in terms of the political
competition of social groups that are not physically distinguishable from each
other, have no official markers of identity, and have not been enumerated for
seventy years.60 Their pressure on the Janata Party government in India (1977-
1979) led to the appointment of the second Backward Classes Commission in
1978. Its report of 1980 largely depended on conjectural projections of the 1931
Census for data, and recommended extensive programs of positive discrimina-
tion for these communities.61 Its partial implementation in 1990 was a conse-
quence of the political pressure that these (still in 2002) unenumerated groups
were able to put on the state. The communities nonetheless sustain, reproduce,
and identify themselves without benefit of census. I shall end with just one ex-
ample of this process at work.
The Scheduled Tribes form about 8 percent of the population of India and
possess specific entitlements under the Constitution. Programs for them actu-
ally began to have a real impact in the 1970s and membership became attrac-
tive. In 1974-1975 new legislation in the state of Maharashtra canceled sales
of tribal land to non-tribals made after 1957, but transactions between members
of tribal communities were not affected. Not coincidentally, between 1971 and
1981 there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of people returning them-
162 SUMIT GUHA
selves as belonging to various tribes. In east-central Maharashtra, 661,000 tri

als were enumerated in 1971 but a demographically impossible 200 percent i
crease led to 2136,000 being counted in the 1981 Census. One tribe, the Ha
ba/Halbi, returned 7,205 in 1971 and 242,819 in 1981. This trend was visib
before the census and led the Maharashtra state government to set up a spec
scrutiny committee in 1980. An official explained how from the late 1950s in
dividuals whose sub-caste name resembled that of some scheduled tribe bega
using that name. When successful, "these efforts resulted into [sic] a comm
nity movement and as a result of which social organizations of non-Schedul
Tribe people were formed and through these organizations united efforts too
place to derive concessions of Scheduled Tribes for the entire caste."62 Re-
viewing the 1981 Census data, one researcher commented that a massive ri
in the enumerated tribal population was "due to the organized tactics employ
by pseudotribals at the time of enumeration."63
The numbers involved are striking. Hundreds of thousands of people-th
majority functionally illiterate-could devise, communicate, and implement a
identity strategy in the ten years between two censuses. It is obvious that th
process was quite independent of official agency. The community transmitt
the strategy of shifting its identity through the same channels of social com
munication that gave hundreds of thousands of geographically dispersed peo
ple a sense of their community identity in the first place. The availability
modern technology perhaps eased and cheapened the process but certainly d
not generate it.
CONCLUSION
It seems irrefutable that any study of the changes that t

wrought upon the processes of social communication and
must begin by considering the status quo ante. At the very l
fuse fuzzy speculations about it with a substantial understand
and was not. I have attempted to look at a limited region t
always part of larger political, economic, and information s
the impact of global changes on local details. An important
discovery of the extent to which local communicative pro
and conserved community identities impacted and still im
processes that generated officially recognized public comm
fuzzy continuum of pre-modern collective life was not sud
ly sliced up by colonial modernity. Local communities had
trusive states that had penetrated along, and augmented, the
ciety. The evidence endorses C. A. Bayly's comment that t
did not simply extract revenue from a society composed
melange of syncretic cults and local cultures. Both as a rev
paratus and as an accumulation of knowledge, the state in
nial India was more formidably developed than this sugg
structures of feeling and communication survived into the colonial era, and used
the colonial public sphere to assert their claims. Some fissures closed and oth-
ers opened. In general, better communications and the creation of an all-India
political arena have led to aggregation and massification as electoral signifi-
cance came to depend upon reaching rising thresholds of political visibility.
These communities had always been political; they now responded to the di-
alectic of colonialism and the opportunities of a new politics without being
thereby transformed into creatures of the colonial or post-colonial imagination.
In the twentieth century they have had to contend with larger imagined identi-
ties ("nations") that sought to marginalize and absorb them-an effort that has,
on the whole, failed; and these tenacious identities, still uncounted, remain with
us to this day. I hope this paper opens the way to a better understanding of the
internal dynamic of protean communities and of their active participation in
state and nation-making, of fundamental processes still shaping the contempo-
rary world.
NOTES
Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presente

History of Rutgers University. I am indebted to those who atte
ments. I have also gained much from the reports of two anonym
reading by Indrani Chatterjee. The responsibility for any remai
Note on transliteration: Software difficulties prevented me from
ate diacriticals in Hindustani, Marathi, and Persian words. They
actly as they would be if diacriticals could be used. This does not
and quotations.
1. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163.
2. "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in Sout
Cohn 1987:224-54). To this day, census enumerators often seek i
a male householder or household representative.
3. Early work is in Barrier, ed. The Census in British India.
4. The major exception to this is the fine 2001 study by Nor
Cents and Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and E
this journal. C. A. Bayly has also continued to argue for significa
the early modern and the colonial eras. See his Origins of Natio
5. Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," 24-26.
6. Everyday material practices is the category favored by A
coursers are too numerous to list. Anderson, Spectre, 29.
7. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 168-69.
8. Anderson, Spectre, 28-29. It is not clear wherein the contra
ries is not geographically constrained where the other is limited
9. Perhaps underlying them both is a Foucauldian notion of go
ductive of self-identity, heedless of Foucault's caveat, "Don't im
that man is only a by-product of police" (Foucault, "The Produc
dividuals," 156).
10. Kaviraj, "Introduction," 12, 27.
11. Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," 26.
12. In fact, it may be plausibly suggested that an awareness of
to inaction, and that oligarchic minorities have been, historicall
164 SUMIT GUHA
agents for self-interested collective action. The classic on this is, of course, Olson's Log-
ic of Collective Action, especially pages 44-46.
13. Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," 315-17.
14. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 40.
15. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 227.
16. Peabody, "Cents, Sense, Census," 820.
17. Jarrett and Sarkar, trans., Ain-i-Akbari, vol. 2; see "Account of the Twelve
Subas." For a painstaking if not always convincing analysis of these Mughal statistics,
see Moosvi, Economy of the Mughal Empire, especially pages 175-80.
18. Wills, Rajgond Maharajas, 223 -24. This is Wills' translation; I suspect the orig-
inal term would be "qaum "-community.
19. Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 124.
20. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, 71-116.
21. Khan, ed., Selected Documents, 228.
22. Khare, Farsi Sahitya, vol. 7, 202-3.
23. For translations of some of these, see Peabody, "Cents, Sense, Census."
24. Oturkar, Pesvekalina Samajik, 100-1.
25. Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 120-21.
26. Sakariya, ed., Mumhta Nainsi-ri Khyat, vol. 1, 30.
27. Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," 329-30. It is not clear
whether he means the enumeration of identities, or of individuals with a specific iden-
tity-both are evident in the Jodhpur list.
28. For a fuller discussion see Peabody's Cents, Sense and Census. See also Gokhale,
Poona in the Eighteenth Century, 19-37.
29. Kolff, Naukar Rajput and Sepoy, esp. ch. 1.
30. British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection Mss. Mar D.31, folio 68;
Mss. Mar D.44 Umrad-answer to Question 26.
31. Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," 330.
34. Mss. Mar D.46, folio 125b.
35. Kulkarni, ed., Sabhasad Bakhar, 76.
36. Translated in Rizvi, ed., Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vol. 1, 453-54.
37. Coornaert, ed., Projet d'une Dixme Royale, 203, 206; Anderson, Spectre, 37.
38. "A discourse at the opening of the Literary Society of Bombay 26th November
1804," by James Mackintosh, printed in Abstract of the Society's Proceedings Official,
Literary and Scientific; reprinted in The Miscellaneous Works, 535-42; see esp. 540-
43.
39. For example, Ramakrsna Visvanatha Hindustanci Pracina va Saprantaci Sthiti,
published in 1843, 5; Krisnasastri Chiplunkar Arthasastraparibhasa-Prakaran Pahile,
published in 1855, 351. Both are reprinted in Bedekar, ed., Car June Marathi Arthasas-
triya Grantha 1843-1855.
40. Susan Bayly comments on the significance of this innovation in Caste, Society
and Politics, 124-24.
41. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 142-44.
42. Khaneh-sumari-the indigenous term for census--literally means a count of en-
closures.
43. British Library Mss. Mar D.44, folios 24b-27a; 66b-67a; 128a, and passim.
44. British Library India office collection, Mss. Eur D. 148 and 149.
45. Mss. Mar D.46, folios 142a and 143a.
46. The tables and documents were not published at the time; they were printed thir-
ty years later as a separately paginated appendix to volume 2 of Report of the Census

taken in the Presidency of Bombay 1872.
47. Jones, "Religious Identity and the Indian Census."
48. Philips, ed., India and Pakistan, 508.
49. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/. Great Britain. India Office. East India Statistical Ab-
stract Relating to British India from 1840/1865. London: HMSO, 1867, Table 4. This
is from the Digital South Asia Library project.
50. Grant, ed., Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India, 321.
51. Conlon, Caste in a Changing World.
52. Guha "Lower Strata, Older Races and Aboriginal Peoples."
53. Kipling, "The Education of Otis Yeere," in Under the Deodars, 23-24.
54. D. Natarajan's, Indian Census through a Hundred Years, vol. 2, 545-61, reprints
significant parts of this correspondence.
55. Cited in Rubbee, "On the Origins of the Mussulmans of Bengal," 48.
56. See, for example, the text accompanying plate titled "Our Magistrate," in Atkin-
son's Curry and Rice: "we acknowledge that it must be a cheering termination to the
niggers-I mean the Oriental gentlemen-whose duties attract them to Kabob, and who
contribute to the repairs of the district roads, to find, after an unmerciful jolting over un-
mended ways, they should be gratified by an easy run at the close of their sufferings."
57. Philips, ed., India and Pakistan, 60.
58. Talukdars, zamindars and jagirdars were all types of privileged landholders,
who, in the aggregate, would not have numbered more than a few thousand in a largely
peasant Muslim population. Philips, ed., India and Pakistan, 190-91.
59. See the fine 1970 case study by Kothari and Maru, "Federating for Political In-
terests: The Kshatriyas of Gujarat."
60. A rich illustration to set alongside Kothari and Maru is Kanchan Chandra's "The
Ethnification of the Party System and its Consequences," 55-104.
61. See Beteille, Backward Classes in Contemporary India.
62. Deshmukh, "Scrutiny of Scheduled Certificates," 23.
63. Lakshminarayana, "The Problem of Pseudo Tribals," 6-13.
64. Bayly, Empire and Information, 368.
REFERENCES
Unpublished sources: These are manuscripts in Marathi and En

the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library,
are identified as Mss. Eur, and Marathi as Mss. Mar.
Published Sources:
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
-. London
1998. The Spectre
and New York: of Comparisons: Nationalism, SoutheastAsia and the World.
Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in Peter van der Veer
and Carol Breckenridge, eds., Orientalism and the Post-colonial Predicament. Phil-
adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 314-39.
Atkinson, George E 1859. Curry and Rice on Forty Plates. London: Day and Son.
Bayly, Christopher A. 1988. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Hy-
derabad: Orient Longman for Cambridge University Press.
. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communi-
I66 SUMIT GUHA
cation in India 1780-1870. New Delhi: Foundation Books for Cambridge Universi-
ty Press.
1998. Origins of Nationality in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to
the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barrier, N. Gerald, ed. 1981. The Census in British India: New Perspectives. Delhi:
Manohar.
Bedekar, D. K., ed. 1969. Car June Marathi Arthasastriya Grantha 1843-1855. Pune:
Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
Beteille, Andre. 1992. Backward Classes in Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Bombay, Government of. 1875. "Report of a Census Taken in the Bombay Presidency
.. 1872."
Chandra, Kanchan. 1999. "Post-Congress Politics in Uttar Pradesh: The Ethni
of the Party System and its Consequences," in Ramashray Roy and Paul Wallac
Indian Politics and the 1998 Election. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 55-104
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essa
hi: Oxford University Press.
Conlon, Frank F. 1977. Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat B
c. 1700-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Coornaert, Emile, ed. 1933. Projet d'une Dixme Royale-Suivi de deux ecrits fi
par Vauban. Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan.
Deshmukh, V. S. 1988. "Scrutiny of Scheduled Certificates: Why and How?" G
ment of Maharashtra- Tribal Research Bulletin 10,2.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2002. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Mod
dia. Indian edition. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. "The Productive Technology of Individuals" in Luther H. Mar-
tin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with
Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 145-62
Gokhale, Balkrishna. 1988. Poona in the Eighteenth Century. Delhi: Oxford Universi-
ty Press.
Grant, Charles, ed. 1984. The Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India-1870.
Reprinted, Delhi: Usha Publications.
Guha, Sumit. 1998. "Lower Strata, Older Races, and Aboriginal Peoples: Racial An-
thropology and Mythical History Past and Present," Journal of Asian Studies 57, 2
(May):423-41.
. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity in India c.1200-1991. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Habib, Irfan. 1963. The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1526-1707. Bombay: Asia
Publishing House.
Jalal, Ayesha. 2000. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Is-
lam. New York: Routledge.
Jarrett, H. S. and Jadunath Sarkar. 1949. Ain-IAkbari, 3 vols. (translated from Persian).
Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Kenneth W. Jones. 1981. "Religious Identity and the Indian Census," in N. Gerald Bar-
rier, ed., The Census in British India: New Perspectives. Delhi: Manohar, 73-102.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. [1992] 1999. "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Partha Chatter-
jee and Gyanendra Pandey, eds., Subaltern Studies VII. Delhi: Oxford India Paper-
backs, 1-39.
. 1997. "Introduction," in S. Kaviraj, ed., Politics in India. Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1-30.
Khan, Yusuf Husain, ed. 1958. Selected Documents of Aurangzeb's Reign 1658-1706
A.D. Hyderabad: Central Records Office, Government of Andhra Pradesh.
Khare, Ganesh H., 1973. Aitihasika Farsi Lekha-Sahava Khand. Pune: Bharata Itihasa
Samshodhaka Mandala.
Khondkar Fuzlee Rubbee. [1897] 1968. "On the Origins of the Mussulmans of Bengal,"
reprinted in Journal of the East Pakistan History Association 1, 1: 1-70
Kothari, Rajni and Maru, Rushikesh. 1970. "Federating for Political Interests: The Ksha-
triyas of Gujarat," in Rajni Kothari, ed., Caste in Indian Politics. Delhi: Orient Long-
man, 70-101.
Kulkami, Bhimrao, ed. 1987. Chatrapati Srisivajimaharajance Adya Caritra-Sab-
hasad Bakhar Pune: Anmol Prakashan.
Lakshminarayana. 1992. "The Problem of Pseudotribals in Maharashtra." Government
of Maharashtra--Tribal Research Bulletin 14, 2.
Mackintosh, James. 1851. The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James
Mackintosh Complete in One Volume, second edition. London: Longman, Green,
Brown and Longman.
Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton, eds. 1988. Technologies of the Self:
A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Moosvi, Shireen. 1987. The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595: A Statistical Study.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of
Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Oturkar, Rajaram V. 1950. Pesvekalina Samajik va Arthik Patravyavahara. Pune: Bha-
rata Itihasa Samshodhak Mandala.
Peabody, Norbert. 2001. "Cents, Cents and Census: Human Inventories in Late Pre-
colonial and Early Colonial India." Comparative Studies in Society and History 43,
3:819-50.
Philips, Cyril, H., ed. 1962. The Evolution of India and Pakistan 1858-1947: S
Documents. London: Oxford University Press.
Rizvi, S.A.A., ed. 1957. Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh-Source Material. K
pur: Publications Bureau of the Government of Uttar Pradesh.
Sakariya, Badriprasad, ed. 1984. Mumhta Nainsi-ri Khyat. Jodhpur: Rajasthan Orien
Research Institute.
Srinivas, M. N. 1972. Social Change in Modern India, Indian Edition. Delhi: Or
Longman.
Wills, C. U. 1923. Rajgond Maharajas of the Satpura Hills. Nagpur: Central Provinces
Government Press.

1

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

1

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c.

INTRODUCTION: WAS THE COLONIAL CENSUS A TEMPLATE

An important part of the by now enormous literature on nationalism has focu

the advent of modernity (typically represented in south Asia as coeval

manifest membership of the community: both to fellow members and t

largely concurs, although he times the change differently, and holds

CENSUSES AND IDENTITIES

In this paper I focus on enumeration-often adduced as

IDENTIFYING AND COUNTING IN MUGHAL INDIA

By the late seventeenth century the Mughal empire domin

community council assembled at Pune under state supervision. In March 17

EARLY COLONIAL ENUMERATIONS

The arrival of colonial rule did not initially change classificat

A century later after Vauban, the development of demograph

from 1820 to 1822. Bemusement is manifest in the very titles of some of th

POLITICAL FRAMEWORKS AND IDENTITY STRATEGIES UNDER

COLONIALISM AND AFTER

The political norm in pre-British times was that of vertical

communities, and a widening franchise-culminating in adult suffrage after in-

selves as belonging to various tribes. In east-central Maharashtra, 661,000 tri

It seems irrefutable that any study of the changes that t

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presente

ty years later as a separately paginated appendix to volume 2 of Report of the Census

Unpublished sources: These are manuscripts in Marathi and En

Você também pode gostar