Official Statistics and Colonial Census of 1872: Cartography, and the Narration of Caste and Criminal Tribes

The debate about the Census of 1872 in colonial India is exemplary of the argument developed in this text in two ways. First, it is one of the most telling instances of the process of identity construction, especially of the criminal types and the savage tribes. Second, it was hailed by Orientalist scholars as the colonial officials with what they presumed to be a neat distinction between themselves and the people of India. Most notably, and to return to General Booth's comment on the first Indian census, it contains a double irony. At a more general level, it constructs the people of India within an Occidental discourse. Essentially, the census was a British device, framed within British assumptions of the collection of data within modernity. At a more practical level, though, the example of the Census shows how a seemingly hegemonic narrative of the people of India can also function, through its very ideals and values, to open up spaces for alternative voices. What is most revealing about the census is that the people of India so constituted, especially the low-caste as well as the Brahmins, disrupted the chronology and the classification of the census. More pointedly, the subjects challenged, through adopting various techniques of resistance and power, the very forms of identity in which they were supposedly being constructed. Significant is how different technologies of power and modes of resistance were undertaken, by various castes and groups in India to represent themselves in the ever-changing nature of their societies after the arrival of the Europeans. What is often overlooked by historians is how the chronological ordering of the census, an important imperial document, was also disrupted by respondents, who chose to answer questions that reflected their own construction of a response, rather than one that would meet their perception of an identity that could be slotted into the alien instrument.