COUNTING PEOPLE, CREATING IDENTITIES: COLONIAL CENSUS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN BRITISH INDIA, 1871–1941, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE PUNJAB

Abstract

Between the first all-India enumeration of 1871–72 and the wartime census of 1941, the British colonial state counted the population of the subcontinent eight times. This article argues that the decennial census was not a passive mirror of Indian society but an instrument that reorganised how Indians named, ranked, and mobilised themselves, and it tests that argument against the province where the stakes of enumeration proved highest: the Punjab. Drawing on the all-India and Punjab census reports, contemporary Indian writings, and recent regional scholarship, it traces three processes. First, the census converted overlapping affiliations into fixed and exclusive categories of caste, religion, and tribe. Second, by ranking castes and, after 1909, tying communal numbers to political representation, it gave Indians strong incentives to contest their classification. Third, in Punjab these incentives left measurable traces in the returns themselves: the Hindu share of the province’s population fell from 43.8 to 29.1 per cent between 1881 and 1941, with abrupt breaks in 1911 and 1931 that reflect changes in self-description as much as in belief. A case study of the Ad-Dharm movement, which won recognition as a separate religion in the 1931 census, shows how a subordinated community turned census categories to its own ends. The article interprets the census as a site of co-production between colonial governmentality and Indian agency, and follows its legacy into the disputed Pakistani censuses of 2017 and 2023.