From Census of nearly a century ago, a roadmap — and a note of caution

Indian Express

03-05-2025

The government's surprise announcement of a caste census as part of the upcoming population enumeration exercise may have dented the Opposition's campaign but the experience of John Henry Hutton, an anthropologist-civil servant from nearly a century ago, frames the challenge on the road ahead.
Those were the heady days of Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience movement. Hutton, a Yorkshire-born, Oxford-trained officer who as Census Commissioner of India conducted the 1931 Census, the last to tabulate data on caste, writes with a hint of annoyance that the exercise 'had the misfortune to coincide with a wave of non-cooperation, and the march of Mr. Gandhi and his contrabandistas…'.
Hutton, who joined the Indian Civil Service in 1909 and served for the greater part of his career in the Naga hills writing two voluminous monographs on Naga ethnography, brought to his census office his experience as an anthropologist.
On the complexities of counting caste, his census report, laced with insight and wit, refers to former census chief Sir Herbert Risley, whose formulation of the caste system as a racial hierarchy in the 1901 Census laid the basis for subsequent surveys and policies on caste.
'All subsequent census officers in India must have cursed the day when it occurred to Sir Herbert Risley… to attempt to draw up a list of castes according to their rank in society. He failed, but the results of his attempt are almost as troublesome as if he had succeeded, for every census gives rise to a pestiferous deluge of representations, accompanied by highly problematic histories, asking for recognition of some alleged fact or hypothesis of which the census as a department is not legally competent to judge…' he wrote in the section titled 'The Return of Caste'.
Saying that doing away with caste entries 'would be viewed with relief by census officers', Hutton wrote, 'Experience at this census has shown very clearly the difficulty of getting a correct return of caste and likewise the difficulty of interpreting it for census purposes.'
Among the many challenges the census officials faced as they asked people to identify their caste was 'misrepresentation' and people used the data collection exercise to jostle for a higher spot on the social order. The census also offered examples of multiple castes consolidating into a single caste for bolstering their numbers or claiming a new social status.
'The best instance of such a tendency to consolidate a number of castes into one group is to be found in the grazier castes which aim at combining under the term 'Yadava' the Ahirs, Goalas, Gopis, Idaiyans and perhaps some other castes of milkmen, a movement already effective in 1921,' the report said.
It also noted that 'carpenters, smiths, goldsmiths and some others of similar occupations desired in various parts of India to be returned by a common denomination such as Vishwakarma or Jangida, usually desiring to add a descriptive noun implying that they belonged to one of the highest Varnas of Hinduism, either Brahman or Rajput… Of the two, Brahman was usually desired at this census though in some cases a caste which had applied in one province to be Brahman asked in another to be called Rajput and there are several instances at this census of castes claiming to be Brahman who claimed to be Rajput ten years ago.'
The census explained these as attempts either at upward mobility, a 'desire to rise in the social estimation of other people', or 'a desire for the backing of a large community in order to count for more in political life'.
Despite the complexities the exercise involved, the anthropologist in Hutton recorded the social benefits of counting caste. Addressing the criticism 'for taking any note at all of the fact of caste', he wrote, 'It has been alleged that the mere act of labelling persons belonging to a caste tends to perpetuate the system… It is, however, difficult to see why the record of a fact that actually exists should tend to stabilize that existence. It is just as easy to argue and with at least as much truth, that it is impossible to get rid of any institution by ignoring its existence like the proverbial ostrich… Indeed the treatment of caste at the 1931 census may claim to make a definite, if minute, contribution to Indian unity.'
Recent scholarship, including Nicholas B Dirks's Castes of Mind (2001), has, however, argued that under colonialism, caste became a 'single term capable of naming… subsuming India's diverse forms' and that census operations such as Hutton's reinvented and essentialised caste – rather than simply capturing what was already there.
Hutton's report quotes from the Government of India's instructions on counting the 'depressed classes' (defined as 'castes, contact with whom entails purification on the part of high caste Hindus'). In these instructions are both a roadmap and a forewarning for what lies ahead.
'It will be necessary to have a list of castes to be included in depressed classes and all provinces are asked to frame a list applicable to the province. There are very great difficulties in framing a list of this kind and there are insuperable difficulties in framing a list of depressed classes which will be applicable to India as a whole,' read the instructions that were issued to various Superintendents of Census Operations.
Hutton's prediction that, with time, there will be other ways to represent demographic data — beyond caste and religion – is open to debate to this day. 'The time will no doubt come when occupation will serve the purpose at present served by religion and caste in presenting demographic data, but that time is not yet, and at the present moment their barriers have not so far decayed that their social importance cannot be ignored for public purposes, though progress in this direction may well prove much than one anticipates,' he had said.
The following Census, in 1941, though caste details were collected, it was dropped from the final tabulation. Hutton's successor, M Y M Yeatts, a Scott whose term as Census Commissioner coincided with limitations imposed by World War II, wrote, 'The time is past for this enormous and costly table as part of the central undertaking and I share Dr. Hutton's views expressed ten years ago. With so constricted a financial position and with so many fields awaiting an entry there is no justification for spending lakhs on this detail.'
In the 1951 Census, in a newly Independent India shaped by the ideals of equality and secularism, the government led by Jawaharlal Nehru decided there would be no caste enumeration.
Hutton, meanwhile, tapped into his experience to write Caste in India, considered an authoritative source on the subject. He retired from the Indian Civil Service in 1936 and moved to Britain, where he continued his academic work and was elected to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, then among the most prestigious academic positions in British anthropology. He died at his home in Wales on May 23, 1968 – over two decades before the Mandal Commission reshaped the salience of caste in society and politics.