British census categories froze caste hierarchies and made Untouchable defection a demographic catastrophe

Evidence

Under the new dispensation, demography became vitally important. The empirical taxonomy of the British census had solidified and freeze-dried the rigid but not entirely inflexible hierarchy of caste, adding its own prejudices and value judgements to the mix, classifying entire communities as ‘criminals’ and ‘warriors’ and so on. The Untouchable castes were entered under the accounting head ‘Hindu’. (In 1930, according to Ambedkar, the Untouchables numbered about 44.5 million. The population of African Americans in the US around the same time was 8.8 million.) The large-scale exodus of Untouchables from the ‘Hindu fold’ would have been catastrophic for the ‘Hindu’ majority. In pre-partition, undivided Punjab, for example, between 1881 and 1941, the Hindu population dropped from 43.8 per cent to 29.1 per cent, due largely to the conversion of the subordinated castes to Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 144

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the modern caste-census debates and to Benedict Anderson’s work on census as an instrument of colonial governance categorizing populations.
• SEED: Angle: ‘How the census created Hindu nationalism’ — the demographic panic sparked by enumeration drove the very identity politics that now dominates India.

Related

• British census classification hardened caste ranks and made Hindu demographic decline politically charged. (similarity 0.95)
• British census counted Untouchables as Hindu, making their defection numerically threatening. (similarity 0.85)