British census classification hardened caste ranks and made Hindu demographic decline politically charged.

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

• QUESTION: The 44.5M Untouchables vs 8.8M Black Americans in 1930 — a striking comparison point worth chasing: scale of the stakes in US civil-rights vs Indian anti-caste politics.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘state census freezes identity’ argument familiar from scholarship on the British Raj and from James C. Scott’s legibility thesis.