The Census, Political Economy, and Identity Formation in Colonial India

This article provides a sociohistorically contextualized understanding of the census in India, situating it among activities pursued by the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce constituted under Lord Mayo's viceroyalty in 1871. The census was motivated by concerns of a specifically political economic, as distinct from colonial governmental nature. While knowledge about Indian society was an important consideration, such concerns were ultimately in service of improving colonial capitalism. These findings have implications for understanding the shift in ethnic identities brought on by the census, or what Bernard S. Cohn terms "objectification." The coagulation of identity occurred at the interstices of aspirations for enhanced respectability and social mobility, the mediating role of the census, and the wider context of capitalist social relations. Such changes were the result of a dialectical process of exchange between colonial capitalism and the Indian peoples, in which the census formed one of the deep structures.