While the government has decided to make changes in the ongoing Census exercise to include a headcount on the basis of caste,80 years ago,a young officer of the Indian Civil Service seems to have been in two minds about it. John Henry Hutton was Census Commissioner of India in 1931,the last time a caste-based Census was carried out. Those were the heady days of Mahatma Gandhis civil disobedience movement and the salt satyagraha and Hutton writes with a hint of annoyance that the Census had the misfortune to coincide with a wave of non-cooperation,and the march of Mr. Gandhi and his contrabandistas synchronised with the opening of Census operations. Hutton also had to deal with a Congress boycott of the Census and criticism leveled at the British for politicising caste. Hutton,an Oxford-trained anthropologist and an expert on castes,tackles the issue in his report on the Census of India. A certain amount of criticism has been directed at the Census for taking any note at all of the fact of caste. It has been alleged that the mere act of labeling persons as 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 stabilise 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 a proverbial ostrich, he writes in Chapter XII,Caste,Tribe and Race,in the section titled The Return of Caste. Thats just what those arguing in favour of including questions on caste in the 2011 Census would want to hear. Can you ignore a social reality by simply shutting your eyes? Hutton joined the Indian Civil Service in 1909 and spent most of his administrative career as Deputy Commissioner in Assam,particularly in the Naga Hills. He was an authority on the Nagas,visiting previously unvisited Naga territory and spoke the Sema Naga language fluently. So when he was appointed Census Commissioner in 1929,Hutton applied his anthropological knowledge to carry out what was a daunting exercise even then. Caste then was as tricky an issue as it is now. So if at one point in the report,it seems as if Hutton thought a caste Census was a natural thing to do in India,in the same chapter he talks of the practical problems involved. 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, he says. Hutton writes about how people used the Census to move up the social order,as a vehicle for what latter-day sociologists call Sanskritisation. To illustrate his point,Hutton quotes from a report of the Superintendent of Census Operations for Madras: For example,an extremely dark individual pursuing the occupation of waterman on the Coorg border described his caste as Suryavamsa,the family of the sun. Ironically,decades later,in Independent India,its a different kind of caste shuffling. Here,in the post-Mandal,quota era,the Gujjars,for instance,fought a pitched battled to be moved from the OBC list to the ST list,eventually settling for special reservation as a special backward class. In his report,Hutton asked for the abandonment of enumerating caste,saying it cast an unavoidable burden on the Census administration. He criticises Herbert Risley,Census Commissioner in 1901,who ranked castes in the Census according to their social standing. 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,of which the Census as a department is not legally competent to judge. For these reasons,an abandonment of the return of caste would be viewed with relief by census officers. It did happen that way and Huttons Census of India was the last to ask for details of caste,though for entirely different reasons. The last Census to be conducted by the British was in 1941,in the middle of World War II,and that did not tabulate any data except the basic population and caste wasnt counted. Independent India decided to do away with caste as a parameter in the Census,with the Constitution refusing to discriminate on grounds of caste. Eighty years later,Census 2011 will take off from where Hutton left.
