The caste census has emerged as a flashpoint in Indian politics. What the Congress now champions as a weapon of social justice, the BJP once opposed as a threat to Hindu unity—only to embrace it strategically. But beneath this political tussle lies an important question: can counting castes dismantle caste itself, or does enumeration merely harden the very divisions it claims to expose?
Anand Teltumbde, scholar, activist, and author, brings a sceptical eye to this debate. In his latest book, The Cell and the Soul, he traces how colonial census operations transformed caste from a fluid, locally varied practice into a rigid, state-certified hierarchy. The British didn’t invent caste, he argues, but they froze it, ranked it, and made it the grammar of modern Indian politics.
Today, as India contemplates a fresh round of caste enumeration, Teltumbde warns that the exercise could repeat history’s mistakes. Without a radical commitment to redistribution and structural change, he suggests, a caste census risks becoming just another instrument of political management—fragmenting communities, stoking competition for shrinking resources, and deflecting attention from the State’s abdication of its basic responsibilities in education, health, and livelihood security.
Edited excerpts:
The caste census is widely seen as progressive politics. But you see it differently. What prompted you to write this book?
Yes, the caste census is projected as progressive politics, but my view is more cautious. I’ve been sceptical due to three counts: First, on principle, I believe caste cannot be meaningfully measured. Despite what the colonial and modern state assume, caste is not a fixed or uniform category—it remains fluid, context-bound, and mutable. To reduce it to a statistical unit is to distort its very nature. Caste is like an amoeba; it splits and is never stable.
Second, even if we take a pragmatic view and decide to count caste, the methodology becomes decisive. The process is not neutral; it is deeply political. How castes are listed, aggregated, or validated will inevitably be shaped by power relations and competing interests.
Third, even if we overcome these hurdles and generate reasonably accurate data, a caste census can only offer a snapshot—a mirror, not a remedy. What we do with those numbers depends entirely on the political will of the state. Without a genuine commitment to redistribution and social justice, data by itself achieves little.
So, my scepticism arises not from denying caste’s significance, but from recognising its complexity. Unless we rethink both the purpose and the politics of enumeration, a caste census risks reproducing the very hierarchies it claims to expose. I have an additional point against the caste census. It is deflecting our focus further from the basic issue: the states’ responsibility to provide for basic capacity-building of people through education, healthcare, and livelihood security.
In your chapter on the colonial construction of caste, you discuss how British rule solidified the caste system through census. Could you explain this?
The British did not invent caste, but they fundamentally transformed it. Before colonial rule, caste was a fluid and locally varied social arrangement—its meanings and hierarchies changed from region to region [lack of means of communication]. What the British did, through the caste census and their obsession with classification, was to convert this fluid, context-dependent system into a rigid, pan-Indian structure.
They treated caste as if it were a fixed, scientific category—something that could be enumerated, ranked, and neatly ordered. Census officials relied on Brahmin informants, colonial ethnographies, and pseudo-scientific ideas of race to draw up hierarchies of “higher” and “lower” castes. The census became the principal instrument of this transformation. From the late 19th century onward—especially with the 1901 census under H.H. Risley—caste was treated as a fixed, quantifiable, and hierarchical system. Each community was assigned a definite place in an all-India order of precedence, largely on the basis of Brahminical notions of purity and pollution. These classifications were then built into administrative, educational, and employment policies. Once the state began to recognise and reward certain castes, caste identities hardened; people started organising themselves around these new official labels.
In short, what was once a flexible social practice became a bureaucratic reality. The colonial state gave caste a permanence and political significance it had never had before.
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You mention how various caste groups “formalised” their social status through the census between 1881 and 1931, such as the Bhumihar caste of north India. What was that process?
Yes, that’s an important aspect of how the colonial census didn’t just record caste—it reshaped it. Between 1881 and 1931, as caste became a formal category in the census, many communities saw an opportunity to negotiate or upgrade their social rank.
Groups that had local influence or new economic power—like the Bhumihars in north India, the Kayasthas, or Marathas in western India—began lobbying census officials to recognise them as “higher” castes. The Bhumihars, for instance, were landholding castes in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh who claimed Brahmin status, though others often saw them as Shudras. During the census operations, they organised petitions, produced genealogies, and mobilised political networks to convince the British that they were a Brahmin sub-caste.
This was not unique to them. Across India, castes began to use the colonial bureaucracy to seek official validation of higher ritual or social standing. Once such recognition appeared in the census reports, it carried enormous legitimacy—it became a state-sanctioned identity.
In this way, the census became a political battleground where caste groups formalised and even reinvented their identities to gain social prestige and material advantage.
How did the caste census accelerate caste-based political mobilisation during British rule?
The caste census didn’t just classify people—it politicised caste. Once caste identities were officially recorded and ranked by the colonial state, they gained unprecedented public visibility and administrative importance. Numbers suddenly mattered. Communities began to see that their share in education, jobs, and political representation depended on how they were counted and categorised.
This set off a wave of caste-based mobilisation. From the late 19th century, groups such as the non-Brahmin movement in the south, the Yadavs and Kurmis in the north, and the Mahars in western India began to organise themselves collectively, demand recognition, and press for reservations or political rights. The census provided both the data and the language for these claims.
In other words, by turning caste into a measurable and official category, the British made it the basis of modern politics. What had once been a social identity now became a political constituency.
An enumerator collects information from residents for a caste-based census in Bihar. As India debates the return of the caste census, critics warn that without a redistributive agenda, enumeration risks entrenching inequality instead of confronting it.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
How did the British reconstitute caste into a rigid system using the census? And how was this different from the earlier fluid system?
Before British rule, caste in India was not a single, uniform system. It was locally varied and context-dependent. The same caste name could mean different things in different regions. Boundaries between groups were often porous—mobility through occupation, wealth, or local power was possible. Caste functioned more as a set of customary relationships than as a fixed hierarchy.
The British, however, approached Indian society through the lens of classification. They wanted to map and govern it scientifically. Through the caste censuses—from 1871 to 1931—they treated caste as a stable, all-India system of ranked groups, each with a definite place in a hierarchy. Bureaucrats and ethnographers like H.H. Risley sought to arrange every community in order of purity and pollution, often equating caste with race.
This act of enumeration froze caste. It stripped away its regional flexibility and imposed a uniform, pan-Indian hierarchy. Once the state began using these categories in administration, education, and employment, they became real in people’s lives. Communities internalised these official identities and even began competing to move upward within this bureaucratic order.
So, what had been a fluid, socially negotiated system was reconstituted into a rigid, state-certified hierarchy. In short, the British transformed caste from a lived practice into an administrative fact.
It’s commonly said that the British used a divide-and-rule policy. Did the caste census aid this strategy?
Yes, the caste census became one of the key instruments of the British policy of “divide and rule”. When the British began enumerating Indians by caste, religion, and community, they weren’t merely collecting data—they were categorising society in ways that deepened its internal divisions.
By classifying and ranking castes, the British encouraged people to see themselves not as members of a broader society, but as part of distinct, competing groups. These divisions were then reflected in administration, education, and later in political representation. The British often used caste data to justify separate electorates, reserved posts, or preferential recruitment in the army and police.
This sowed rivalry among communities—each began to demand recognition, higher status, or a greater share of state benefits. It diverted attention from collective opposition to colonial rule and instead turned social groups against each other.
In that sense, the caste census perfectly served the British strategy of divide and rule: by fragmenting Indian society along officially recognised caste lines, it made unified resistance to colonial power much harder.
You also point out that the caste census helped the British enact laws that stigmatised entire communities or tribes. Could you explain?
Yes, that’s an important and disturbing outcome of the colonial use of caste data. Once the British classified Indian society by caste and tribe, they began to associate certain communities with particular moral or criminal traits. This so-called “scientific” mapping of society gave a bureaucratic legitimacy to prejudice.
Drawing on caste and ethnographic data, the British introduced the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, under which entire communities—many of them nomadic, pastoral, or tribal groups—were officially labelled as “hereditary criminals”. The logic was that criminality was a caste trait, passed down through birth, just as occupation was.
This was a direct extension of the mindset fostered by the caste census: if every community could be neatly categorised, then some could also be marked as inherently deviant. Thousands of people were forced into settlements, constantly surveilled, and denied the basic rights of citizenship.
So, the caste census not only froze social hierarchies but also provided the so-called empirical foundation for repressive colonial laws that criminalised identity itself. It institutionalised stigma through law.
You discuss reformist movements from Phule to Periyar in the context of the caste census. How did the census aid movements like Satyashodhak Samaj in Maharashtra or the Self-Respect movement in Tamil Nadu?
Yes, the caste census—though introduced as a colonial administrative exercise—had unintended political consequences. It gave reformers like Phule and later Periyar the empirical and ideological ground to challenge Brahminical domination.
When the British began publishing caste data, it exposed the sharp disproportions in education, landownership, and government employment. The numbers showed that Brahmins, though a tiny minority, held most of the power, while the vast majority of Shudras and Ati-Shudras were excluded. Jotirao Phule used this very evidence to argue that social inequality was not natural but constructed—and that the so-called lower castes had to unite to claim their share. His Satyashodhak Samaj thus became both a spiritual and social revolt, using the colonial state’s own data to question Brahmin hegemony.
Similarly, in the south, Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement drew upon census classifications and statistics to reveal how the Brahmin minority monopolised education and bureaucracy. These facts became the rallying point for a powerful non-Brahmin mobilisation that eventually reshaped Tamil politics.
So, while the caste census was meant to help the British “understand” and thereby control India, it also gave reformers a new vocabulary—of rights, representation, and equality—to challenge caste oppression. In that sense, it inadvertently armed the oppressed with the language of modern politics.
How did the number of castes increase from 4,000 in 1931 to 46 lakh in the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC)? What drove this explosion? And why is renewed caste enumeration risky?
In the 1931 Census, the last full caste count under the British, about 4,000 castes and sub-castes were listed. By the time of the SECC of 2011, that number had risen dramatically—to around 46 lakh caste names. This explosion didn’t happen because Indian society suddenly became more divided, but because the process of enumeration itself encouraged fragmentation and assertion.
JD(U) workers and supporters celebrate after the declaration of Bihar’s caste-based census report, in Patna, October 4, 2023. Teltumbde says caste cannot be meaningfully measured. To reduce it to a statistical unit is to distort its very nature—it is like an amoeba; it splits and is never stable.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
In your chapter, “What Led Us Here”, you call the caste census necessary—using Satish Deshpande’s term, the “nation’s selfie”. But you also urge caution. Why?
Yes, I do argue that a caste census is necessary—and I’ve used Satish Deshpande’s phrase, calling it the “nation’s selfie.” The idea is simple but powerful: just as a selfie shows us who we really are at a given moment, a caste census forces the nation to look at its own social reality—the hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions we often prefer to ignore.
For decades, we’ve had economic data, religious data, even data on forests and tigers, but not on caste, which continues to shape access to education, jobs, and dignity in India. Without such data, policies claiming to promote equality operate in the dark. So, a caste census is essential if we want to base social justice on evidence rather than assumption.
The BJP first opposed the caste census, fearing it would fracture Hindu unity. Now it has accepted it. How is the BJP manoeuvring here?
Yes, it’s true that the BJP initially opposed the caste census, arguing that it would fragment Hindu society and weaken “Hindu unity”. Their politics of Hindutva depend on projecting a single, undifferentiated Hindu identity that subsumes caste differences under a larger religious banner. A caste census, by making visible the deep inequalities within the Hindu fold, threatens that narrative.
However, the BJP’s acceptance of caste enumeration reflects political pragmatism, not conviction. After the Mandal-era resurgence of OBC politics and the recent demands for caste data from opposition parties, especially after Bihar’s caste survey, the BJP realised that it could not afford to be seen as opposing “social justice”. Instead, it has chosen to appropriate the discourse and control its direction.
By agreeing to the caste census now, the BJP aims to appear responsive to backwards-class aspirations while ensuring that the interpretation of data remains within its own ideological framework. It wants to turn the focus away from questions of inequality and redistribution toward symbolic recognition and selective welfare—using the numbers to reorganise political alliances, not to restructure power relations.
In that sense, the BJP is playing smartly: it is no longer denying caste but managing it politically—using data to consolidate, not challenge, its Hindutva project. It seeks to transform a potential instrument of social justice into a tool of electoral engineering.
The Modi government introduced the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota. Do you foresee the BJP using caste census data to argue for abolishing caste-based reservations in favour of economic or sub-caste classifications?
Yes, that possibility is quite real. The Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) quota introduced by the Modi government in 2019 was a major ideological shift—it marked the first time that reservation was extended purely on economic grounds, and explicitly to the upper castes. In doing so, the BJP subtly redefined the logic of affirmative action: from compensating for historical injustice to addressing present economic disadvantage.
Now, with the proposed caste census, the government will acquire data showing how each caste fares socio-economically. This opens the door for a new narrative: that caste-based reservations have outlived their purpose, and that the system should now move toward economic or intra-caste sub-categorisation. The BJP can then claim to be making the system more “rational” and “fair”, while in reality diluting the principle of social justice that Ambedkar and the Constitution envisioned.
Such a shift would serve multiple political purposes: it would appease the upper castes who feel threatened by growing demands from OBCs and Dalits, while also fragmenting the backward classes through internal sub-categories. The government could claim to champion “social balance” and “merit” even as it erodes the redistributive core of the reservation policy.
So yes, I do foresee this direction—a gradual reframing of reservations from a historical and moral remedy to a technocratic, economic tool. It’s a way of disarming the caste question without dismantling caste hierarchy—a strategy that fits perfectly with both Hindutva politics and neoliberal governance.
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How do you view the Congress’s demand for a caste census? The party avoided it for years. Why has it now made this its main electoral plank?
Yes, the Congress demanding a caste census today marks a sharp shift from its historical position. For decades, the party avoided this issue—partly because it feared that acknowledging caste divisions would undermine its image as a party of national unity, and partly because its leadership, drawn largely from upper castes, was uncomfortable with the Mandal-style politics of social justice.
The Congress long relied on a broad, catch-all coalition—secularism, nationalism, and welfare—without confronting caste head-on. But as Mandal politics reshaped the Hindi heartland and as the BJP successfully mobilised OBCs within the Hindutva fold, the Congress’s hesitation turned into a strategic blunder. It lost both moral and electoral ground.
Now, by making the caste census an electoral plank, the Congress is trying to reclaim the language of equality and representation—to project itself as a party that will ensure fair distribution of resources and power according to population. However, the move also reflects political compulsion rather than ideological conviction. The Congress has realised that it cannot counter Hindutva with abstract secularism or welfare populism alone; it needs to address the concrete structure of caste inequality that defines everyday life in India.
Whether this shift becomes transformative depends on whether the party treats the caste census merely as an electoral slogan or as a basis for restructuring its own social coalition and policies. Without internal ideological clarity and commitment to radical redistribution, the Congress risks appearing as a late convert to a politics it long ignored.
You’re not convinced that the caste census alone will address widening inequalities. What should the government be doing instead?
Yes, I do support the caste census—but I am not convinced it is, by itself, the solution to India’s widening inequalities. A caste census is only a diagnostic tool, not the cure. It can tell us where inequalities lie, but it cannot correct them. The real question is what the state does after it knows the facts.
In today’s India, inequalities are no longer just caste-based—they are being reinforced by neoliberal economic policies: jobless growth, privatisation of education and health, and withdrawal of the state from social sectors. The result is a double exclusion—where the poor are marginalised both economically and socially. Merely counting castes without addressing these structural forces will not bring justice.
What the government should be doing is rebuilding the foundations of equality by investing massively in public education, health, and employment, expanding social security beyond token welfare, ensuring land and resource redistribution, and redesigning affirmative action to focus on universal basic empowerment before selective benefits.
Caste data can certainly help target policies, but without a redistributive economic vision, it will only lead to competitive victimhood—each caste demanding a larger share of a shrinking pie.
So, my argument is: yes, take the selfie, but then act on what you see. A caste census must be linked to a radical programme of social and economic transformation, otherwise it risks becoming just another political slogan.
