Caste and Race in India c12.46

c12.46

It is difficult to see any valid public reason for this elaborate treatment of caste in the Census-reports. The Government have never avowed their intention of helping every caste to retain its numbers and prosperity. Nor have they any time helped a particular caste because it registered numerical decline or economic dislocation. Not even the declared policy of the Provincial Governments to provide special representation either by election or nomination to certain classes of people necessitates an enumeration of the people by their castes. For this representation is not dependent on numbers. It is not proportional. All that the particular officers of the Government have to do is to determine in the light of their experience whether a particular person is one who can legitimately claim to belong to one of the three large groups of the population, devised for political purposes. And a Court of Law in any disputed case will settle the point by reference to the usual practice of the people. The conclusion is unavoidable that the intellectual curiosity of some of the early officials is mostly responsible for the treatment of caste given to it in the Census, which has been progressively elaborate in each successive Census since 1872. The total result has been, as we have seen, a livening up of the caste-spirit.