Census

Alpasankhyataru Mattu Jaati Vyavasthe: Asmite, Vasahatushahi mattu Misalati (In Kannada; Minorities and Caste System: Identity, Coloniality and Reservations) by Muzaffar Assadi, Bengaluru: Bahurupi, 2021; pp 264, `300 (hardcover).

Numbers in India’s Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics by Ankush Agrawal and Vikas Kumar, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020; pp 397, `945.

The Uncounted by Alex Cobham, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020; pp 227, price not mentioned.

Sex ratios in India have been declining for decades, and “missing girls” are a serious social and political problem. Drawing on subdistrict-level data from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses and detailed data on women’s education and fertility, we show that more-educated mothers have fewer girl children than less-educated mothers, but that these girls are also more likely to survive. The policy implication of these findings is that among uneducated mothers, the focus should be on child treatment and survival; among educated mothers, attitudinal campaigns that emphasise the value of having girl children are likely to be more successful.

Often cited as an exemplary form of the epistemological violence wrought by the British colonial rule in much postcolonial inquiry, the 1872 Census merits closer analysis in the context of wider 19th-century conversations about the so-called science of statistics. An in-depth study of the processes and reports reveals that the village munduls were in fact indispensable to the actual work of enumeration and the singular figure of “indigenous agency.” The role they played constituted an important condition of the possibility of implementing the census in late 19th-century Bengal.