The Census That Counted Caste and the Category It May Have Made

In 1931 a British administrator in India counted the population of a subcontinent by caste for what would turn out to be the last full time. The first synchronous Census of India had been held in 1881, and for half a century its clerks asked every household to name a caste, sorted the answers into tables, and bound the tables into volumes that ran to thousands of pages. After independence the Republic chose to stop asking, except about Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The questions fell silent. Yet the numbers from 1931 did not. Nearly fifty years later the Mandal Commission built its estimate that other backward classes made up about fifty two percent of the population on the old figures, and the arithmetic of Indian reservation has leaned on that count ever since.

The long silence ended noisily. In October 2023 the Government of Bihar published the findings of a state survey, which reported that extremely backward classes formed about thirty six percent of the state and other backward classes about twenty seven percent, together a little over sixty three percent. The extremely backward classes, a group often missing from public debate, proved to be the single largest bloc in the state. Other states and parties took up the demand, and in 2025 the Union Government announced that caste enumeration would be included in the next national census. The country that had stopped counting was preparing to count again.