URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=55153
(Indian Express - September 16, 2004)
CENSUS SENSATION, PART- II
the way we indians are
An irrelevant enumeration
The concept of the Census itself is a colonial and retrograde one designed to benefit an imperialist master.
SHARDUL CHATURVEDI
The debate in the media about the ‘implications’ of Muslim growth is nauseating. The Parivar is jumping with a sense of triumph. Their age-old allegation about Muslims multiplying faster than Hindus have been proved, by a secular agency, under a secular government. Secular gharanas are silent, understandably so, they have routinely dismissed this knowledge as communal propaganda. Now they have nowhere to look.
About thirty years after they silenced the last rebel gun in the great revolt, the British decided to make sense of the country they had come to acquire. And from this curiosity, arose the most novel and extraordinary endeavour of human mapping: the Census. Quite understandably, the British did not know where or how to begin, for Indians needed to be defined, classified, measured, numbered and put in categories. What were these categories? Who were to devise them? These were the daunting questions our benevolent masters faced, and not for the first time in their rule and certainly not for the last, they settled for the easiest and the most damaging answer.
They summoned a bunch of Maulvis and Brahmins to Calcutta, sat them down, and settled once and for all, the fundamental definitions of a Hindu and a Muslim. Maulvisque and Brahmanical perspectives — parochial, textual, and most certainly very communal — gave the British their basic understanding of Islam and Hinduism. We were defined hence by our most fundamentalist representatives; men who often knew little beyond their Arabic and Sanskrit texts and had very little connections with the actual anthropological realities of India. And with such categories in hand, British officers jumped into the Indian leviathan, numbering and categorising people, deciding their races, observing their noses, measuring their jaw structures, categorising them as Moslems, Hindoos, Parsees, Sikhs, martial, effeminate, brave, treacherous, criminal, thugs, genteel.
More often than not, Indian realities did not fit into the categories given to the British by Indian ‘representatives’. It was tough to decide whether Punjabi Rajput Muslims in what is now Pakistan, were culturally Muslims, Rajputs or Punjabi. But the thumb rule was: when people did not fall into categories, categories were clamped on to them. This was the great Census of 1881, which rather than generating identities from Indians, imposed them on the people, often herding them into categories they themselves did not comprehend. But soon, informed of who they were, and how much in numbers, of what race, how brave, how respectable, and the rest, Indians quickly internalised the knowledge, and started believing, behaving, demanding, combining and aspiring according to their newly found categories.
Rajputs ‘realised’ that they were warriors, Sikhs — martial, Brahmins — intellectuals, Mewatis — Muslims, Tamils — Dravidians, Punjabis — Aryans and Muslims — a new category — minority. From that day we can safely date Muslim distrust in number politics and in democracy, and the Hindu confidence in it.
The Census of 1881 is widely seen as an event of huge consequence in Indian self-image and identity. Unsurprisingly, it marks the beginning of the politics of identity — of communalism, casteism, and racism of the Aryan-Dravidian type. Besides, most Indians, when they learnt that they were not ‘adequately’ something, became more desperate to mimic the prototype. Categories were hardened, genealogies purified, languages codified and accents chastened. And the Census, a complete colonial artefact in methodology and intent, continues to replicate itself in our times, provoking similar responses, fears and demands.
Indians who follow Islam continue to be seen as ‘‘Muslims’’ — an almost homogenous monolithic block, and when we are informed that there is something called the Muslim growth rate, we believe in it, though it would be fairly obvious to an even casual observer that Muslims and Hindus of the same class grow at the same rate. Muslims grow faster because more Indian Muslims belong to the lower classes than Indian Hindus and if Muslims were compared to the Hindus of the corresponding classes, the similarity would be striking. But then our Census sees people in terms of their religion, not class, which could be another, perhaps fairer method of understanding people, because members of the same class show social and cultural similarities, which very often members of the same community do not. Most upper classes, for instance, show a decline in the rate of reproduction, irrespective of religion.
Except the Jains, who have startled all by their alarming rate of growth, and given that most Jains in India are not particularly poor, there needs to be serious examination of their growth rate. And I am alarmed, not because they constitute any threat to India, but over the simple issue of population explosion. In the similar way I am disappointed that lower and lower middle-class Muslims have not taken to family planning. Addressing such an issue requires complex and sensitive responses, certainly more sensitive than seeing Muslim growth as a threat to the country.
The threat logic is confusing. Venkaiah Naidu wants us to believe that if Muslims continue to grow at the current rate, they would soon imbalance the demographic equilibrium and threaten national security. How? By simply overtaking Hindus in numbers? That might, hypothetically, change the cultural idiom of the nation state, but why and how would that threaten national security?
The writer is a history scholar who completed his research from Oxford University.
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