The Economic and Political Weekly
September 25, 2004 (Census 2001 and religion data)
Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective
The census has always been used by communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities, particularly the Muslim. Census data has been an instrument not just for enumeration, but also for comparison.
by Charu Gupta
It has been pointed out by many scholars like Arjun Appadurai, Bernard Cohn and Kenneth Jones that since the time the first census appeared in India during colonial rule, it has become an absolutely critical tool for Hindu communal forces. It is used as an instrument which uses the façade of statistical data to produce yet another story of mangled bodies and torn minds. The census has been used by the Hindu communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities. The Hindu religion here becomes the Hindu comunity counted and compared in hard numbers with other communities, particularly Muslims. Thus, census data historically has been used not just for enumeration but also for comparison.
The discursive power of Hindu communalism actually does not spring exclusively from single texts or even a chain of them. It creates a popular network of tropes and themes, to provide a single mobile trope, which has immense potency and amazing flexibility. In 1979, the Hindu Mahasabha brought out a publication called They Count Their Gains, We Calculate Our Losses, which raised the scare of a growing Muslim population and again used census data in a distorted manner. Earlier in 1925, Swami Shraddhanand had declared that he had been seized by the problem of the 'dying out' of 'the Hindu race'. And as early as 1912 there was a pamphlet published in Calcutta by U N Mukherjee, entitled Hindus – A Dying Race, which was actually to become a part of the Hindu communal 'common sense'. Population fears have thus been especially 'used' by communal discourses to construct myths of 'dying Hindus' and perceptions of declining Hindu numbers. In fact, the British colonialists used such constructed fears effectively for their policy of divide and rule. O'Donnell, the census commissioner for 1891, on the basis of slower population growth rates of Hindus relative to the Muslims, leapfrogged across simple statistical logic to deduce the number of years it would take for the Hindus to disappear altogether! Jagatguru Shankaracharya in a Mahasabha meeting at Nasik in 1925 claimed that with such rates it would just take one century for Hindus to disappear completely!
Such statistical formulations aided the Hindu fear of numerical decline, which became much more intense in the specific context of the 1920s, in the context of 'sangathan'/'shuddhi' and increasing communal riots. The 1921 Census stated:
Both relatively and absolutely Hindus have lost…Hindus have decreased during the last decade by 347 per 10,000, or just under 3.5 per cent.
Using this, a tract written in 1922, titled Hinduon ka Sangrakshan aur Atmarakshan stated:
Some Hindus argue that what do we have to do with increasing our numbers. We should be more concerned with preserving the seed of our true Aryan identity. Dear, what do you mean by the protection of the seed? In every census, the number of Hindus is decreasing while that of Muslims and Christians is increasing. And you are just concerned with the protection of the seed! Our aim should be to increase the numbers first and foremost.
The changes in the Hindu population were lamented for example in a tract called Hinduon ke Sath Vishwasghat, saying that from 33 crore, the numbers had now been reduced to a mere 20 crore. Using the statistics from 1911 and 1921 Censuses, it was said that over the 10 years, Hindus had been reduced in number by 8 lakhs while Muslims had increased by 21 lakhs. If this continued, after some years, no Arya would be found in India. Newspapers, magazines and even caste journals propounded similar myths, with catchy titles like 'Hinduon ka Bhayankar Haas'. The numerically defined strength of the community has thus historically been a significant component of communal consciousness, helping in stabilising Hindu communal identities around new orientations. Bhai Parmanand, a leading light of the Hindu Mahasabha stated that the main reason for the Hindu-Muslim conflict was the question of numbers, where Muslims were constantly increasing and Hindus declining. In such a situation, the main aim of shuddhi and sangathan was to stop the decline of Hindu numbers. And this, of course, ties in with the current conversion debates too.
There are serious implications for questions of gender and sexuality, and here again I am going to specifically refer to Hindu communalism by offering a fragment from historical data. The example can provide, I think, some linkages to the current conversion debates as well. I will highlight here very briefly the shifting nature of the debate on widow remarriage, when linked to the censuses. The Census Report of 1911 for UP, for example, not only acknowledged that Muslims were more prolific in comparison to Hindus, but also linked this fertility to the status of widows:
It has long been known that Musalmans are more fertile than Hindus and that their chances of life are better: and the figures of the last decade merely strengthen this view…The prohibition of the remarriage of widows does not affect the Muhammadan. The figures bear this out…The Muhammadan widows are only 14 per cent of the female population as against 17 per cent among Hindus…At the child-bearing ages (15-40), when this factor will chiefly effect the rate of increase, under 3 per cent of Muhammadan women are widows whilst the Hindu rate is over 4 per cent.
Hindu propagandists, while highlighting the alleged decline of Hindus and the simultaneous proliferation of Muslims, said that one of the most important reason for this was the increasing frequency of alliances between Muslim men and Hindu widows. A tract said that large numbers of widows were at present entering the homes of 'yavanas' and 'mlecchas', producing children for them and increasing their numbers. A poem, widely quoted at the time, had these lines:
Gode mein isaiyat islam ki
betiyan bahuein lita kar hum late!
Ah ghate par humen ghata hua
man bewaon ka ghata kar hum ghate!!
It was plainly stated that a loss of a Hindu widow was not just the loss of one person, but also of many more. Moreover, these numbers were subtracted from the Hindu population, but added to the Muslims, doubling the loss to Hindus. One tract, Humara Bhishan Haas, a collection of articles reprinted from newspapers, dwelt on the catastrophic decline of Hindus due to growing conversion. A picture of terrible calamity was built up, quoting extensively from census reports. At one place it was stated:
Our sexually unsatisfied widows especially are prone to Muslim hands and by producing Muslim children they increase their numbers and spell disaster for the Hindus...Muslim goondas are especially seen outside the houses that have Hindu widows...You yourselves say, would you like our Aryan widows to read nikah with a Muslim?
Here we see a combination of the 'negative' portrayals of Muslims, stereotypes about the sexual desires of widows, as well as fears of agency of the widow. There is a similarity between the way widows and Muslims are treated here: both are seen as figures of potential sexual excess and hence of fear. Such essentialisms are as crucial to the definition of the 'problem' as of the community.
A tract of the time stated that two and a half crore Hindu widows had been enticed by the Muslims through various methods. In the shape of a poem, a warning was issued to Hindu males by using the voice of the widow:
Jis din than jayegi man mein, kahin nikal main jaoongi.
Kisi yavan ka hath pakarkar, usko main apnaoongi.
Paida karke bacche usse, uski shakti bharaongi....
Gauon ko katwaungi nit, mandir main turvaungi.
Devsthanon ko mitvakar, masid main banvaungi....
Dharma-granth jalva dungi main, chutiyon ko katwaungi.
To overcome this disaster and crisis, the solution proposed was that widow remarriage must be advocated, and Hindu males, as part of their religious duty, should marry Hindu widows to increase the number of Hindu males, and control the widow's reproductivity within the bounds of Hinduism. The liberal promise of widow-remarriage was overturned by a community need for a better economy of potential childbearing wombs, and to reverse the alleged decline in Hindu numbers. We come full circle here. In the militant Hindu psychology, conversions have to be prevented at all cost, especially of women, as it ties up with constructed fears of Hindu decline. The converted widow here is perceived as dangerous to the vaunted Hindu nation. She puts at risk the grand strategy of Hindu identity formation itself, a denial of both difference and the right to a difference.
Many of these debates can be linked to the present situation. With such arguments, even a demographic religious majority can still mentally project itself as an endangered minority. The conversion of the census into a fully grown and popular communal knowledge, increases its flexibility even more drastically (without losing the authority of statistics), allowing for much bigger effects to dramatise anxiety. The whole discourse of the Hindu Right around the censuses is aimed at obliterating pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the other and propagating a constant myth of a catastrophic decline in the Hindu population.
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