Colonial Surveys and the Invention of Social Categories

Research record

Colonial surveys created an extraordinarily dense archive for the social history of Mithila, Vajji and Anga, but the archive must be read as a history of classification as well as a description of society. From Buchanan-Hamilton’s early district inquiries to the censuses, Risley’s ethnography, Grierson’s linguistic survey and the gazetteers, officials progressively standardized names, boundaries and comparative tables. The central method of this chapter is chronological: a colonial category is evidence first for the date and administrative purpose in which it appears. It cannot be projected backward without independent period evidence. Colonial rule generated an expanding demand to describe the people it taxed, policed, recruited, litigated with and governed. The resulting surveys were never neutral inventories. Their headings reflected administrative problems: landholding, occupation, religion, language, “tribe,” “caste,” custom and rank. Yet it is equally misleading to treat every category as a pure colonial fabrication. Officials worked with locally supplied names, inherited textual vocabularies, previous revenue records and the testimony of intermediaries. The historical problem is therefore to reconstruct a process of translation. Social identities existed before the census, but the survey and census increasingly required them to be written into standardized boxes, compared across districts and made legible to provincial government. The documentary archive is invaluable precisely because it records this encounter between lived social description and bureaucratic classification.

Section index

1. 59.1 Colonial knowledge became an instrument of administration
2. 59.2 The Company survey preceded the decennial census by decades
3. 59.3 Buchanan-Hamilton’s method joined observation to local testimony
4. 59.4 Early surveys mixed social, occupational and religious classifications
5. 59.5 Revenue knowledge and social knowledge were intertwined
6. 59.6 Hunter’s Statistical Account made the district a comparative statistical unit
7. 59.7 The 1872 enumeration was a major experiment rather than a fully standardized modern census
8. 59.8 Enumeration was mediated by local clerks, household informants and officials
9. 59.9 The 1881 census regularized decennial enumeration
10. 59.10 A printed table made fluid answers appear mutually exclusive
11. 59.11 Caste names in colonial records were situated claims, not medieval fossils
12. 59.12 Occupation and caste were related but never interchangeable
13. 59.13 Religious classification also required administrative boundaries
14. 59.14 Language classification converted multilingual practice into named languages
15. 59.15 Hunter’s accounts linked population categories to economy and administration
16. 59.16 The district gazetteer became a durable administrative archive
17. 59.17 Gazetteers intertwined ethnography with practical governance
18. 59.18 Risley’s ethnographic programme sought a more systematic taxonomy
19. 59.19 Anthropometry attempted to turn social hierarchy into bodily measurement
20. 59.20 Social precedence made ranking itself a field of inquiry
21. 59.21 Local intermediaries were indispensable to ethnographic classification
22. 59.22 Communities could use the classificatory state strategically
23. 59.23 Classification fed back through schools, courts, associations and print
24. 59.24 Grierson’s Linguistic Survey created a different classificatory map
25. 59.25 Linguistic boundaries rarely coincided with district boundaries
26. 59.26 Maithili, Angika and Bajjika require source-specific naming discipline
27. 59.27 Self-description and administrative category must remain analytically separate
28. 59.28 Colonial classifications are evidence with defined limits
29. 59.29 Śrotriya chronology is protected by a specific Panji-based firewall
30. 59.30 Conclusion: categories were historical processes as well as historical data

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Colonial Surveys and the Invention of Social Categories.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-59/