The census questionnaire is perhaps the most comprehensive manuscript of a nation’s social, economic and political evolution. Far from being a neutral statistical exercise, it is also a record of the state’s priorities and anxieties at a given moment. Every new question added, and every old one dropped, offers clues about what a society values, what policymakers seek to measure, and how governments perceive their citizens.
The evolution of census questionnaires across the world reflects this intimate relationship between statistics and statecraft. The questionnaire framed by the imperial government was shaped by colonial imperatives. The evolution of questions relating to family and gender also reveals changing social attitudes. Marital status classifications gradually expanded from a simple distinction between married, unmarried and widowed persons to include separated and divorced persons.
The population enumeration phase of the Census, scheduled to begin next month, will have 13 new or modified questions compared with the 2011 Census, including details of a person’s father and mother and their places of birth. These questions were also part of the National Population Register schedule notified in 2020, sparking a political debate, with opposition questioning the government’s motive. Popularly, 1872 census is considered to be the first for the Indian subcontinent, though it covered only the tracts that were under British rule. Educational qualification, taken for granted in modern surveys, appeared only in the 1941 census. The introduction of age at marriage in 2001 reflected increasing policy attention to gender, reproductive health and social development.
Because understanding and categorising Indian society was critical to colonial governance, religion, caste and community formed the backbone of enumeration.
Likewise, the recognition of a category other than male and female in 2011, and the subsequent adoption of the category “transgender person”, marked an acknowledgement of identities that earlier census frameworks had erased.
