Age and empire in the Indian census, 1871-1931

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 61-89

  Alborn, Timothy L ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749273480     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/002219599551912     Document Type: Review

References (100)

1. On the household, see Brian Cooper, "Essays on the Economics of the Family," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1997).
2. On women's work, see Edward Higgs, "Women, Occupations and Work n the Nineteenth Century Censuses," History Workshop Journal, XXIII (1987), 59-80.
3. On farm labor, see Edward Higgs, idem, "Occupational Censuses and the Agricultural Workforce in Victorian England and Wales," Economic History Review, XLVIII (1995), 700-717.
4. On occupations, see Simon R. S. Szreter, "The Genesis of the Registrar-General's Social Classification of Occupations," British Journal of Sociology, XXXV (1984), 522-546.
5. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990);
6. Libby Schweber, "The Assertion of Disciplinary Claims in Demographic and Vital Statistics: France and England, 1830-1885," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1996);
7. William Alonso and Paul Starr (eds.), The Politics of Numbers (New York, 1987).
8. Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, 1988), 30-31, 52.
9. On the status of age returns, and the related subject of birth and death registration, prior to the "modern" British census as performed by the General Registrar's Office starting in 1841, see David V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of the Census in Britain (Farnborough, 1973).
10. Charles J. O'Donnell, Report . . . [on] the Lower Provinces of Bengal and Their Feudatories (Census of India, 1891) (London, 1891), III, 164.
11. A classic example of unwarranted assumption occurs in Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Depravation (Oxford, 1981),
12. which critically evaluates official statistics on productivity and wages for various Indian and African famines but spends little time analyzing the relevant vital statistics. See also the contributions to N. Gerald Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives (New Delhi, 1981).
13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1992), 169;
14. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), 242, 224-230;
15. David Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990), 58-66;
16. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 82.
17. Roger Owen, in "The Population Census of 1917 and Its Relationship to Egypt's Three 19th Century Statistical Regimes," Journal of Historical Sociology, IX (1996), 457-472,
18. similarly interprets the British-administered census of Egypt (1917) as an exercise in "governmentality" that assisted in defining the postcolonial Egyptian nation-state. Arjun Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, 1993), 318-319, 331, similarly suggests that the category of "caste" in the Indian census provided an opportunity for indigenous self-identification that coexisted in tension with its "objectifying" features, contributing, as Benedict Anderson argues, to the communitarian origins of present-day Indian nationalism.
19. With regard to the unprecedented use of the census, see, for example, Geraldine Forbes, "The Indian Women's Movement: A Struggle for Women's Rights or National Liberation?" in Gail Minault (ed.), The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Delhi, 1981), 49-82, as well as the sources cited in notes 37-41.
20. Alborn, "A Calculating Profession: Victorian Actuaries among the Statisticians," Science in Context, VII (1994), 457-458;
21. John Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Influence of William Farr (Baltimore, 1979), 66-76.
22. The important place of age returns in the English census qualifies Appadurai's contrast ("Number in the Colonial Imagination," 317-318) between the Indian census' focus on ethnography and the English census' primary concern with territorial and occupational categories - a concern that prevailed only in the United Kingdom after 1900. See Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census: The Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801-1901 (London, 1989), 17.
23. Francis G. P. Neison, Report on the Bengal Military Fund (London, 1854);
24. Francis G. P. Neison, idem, Report on the Madras Civil Fund (London, 1852);
25. Samuel Brown and Peter Hardy, Report on the Madras Military Fund, Containing New Tables of Mortality (London, 1863).
26. Alborn, "Calculating Profession," 460, 451-452;
27. Higgs, Making Sense of the Census, 8.
28. See also Richard Lawton, "Census Data for Urban Areas," in idem (ed.), The Census and Social Structure (London, 1978), 82-145.
29. Brown, Report on the Madras Civil Fund, with Valuation (London, 1860), 8, 32;
30. Neison, Report on the Bombay Provident Fund (London, 1862), 11;
31. Neison, idem, Report on the Bengal Military Fund, 2;
32. Brown, "On the Rate of Mortality and Marriage amongst Europeans in India," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, XI (1863), 8-9.
33. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine, 76-84, 97-122.
34. Neison, Report on the Bengal Military Fund, 28;
35. Brown and Hardy, Report on the Madras Military Fund, 7.
36. George Hardy, "Memoir: Sir George Francis Hardy," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, LI (1915), 1-14;
37. George Francis Hardy, "The Rates of Mortality among the Natives of India, as Deduced from the Recent Census Returns," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, XXV (1885), 241;
38. "Obituary: Mr. T. G. Ackland," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, L (1915), 172-173.
39. J. H. Hutton, "Report," Census of India, 1931 (Delhi, 1933), I, xiv.
40. On the Oriental, see D. M. Slater, Rise and Progress of Native Life Assurance in India (Bombay, 1895);
41. L. S. Vaidyanathan, "Mortality of Indian Assured Lives," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, LX (1929), 180-181, 213-216.
42. For examples of findings contributed to the Institute of Actuaries, see Ackland, "On the Estimated Age-Distribution of the Indian Population," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, XLVIII (1913), 400;
43. Hardy, "The Rates of Mortality among the Natives of India," 241.
44. Although there were many enumerations and population estimates of Indian natives prior to 1870 - both by East India Company officials and private civilians - none of them extended to the questions of longevity and age distribution. For examples of these early efforts to count natives prior to 1870, see Durgaprasad Bhattachary (ed.), Report on the Population Estimates of India (Census of India 1961) (New Delhi, 1961), I, III;
45. Cohn, Anthropologist among the Historians, 231-238.
46. Henry Beverley, "The Census of Bengal," Journal of the Statistical Society of London, XXXVII (1874), 69, 100, 70.
47. Edward A. Gait, Census of India, 1911 (Calcutta, 1913), I, 148.
48. On Indian vital statistics and public health, see Harrison, Public Health in British India, 78-82.
49. J. Athelstane Baines, "The Peradventures of an Indian Life-Table," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, LXXI (1908), 293, 306;
50. Ackland, "Actuarial Report," in Census of India, 1911, I, 156;
51. Gait, General Report of the Census of India, 1901 (London, 1904), 472; Hutton, "Report," 84-85.
52. Hardy, "On the Rates of Mortality and the Mean Duration of Life in the Various Provinces as Deduced from the Age Statistics and Rates of Increase," Report on the Census of British India . . . 1881 (London, 1883), I, 144.
53. The Baines quotation appears in Frederick C. Danvers, "A Review of Indian Statistics," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, LXIV (1901), 69;
54. Ackland, "Actuarial Report," 158;
55. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report," in Census of India, 1931, I, 111.
56. See also H. G. W. Meikle, Report on the Age Distribution and Rates of Mortality Deduced from the Indian Census Returns of 1921 and Previous Enumerations (Calcutta, 1926), 2.
57. Hardy, "On the Rates of Mortality and the Mean Duration of Life," 142-143;
58. Hardy, "idem, Memorandum on the Age Tables and Rates of Mortality of the Indian Census of 1901 (Calcutta, 1905), 2;
59. Meikle, Report (1921), 1; Ackland, "Actuarial Report" (1911), 154.
60. Baines, "Peradventures," 306;
61. Hardy, Memorandum, 6; Meikle, Report (1921), 2-3.
62. William Makeham, "On the Law of Mortality," Assurance Magazine, XIII (1865), 335;
63. Hardy, "On the Rates of Mortality and the Mean Duration of Life," 161-162.
64. See Alborn, "A Calculating Profession," 458-460.
65. Ackland, "Actuarial Report" (1911), 167;
66. Meikle, Report (1921), 34-35. Meikle's reason for grouping more years around numbers ending in zero was that the least-reported ages ended in nine and one. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 108-109.
67. Hardy, "On the Rates of Mortality and the Mean Duration of Life," 162-165, 149-150.
68. Baines, Census of India 1891: A General Report (London, 1893), 281;
69. Hardy, "On the Rates of Mortality and the Mean Duration of Life," 145.
70. O'Donnell, Report (1891), 165; Meikle, Report (1921), 6.
71. O'Donnell, Report (1891), 164.
72. Hardy, Memorandum, 16; Ackland, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 167;
73. Meikle, Report (1921), 36; Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 159-160.
74. For the Malthusian population principle, see Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population . . . (New York, 1992; orig. pub. 1798). In Memorandum, Hardy mentioned the possibility of "a steady increase in the means of subsistence" (17), but both he and other actuaries devoted practically all their speculations to the other two options.
75. Baines, "Peradventures," 299; Hutton, "Report," 81-82, 91.
76. Baines, "Peradventures," 296;
77. Gait, Census of India, 1911, I, 147.
78. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 119-120; Meikle, Report (1921), 2.
79. Compare Joseph Schwartzberg, "Sources and Types of Census Error," in Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India, 41-60. In Report (1921), Meikle allowed that it was not the enumerators' fault that they tended to return estimates in increments of five years, which was the main source of the spikes in reported age (3).
80. Baines, "Peradventures," 294, 305, 298.
81. Gait, Census of India, 1901, I, 480.
82. Gait's diagnosis was only partly correct. Subsequent demographers have also linked famine with temporary amenorrhea among women. See John Bongaarts and Mead Cain, "Demographic Responses to Famine," in Kevin M. Cahill (ed.), Famine (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1982), 47-49.
83. Hutton, "Report," 92-94; Baines, "Peradventures," 298-299.
84. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 146, 143-144, 148, 150-151.
85. See also Vaidyanathan, idem, "Mortality of Indian Assured Lives," 180.
86. Vaidyanathan, Idem, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 156, 151. Vaidyanathan condemned purdah (that is, the forced seclusion of women) in the same way that he had criticized child marriage, by linking it to increased mortality rates in regions where he assumed it to be a prevalent practice (in this case, the largely Muslim Northwest Provinces) (158).
87. Hutton, "Report," 97, xv. For an example of nationalist resistance to the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, see Radha Krishna Sharma, Nationalism, Social Reform and Indian Women (New Delhi, 1981), 208.
88. Many Indian nationalists were even more hesitant to support birth control, owing to Mohandas K. Gandhi's opposition to contraception: See Barbara N. Ramusack, "Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920-40," Journal of Women's History, I (1989), 34-64, who confirms that Indian natives who advocated birth control were almost all, like Vaidyanathan, from the urban elite.
89. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 150-151.
90. The tables on Indian policyholders' mortality had earlier appeared in Vaidyanathan, "Mortality of Indian Assured Lives," 200-210.
91. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" (1931), 149, 108-109.
92. Vaidyanathan, "Actuarial Report" Ibid., 121, 135-136.
93. Eleanor F. Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur; An Object-Lesson from the Past to the Future (London, 1934), 60, 64-66, 46.
94. Eleanor F. Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur; Ibid., 60, 71, 108.
95. Eleanor F. Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur; Ibid., 26, 53, 94, 114.
96. See also Rathbone's private comment in 1930 revealing her distress regarding "all the wretched little brides who are likely to be sacrificed on the altar of India's political aspiration during the next few years," cited in Ramusack, "Women's Organizations and Social Change: The Age-of-Marriage Issue in India," in Naomi Black and Ann Baker Cottrell (eds.), Women and World Change: Equity Issues in Development (London, 1981), 209.
97. See Mrinalini Sinha, "Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice," Journal of Women's History, VI (1994);
98. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance (New York, 1977), 171-172.
99. On the clash between Rama Rau and Rathbone, see Ramusack, "Women's Organizations and Social Change," 202-212.
100. Sinha, "Reading Mother India," 6.