Ancient geographers referred to India as ‘chatuh samasthana samsthitam’ – a fourfold conformation with three sides facing the sea. We did not start off being called India. We had several names – from Bharat, then Hindustan and later India. India is an ancient civilisation and growing to be a most modern nation. In ancient times, the land was called Bharata (the cherished) derived from the ancient Hindu Puranas which tells the story of Emperor Bharata, the first conqueror of the Indian sub-continent.
“The country (varsam) that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharatam; there dwell the descendants of Bharata.” – Vishnu Purana
Later, the people of India, got its name from the river Sindhu (reference to the Indus river). The Persian invaders referred to it as Hindustan (Sindhu converted to Hindu, and ‘stan’, being place). Hindus evolved to Indos, by the British, and by the 17th Century it was being referred to as India. This land was referred to by other names as well: Aryavarta, Matrubhumi, Punyabhumi, Dharmabhumi, Devabhumi, Jambudvipa, Bharatkhanda or Bharat Mata.
Plurality of religious practices have existed for thousands of years in India. Until the nineteenth century, the word ‘Hindu’ had no specific religious meaning and simply referred to the people who no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism.’ Up until the 19th century, India was still a place where traditions, languages and culture cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith. As such, the term covered all the people in the region.
India is one of the very few developing countries which have a long history of population censuses. The first census was in 1872, the second in 1881 and since then there has been a census every ten years, the latest in 2011.The census of February 1881 was started by WC Plowden, Census Commissioner of India and was the first synchronous enumeration carried out for all in British India. This was the first official census in India and under Lord Rippon, Governor General of India.
Earlier, there were sporadic attempts sponsored by individual provinces. Ever since, we have this census once every ten years. Religion classification was also included. Consequently, what was then an erstwhile fluid group of Indians was now rigid entities. Once counting it took on a whole new meaning.
As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in ‘Indian Summer,’ when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” With this arises a ‘double error of identity: first into gathering diverse faiths into a fictitious ‘Hinduism’ and then assuming it to be a religion.
“We pigeon-holed everyone by caste and if we could not find a true caste for them, labelled them with the name of hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its effect on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore,” The British Superintendent of the 1921 census wrote.
Many inaccuracies and biases crept in. Mr Drysdale, in page 83 of his Appendix A, remarks, “The greatest ignorance prevailed on the subject of religion, also frequent indifference and great prejudice, the latter especially, among the census agencies. Many could not tell whether they belonged to any particular religion. The census agency not only made entries at variable discretion in such cases, but they carried preconceived notions to the extent even of dispensing with the formality of inquiry and rejecting replies given.”
What is a Hindoo?
This is the question Mr Beverloy asks, in his Report on the Census of 1872, done in India under the rule of Lord Mayo. “The Sikhs and Mahammedans, the Jews and the Parsees, have an individuality which it is impossible to mistake.” “The Christians profess a faith which separates them from all other classes of the community, and the Buddhists and Jains, though they have been said to possess much in common, differ from each other and from the people who surround them, in dogma, ritual, and manners.”
Mr Bourdillon notices that the difficulty which Mr Beverley experienced in 1872, in separating Hindoos from others, repeated itself in 1881, “To have allowed any discretion to the compiling clerks engaged in the tabulation of the figures taken out of the census schedules would have been out of the question, and from the very outset the most stringent orders were issued, and it is believed that they were well carried out, that each person should be shown in the census tables as of the religion to which he was described as belonging in the enumerators’ schedules. The result has, no doubt, been that the number of so-called Hindoos has been somewhat overstated.
The rule provided that forevery native who was unable to define his creed or described it by any other name than that of some recognized religion, or the sect of some such religion, was held to be classed as a Hindoo. The assumption at the basis of this rule is that the native of India must be presumed to be a Hindoo unless he belongs to some other recognized faith.
There was not the slightest fear that a member of any one of theiother great religions, whatever his mode of life or social standing, would fail to describe himself as a Mussulman, a Sikh, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Zoroastrian, or a Christian, either directly or as belonging to some well-known sect, such as Shiah, Wahabi, or Sarâozi, but it was certain that many of the vagrant and outcast tribes would allege that they belonged to creeds of strange and unfamiliar names, that a gypsy would in many cases return his religion as Sansi, the name of his tribe, that a scavenger would describe his faith as Lâi Begi, or Bâla Shahi, from the names of the spiritual preceptors of the caste, and that the followers of the innumerable sects which are ever springing from the womb of Hindooism, would return these sects not as beets but as religions.”
He goes on to justify this by sharing that the same difficulty was experienced at the last census [1872], and, in fact, the absence of some such rule [for Hindoo classification] would make the census almost meaningless.
Postscript: We are Indians first and last, and we have the freedom and right to be more than some pre-defined cultures. We are Indians first, and it just happens we may be Christian or Hindu, Ladakhi or Keralite. Our language, caste, etc. do not define us, they merely explain aspects of us. We have every right to define our part in the multiplicity of India, rather than defined by the ‘other’. For India is truly a land that celebrates– let a thousand flags fly!
(Steve Correa is an author, executive coach and HR consultant, who has had over three decades of corporate experience)
