Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India

Abstract

This essay is about the caste-wise enumeration of households taken in the major kasbah towns of the western Rajasthani kingdom of Marwar between 1658 and 1664 under the direction of the kingdom's “home minister,” Munhata Nainsi, for inclusion in his mammoth survey of kingdom entitled Marvar ra Parganam ri Vigat (An Account of the Districts of Marwar). This essay also explores how Nainsi's early enumeration of caste data, and other precolonial human inventories that followed upon it, helped shape the first known colonial census of western Rajasthan, undertaken by Alexander Boileau in 1835 in Marwar and the adjacent kingdoms of Bahawalpur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer. One goal will be to redirect scholarly attention to some native agenda that may have been institutionalized and advanced by this nominal way of ‘knowing the country' both during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Without positing an easy continuity from the precolonial to the colonial in terms of forms of knowledge and attendant institutions, this essay will suggest that colonial discourses often built upon indigenous ones in ways that inflected local politics about which the British initially were only dimly aware and indirectly concerned, but which later had a major impact on the constitution of colonial rule.