FROM MILLIONS TO FRACTIONS 231
had been carried, it would not have been possible to know the population of the Untouchables. Fortunately owing to the absence of the mover, the resolution was not discussed and the Census Commissioner of 1921 remained free to carry out his inquiries in the usual manner.
Thirdly no attempt was made for a separate enumeration of the Untouchables by any of the Census Commissioners previous to the year
- The first general Census of India was taken in the year 1881. Beyond listing the different castes and creeds and adding up their numbers so as to arrive at the total figure of the population of India, the Census of 1881 did nothing. It made no attempt to classify the different Hindu castes either into higher and lower or Touchable and Untouchable. The second general Census of India was taken in the year 1891. It was at this census that an attempt to classify the population on the basis of caste and race and grade was made by the Census Commissioner for the first time.
The third general Census of India was taken in 1901. At this census a new principle of classification was adopted namely “Classification by Social precedence as recognized by native public opinion.” For a society like the Hindu society which does not recognize equality and whose social system is a system of gradation of higher and lower, this principle was the most appropriate one. Nothing can present a more intelligible picture of the social life and grouping of that large proportion of the people of India which is organized admittedly or tacitly on the basis of caste as this principle of social precedence.
II
The first attempt of a definite and deliberate kind to ascertain the population of the Untouchables was made by the Census Commissioner in 1911.
The period immediately preceding the Census of 1911 was a period during which the Morley-Minto Reforms were in incubation. It was a period when the Mahomedans of India had started their agitation for adequate representation in the legislatures by separate electorates. As a part of their propaganda, the Mahomedans waited upon Lord Morley, the then Secretary of State for India in Council, in deputation and presented him a Memorial on the 27th January 1909. In that memorial there occurs the following statement:
(The statement is not recorded in the MS. —Ed.)
Whether there was any connection between what the Muslim deputation had urged in their memorial regarding the Untouchables in 1907 and the idea of the Census Commissioner four years after to make a separate enumeration of the Untouchables, is a matter on which nothing definite can be said. It is possible that what the Census Commissioner proposed to do in 1911 was only a culmination of the