A caste census will reveal India’s worst-kept secret
The hierarchical identity system continues to divide the nation of 1.4 billion people almost 100 years after calls for its abolition.
A woman in a Dalit area stands at the entrance to a house in India. The Dalits, formerly known as “Untouchables”, have historically been assigned the most degrading and dangerous occupations, such as burning corpses, slaughtering animals and cleaning sewers. Bloomberg
For the first time in almost 100 years, India will get 1.4 billion people to name their caste in a census.
Presenting the biggest obstacle to India’s embrace of modernity, the caste system divides Hindus into rigid categories that govern every aspect of life. The last successful exercise to record this ancient, hierarchical social identity, conducted by British colonial rulers in 1931, threw up more than 4000 answers. (There was another attempt in 2011, but it didn’t quite work; an open-ended question generated 4.6 million replies. The government decided the caste data was worthless.)
