…quipped my brother Dilip in response to the following mail from my sister Pramada:
So the bell rings this afternoon. desperate clanging. i open the door and there is a man with forms in his hand and a general irritated demeanor. figured that this was the census man. he comes in and settles down. starts by wanting to know who the head of the household is. i say there is no one. he insists. i continue to say no one.
Census of India 2011 mascot
He proceeds to explain that if the parents live in the house, then they are the head of the household, if married then the husband is. I proceed to ask for definition and say that all three of us who live in the house are head of the household since we all earn and take decisions. he promises to erase what he has written since he was sure my mother was head of household.
He seemed to find my gender a bit dubious so questioned my mother if i was a boy or a girl and then repeatedly said “ladki” to me. having established that i indeed was a woman, he wanted to know date of birth, which was not difficult, but place of birth he found extremely challenging. he could not get his spellings right, or did not know districts or states in the country so tattamangalam in palghat district in kerala was as baffling as mysore in karnataka. calcutta was easy to deal with and he said calcutta was in calcutta!!! mother tongue caused him more angst because he had to write malayalam and again the spelling eluded him.
In a casual manner he asked – sabke haath pair to theek hain? ( is everybody’s hands and legs okay?). i realised that this was the question on disability. i said yes that’s all fine but i cannot see without my glasses. that did not count.
Education, marital status were easy-peasy and then the tricky question of employment. he just could not understand what i did and what did i mean when i said i was a consultant and what were NGOs and did i work with these afore mentioned NGOs in haryana. and could i not give him just one name so that he could put it down.
Sujata’s employment was even more difficult for him. counselor on chemical and substance abuse – in hindi its deadly, sharab aur nasheeli padarthon kay sevan karne walon ko in cheezon se mukt karane ki kaam karti hai! asked caste and we said that we did not know since we were urbanised and had to confess that it sounded foolish even to my ears.
The enumerator is a teacher in a school in haryana somewhere but as far as we were concerned, we were aliens who occupied some strange space. a place where he hoped he or his family would not have to tread. a household where three women rule, where a woman aged 46 says that she is unmarried and is not ashamed, does not for work everyday and i suspect he had not heard of the words human rights – in any language! what do you think he teaches , if he is not sure of the states in the country! mysore was difficult, can you imagine if it was daporijo or mokukchung?
What is the point of being counted thus. he is baffled by the names of villages, states, languages, does not realise that disability is of many forms, that men can look like women and women can look like men…. his world is being torn asunder in this process…were they trained at all and what do you think will actually emerge from this huge effort to have an idea of who lives in this country?
Meanwhile not surprisingly, other feminists too have their own census sagas:
Ranjani K Murthy: Today two women from the corporation came to take census. They wanted to know what was the name of the head of the household. I told them my name. They would not accept. They told me “Tell me Sir’s name, Madam”. I asked them last year I paid more tax so why my husband qualified as the head of the household. They were baffled.
The reality of my previous domestic help Jamuna and my friend now, is that while she earned less than her husband he drank away 90% of his income. So she was the head of the household anyway. It is time the patriarchal notion of male head of household was removed in India Are they really the heads? Do they act as trustees of interest of all family members? Make it joint headship, as has been done in Republic of Korea.
The next baffling comment was that i am born a Hindu and married to a person who is born a Muslim. Me and my ‘Sir’ have put him as other religion in School. In the census they were confused as to where to slot him in. One woman said that there was ‘no other category’, while the other said there was an other. Any way I made them slot my son in this ambiguous category.
The third baffling question was how far was my place of work and that of my ‘Sir”. I travel considerably each day depending on what issue emerges, while my ‘Sir’ has an office 1 km away. I write out of home. They wanted to say that i work out of home, while i wanted otherwise.
The fourth is majority of the census enumerators are women apparently. They have to go alone, but they came together for safety. They have not been given any self defense training. One of them quit her job in Health and Glow paying better for a government job (no pension) as she knew she would be thrown out of her job as she grew older.
(One census enumerator was bitten by a snake and died – she was walking to some remote areas of a rubber plantation in Kerala)
Geeta Seshu: The census man came home and couldn’t figure us out either…80-year old woman is head of the household, I was born in Madurai (where’s that…so I had to spell it out); kids’ mother tongue is telugu (which they can’t speak a word of), then we said no religion, no caste so he left it blank and said he’d ask his superior when he get’s back, said he’d fill it up depending on the surname (hah)…but i insisted he couldn’t fill it up…stalemate.
But what spooked me was that all of this will get into reams of statistics and studies and all of us will then write stories and do research and have seminars on the findings of the 15th census!
p.s. oh the poor chap said he hadn’t got paid for work on the 2001 census!
Chayanika: the woman who came to our house went away the first day saying that she will come back the next day with her supervisor as we were being very tough. she was a school teacher and absolutely not liking being asked about everything that she was writing.
First block was of course head of household. then it was religion which grudgingly she wrote ‘atheist’ because we made her do so and of course in pencil so we do not know what finally gets filled in.then she asked where i was born and of course did not know chhindwara which is alright but then she asked me why did i come from there to bombay and i said but why would i come from there? i might have gone to ten other places and then come here. she decided to leave it blank and turned the page.where do you work? i said am retired. and she wrote does not work.
By then i had taken an unfilled form from her and was reading the options available to her and so said you cannot write no 4. then she got more confused. we kept saying that there are many questions that you may not find simple answers for in many of our lives so why do you not give us your options and we shall choose what applies. and then why did you not ask about disability or gender and why did you take that for granted and she looked at us as if we were mad and just harassing her and picked up the papers and left assuring to come the next day. the other fight was on language. the form was all in marathi and she would not ask in any other language as well.
Next day supervisor was more open and in fact said that for religion we had said that many people do not believe and so you should have an option for that but in our training they said this is all there will be. she was super cool and took everything without batting an eyelid but do not know if that was just a way of getting done with it because they had many more forms to fill or whether she would make sure that the data stayed as it was narrated. her explanation for our census person was that she was a teacher and so did not know how to deal with many people but “i am from the social field so I can handle this.” whatever she thought at least she managed to finish the exercise without giving us a sense of how weird you are and also came across as someone who was open to all kinds of people.
But we must follow up on some of these things: head of household, option of no religion being made available, proper training on gender and disability (read some reports of census people trying to convince some transwomen who wanted to be recorded as women that no they were transgenders really) at least.
kabi sherman: i’m totally bummed because no one came to my house. census doesn’t only count nagariks i hope. i want to count too. i wonder if kannu got counted in his village or if he is uncounted.
Please let me say a word (in defense of) on the census taker teacher. just judging from the teachers i worked with in the bmc schools, they really didn’t want to be census takers. they resented it completely. first, their students were left teacherless, second, they then had to work overtime to make up their portions, third, they felt that it devalued them as professionals, as if they were expendable, fourth, its very tiring for them, and last, i guess they have to put up with the likes of us – even worse than their unruly students, tho they never said that!
With so many unemployed people, why aren’t they putting people to work – giving them training and giving them a paid job during the census? why are they taking teachers out of schools, leaving students without learning or attempts thereof, during this time. cost is not a good enough reason.
Meena Saraswati Seshu: I agree with Kabi, the teacher who came here was teaching 10th class students. In maharashtra the Board exams started today. He was most traumatised and was in tears! he said that his students now come at 6 am for revision because they are from the municipal schools and do not have private tutions or even place in their houses to study. He also said that the upper/ middle class stop sending their kids to school in January itself and give them time to study at home. But poor kids do not have this option, they are dependent on their teachers for last minute revision.
That aside, the census form has many issues that have to be taken up. Since all of us have separate surnames the teacher was most confused. Adults he could accept but not the kids! He insisted all my kids should have Vasant’s name. And if they had surnames that depicted they did not belong to Vasant’s caste he was more confused! This surname thingy is quite lethal. Though we insisted …. no caste, I’m not sure they accept that. He insisted no religion means `manavta’ religion!!!?? When I said no he was most upset. Nice guy – just confused and irritated. Also relationship of HOH to each child – I said father – he insisted if they have different names then they should sister’s children!
The form is faulty. We should intervene there. they should have boxes that say – Nil.
Chayanika: have full empathy having done election duties as a college teacher and found it very undermining of my work to sit the whole day applying ink of various fingers. also have gone through making up all those lost days and other such rigmarole. have fought for teacher’s right to protest against all these extra duties given to them apparently because they have vacations!! (everyone eyes our vacations and ignore all the other work that is squeezed out of us for that reason).
But the problem is also in the ways in which teachers themselves seem to be so closed in their minds and approaches (of course like everyone else but…). and our poor thing was also upset with her situation at home and workplace.
agree also that the situation is so weird because of the form and the nature of the training as well. so we must write to the census office.
Mary John: for instance, something as obviously problematic as head of household which we might want to see removed altogether (i am older and earn more than my partner — when i told the teacher who had come she giggled, but actually put it down)… however, it was precisely this category that threw up data on “female headed households” — upto 30% in rural India as early as the 1970s, and helped those interested in questions of single women, widows and so on…
Religion — there is definitely the category of “no religion” — so please use it! i have made some progress here in my case — in 2001, the (male) teacher enumerator who turned up insisted against our statements to put satish down as hindu, me down as christian, and our son as hindu (!) … this time i managed to get no religion for all three.
Laxmi Murthy: Yes, “No religion” is an option, at least the woman who took down my info agreed it was (“athiest” is not, though). What confuses them is if some in the household (my father, for example), put down a religion and others say “no religion”. But it was all done in pencil, and she said it gets ‘faired” later..so don’t know what happens then.
Agree that there’s little point directing our ire at the enumerators..a harried lot for the most part, roaming around in the sun, people don’t even call them inside, and they have to make 2-3 visits to the same house if no one is in. By the third visit, they were ready to fill in anything for our neighbours (just tell us anything, they pleaded), just to get it over with. It’s quite frightening to think that policies are based on this poor quality of data.
Meanwhile, the homeless were enumerated too:
“…For people like Nanavane, Kamble and Datar, the census was the only time they were reminded of the state’s existence. “This is the first time someone from the government has asked me about my existence. For you, it might be just another day, but for us, even this thumbprint means a lot,” Kamble said…” A head count of the homeless
As for me – I got two harried and hurried school teachers trying to get it over with, one of them had a child with an exam coming up; when I said I suppose you wont let me put myself down as head of the household, one hastily said “aap likhwa sakti hain”; but insisted I cant say no religion or atheist or non-believer. I wouldn’t say “Hindu” but I guess she put that down. The whole thing was over in less than 5 minutes.
Apropos, here’s Ian Hacking on Making Up People:
I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organise and help, but at the same time keep ourselves safe, as the poor or the homeless. Sometimes to change them for their own good and the good of the public, as the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) geniuses. We think of these kinds of people as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it’s not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.
“Authoritative census data”… hmmm.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
I think there is some confusion here on the issue of religion. Religion for the purpose of census is not what religion you follow or what your religious belief is. It is more about which religious community you belong to. So if you are born a Muslim (have a Muslim name, live in Muslim locality, have Muslim relatives etc. or some of the above) then you are a Muslim unless you have specifically converted to another religion. If you have generally believe that you don’t have the required faith in Allah anymore and therefore think you are an atheist it is your personal matter. But evenin such a scenario if you tell the enumerator you are an atheist you are just misleading them. For example the Ranganath Mishra commission or the Sachar commission did not go around asking if peoplewoke up in time for fajr to determine if they are muslims. . Same applies to Hindus as well. Or Christians Sikhs and Parsees for that matter. . I’m not saying all are like this but from what I read here and what I hear elsewhere a vast majority of those claiming to be atheist seem to be falling in thiscategory.
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The use of the word religion is confusing. the question of religion needs to be dealt with as 2 different questions – one as a question of “faith” and the other as a question of “community”. further, the question of community cant be merely decided by birth but needs to incorporate multiple identities/ categories…
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The enumerator who visited us was quite happy to list my mother tongue as Hindi and Ravi’s as Malayalam, and then she left a blank against my daughter’s name. And yes, she was puzzled when I said I work in an NGO or swayamsevi sanstha. She asked what exactly I do, but didn’t ask any further questions after I said ‘paryavaran’. My work was listed as ‘naukri’.
We hadn’t been counted till yesterday and I read in DNA today that one could e-mail someone in the municipal corporation about it. I did so, and in minutes I got back a short and polite email response (from a blackberry) that someone would visit us. And within four hours, we were.
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Interesting stories.. I had read/heard that some UN agencies (UNIFEM/UNDP) are working with the Census of India (and also with NSSO etc.) to improve the data collection process and make it more gender sensitive. Any results of those efforts??
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I found the entire article hilarious.I have always thought that the teachers who go out to collect the census have a thankless job.The dignified teacher who came to our house in chennai i’m sure would have loved to have got home after a full day’s work.Yet she was out there going from door to door dealing with all kinds of people! Not really enjoyable.And children’s exams, the family meal that is to be prepared are all existing realities.
The first comment on the definition of religion as per the census is defenitely an eye opener.
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I had a very good experience with the person who visted us for census information. She was not only well aware about the questionnaire but also was very clear on the usual confusions in answers. I know, in our country we love to be cynical about every thing around us and by default we distrust all data , all schemes and all goverment initiatives …but i think its not bad if we give census a chance . There is definitely some effort to improve the quality of data collection ( how many of us remember 1990 or 1980 census ?). Let us appreciate the effort these people are taking in ensuring some sort of relaibility in data on which our entire governmnet spending will be based . If some of you find issues with the enumerators and their questions , please remember census is a limited exercise and not meant to solve all problems of our education, our social biases and the like .
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Voyeur, you have raised a key question regarding the census and our responses to it. At one level you are absolutely right. If one sees the Census as an instrument of classification that helps the state to organize, help and control the different categories, and if one sees that as a primary responsibility of the developmental state, then there is no point in insisting on refusing to fit into administrative categories that have legal and material relevance. As a result of about two centuries of ‘looping’, as Hacking puts it, these identities are real. So much as I may insist i am atheist or a non-believer, my Muslim or Hindu or Christian name has consequences from the state’s point of view and from society’s, and in that sense i could agree with you that there is no point in insisting on an identity of personal belief that has no legal relevance.
But if we understand the phenomenon of ‘looping’ accurately, then through our practices of refusing to conform to existing categories, or by challenging categories in the census, we make visible new identities that can eventually feed into legal common sense. ‘Transgender’, or ‘non-believer’ or ‘none of the above’ thus, can become ways of troubling the fixed categories through which the state orders the population. Such a strategy can be adopted from two opposite points of view. One which wants to enable the state to understand its population better; the other, from the opposite position of extreme suspicion of the state and the belief in the need to refuse to be made entirely legible to its practices.
I have thus been wondering if there is an option NOT to be enumerated at all.
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It is really pathetic that a qualified teacher goes to every house and asking a lot of odd personal questions. A real thank less job and even insulting if you are interviewing a feminist or some body easily gets offended at any question posed by the enumerator in the name of the State.
When enumerator came to my house, she was accompanied by her husband- to help her to ask fill up and to carry all those long sheets of papers. Both of them were asking questions- After telling them about our different faiths, I was a bit anxious whether they were going to ask the religion of my daughter/son also- fortunately that did not happen.
Going for a census duty is a least interesting job, considering the hurdles on the way and reactions of different sets of people. they are entering territory another without being invited or expected. And what they ask -most personal details..
Last month in Kerala, a lady teacher in census duty was dead in hospital after she was bit by a snake while visiting a house, Another was physically attacked by a man at his house…. ..
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It seems that we need to work *with* the State on this. Strongly suggest newer categories, and more crucially, newer non-categories, we need more of ‘Others’, ‘Not Applicable’s and ‘None of the Above’s. The more the final census results will show up these odd remains of ‘atheists’, ‘non-believers’, ‘transgenders’, ‘headless households’ and ‘mixed-religion’ persons, the more it will show up those who choose to not identify or can’t identity with the given Census categories, the more will the State have to recognize (not in a academic, fuzzy way that we are all more than our identities, of course we are!) but that we need newer policies for newer social conditions today, conditions in which older categories do not hold, conditions in which a changing mass of people requires a changing and agile body of State interventions! That is the way, we think, this very real looping will come to some use!
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btw, was thinking, what will the census do in kashmir, in maoist-influenced areas, and in some parts of the north-east? are the ‘insurgents’ our own? will they be counted? or will those be the oddball liminals who will just have to be remaindered out of the counting?
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Wow people. Get over yourselves! Please stop making fun of these hapless teachers sent to your houses just because they don’t seem as ‘liberated’ as you think yourselves to be. And since the individual census data is only used to tabulate macro figures and not to keep a record of each citizens I don’t see any issue with giving this information. I thought you guys were all for government sops (whether they actually reach the intended beneficiaries are not of any concern as long as the government keeps spending money year after year on these populist sops) so why this sudden mistrust of government??
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In the US one hears that Mormons and other sects still manage to refuse to be counted. But in India, it’s mandatory for every citizen to provide information (the truth and nothing but) under the Census of India Act, 1948. Else you can be fined Rs 1000. There is this quaint proviso about furnishing accurate information under Clause (2) which says: “Every person of whom any question is asked under subsection (1) shall be legally bound to answer such question to the best of his knowledge or belief:
Provided that no person shall be bound to state the name of any female member of his household, and no woman shall be bound to state the name of her husband or deceased husband or of any other person whose name she is forbidden by custom to mention.”
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Priti and Ajai P Mangattu – your concern for teachers (“A real thank less job and even insulting if you are interviewing a feminist” and “Please stop making fun of these hapless teachers “) appears to be less sincere than your irritation with feminists. Precisely because we are feminists we recognize how difficult, exploitative and thankless this job is, and most of the comments above write sympathetically about the actual people doing this work, and give us information that reveals that genuine engagement and conversations have happened – one teacher hadn’t been paid for his last such duty, another has her child’s exams going on.
As for your disingenuousness, Ajai, in citing information about the hazards teachers face in this process as if you are bringing it to our notice, when it is all there in my post or I have linked to it, directing you there – what can I say?
It seems the F word still has the power to shock and awe :)
Priti -” I thought you guys were all for government sops (whether they actually reach the intended beneficiaries are not of any concern as long as the government keeps spending money year after year on these populist sops) so why this sudden mistrust of government?”
I assume, in contrast to us, you are “all for non-populist sops for the elite”. Yes, we disagree there.
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@Nivedita Menon
I think the census people should first do a sample survey and see what the options available are, because it is not entirely possible to go for such a large statistics gathering exercise with open questions. In the sample survey they could come up with more appropriate looping more suited to the times. Of course then the problem is continuity of these loopings (loops?) from one census to another. But that is a smaller problem compared to leaving out people altogether or clubbing them with categories they don’t belong to.
Also if we are willing to recognize that the census is not looking at personal beliefs but rather looking at communities, the option should not be “atheist” but rather “unaffiliated” unless you want to have a separate “atheist” category.
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I had the good fortune of filling up my own census form, over a whole week, with a pen, and was profusely thanked by my census enumerator for doing so. while the questions were in hindi i answered in english and he seemed fine with that. so i had a week to ponder over the questions relating to caste and religion. while i wanted to fill myself in as an atheist, i realised that i enjoyed that option because i lived a privileged, protected life and had had access to a very fine liberal arts education. however, i couldn’t easily wish away the fact that i was privileged because i was born into a historically empowered group – upper caste, Hindu. how would the state judge that it is people like me who continue to enjoy access to education and wealth, if i fancied myself as an atheist, or a caste-less person? (and categorised myself as such) i thought that if i withdrew myself from the discourse of caste and religion, i would be falsely disowning the fact that i am a female, educated HOH today partly because of my privileged birth?
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I think we are digressing if we speak about how enumerators respond to answers regarding the head of the household, religion, gender etc. One cannot blame them since majority of the people have a normative perception that it is essentially male members who are the head of the household (most often considered to be breadwinners and the decision-makers in the family); that there exists only male and female sex; and though people could be atheist or agnostic, but they must have been born or belong to a Hindu, Muslim, or Christian family. So what the census enumerators can make sense of are categories that have been standardized over a period of time. It is good if alternate voices are registered that questions the gendered/patriarchal norms so that women as household heads are accounted for. Questioning the two-gender binary i.e., male and female is also the need of the hour. This could make the officials in state institutions to rethink and craft the census forms while acknowledging new categories. It could be a first step in recognizing the presence of trans-genders, non-believers, and women as head of the households as not mere aberrations, but as distinct identities that could be categorized.
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the only people who have managed to not get themselves counted are the really well off from whose houses the census enumerators were rudely shooed away or asked to come only if they an appointment. bet they were not fined.
there were reports on how the enumerators were given training to ask individual members about their religion/caste given the reality of mixed marriages (it is another matter how effective the training turned out to be). but the question of the children has not been resolved because of the very question of agency which is denied to children. also the norms of data collection also are such that in our categories each one can take only one option. You can not have two mother tongues or two religions, and the blank is the only option left.
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Er Nivedita, I have no clue why you think I have a problem with feminists. But if you actually re-read the post with less blinkered eyes, you will realise how condescending it is to women who may not be as ‘liberated’ or privileged as you people are. You have a problem that they are not able to conceive of women heading a household which is actually not true because I personally know that a number of households they have gone to have been categorised as women headed. As to religion, I think there is an option of no religion and the census people are supposed to ask each person his/her religion individually so I don’t see where the problem is. They even have a category for transgender. I don’t really see any reason to crib about the census not recording every possible permutation and combination of identities that a person might have. To me, it seems like they are fairly detailed categories.
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Er Priti. When someone uses the term liberated in gratuitous quotation marks to try and silence women who ask questions, I think I have reason to think they have a problem with feminists. As for the rest of what you say – again, a common tactic of people who dont really have any valid criticism to make but still want the last word – every point you make has been made by somebody or other in my post above (“I think there is an option for no religion?” Really? You think? Or you read it here? Also – “a number of households have been categorised as female headed” – and you know that because…?)
I grant you this – perhaps you have read the entire post so carefully that you have internalized it completely and think these are your original ideas? That’s the most charitable explanation I can come up with). If there are some detailed categories in this census it is because of these cribbing feminists and other malcontents who wouldn’t shut up after the last census. Change doesn’t just happen.
“I dont see where the problem is.” Good for you that you fit so neatly into the normative categories of the census. The problem is for those who don’t, or dont want to, and you may want to use the cheap crack that it is because these are privileged people, but the whole point is that most are not – those women-headed households are usually very poor.
And anyway, look at you, privileged and happy to fit the census categories. Clearly “privilege” does not explain anything in this case.
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Many feminists who have narrated their experiences with census enumerators above have said that enumerators got confused when they replied ‘atheism’ for the question on religion or the census form doesn’t have an option called ‘atheist’.
Now, there is a difference between one’s religious beliefs and the religion one is born into. And I believe that the census tries to capture the latter. I don’t understand why is it such a big fuss with atheists to just mention the religion they were born into (I know when that can be debatable), irrespective of their personal beliefs. Some developed countries have an option of ‘Don’t follow any religion’ (not sure whether this is same as being atheist or agnostic). Unfortunately, GoI doesn’t have such an option in its census.
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Rajarshi, please take a moment to read the engaged debate that follows the post, you’ll see that this point has been made by another reader and discussed thoroughly after that…
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