Umesh bedkute

Happy Independence day! Eighty years on, our efforts to create the heaven of freedom which Tagore aspired, should continue.

This is a critical analysis of how #HCMTR affects Punkar's daily life for the next decade or more if the project is rolled out. A 1983 plan imposed on a 2026 city. Enormous cost, many housing areas under thereat, and little benefits.

Across religions, literacy shows even greater contrast in 1911. Zorastrians and Brahmos , had the higher average literacy 70%, even womens literacy rate was a~65%. They were more than 100 years ahead of the rest of Indian population.

This chart shows how unequal education access was across different Castes and tribes in 1911. Gender gap across castes is stark (women were hardly in school, barring few upper castes). Baidya, Subarna banik (goldsmiths) Brahman, and Kayastha', men had literacy rate comparable to 2001 rate. Whereas Dalit castes (Bauri, Dom, Mochi) in West Bengal, had less then 2% literacy.

The colonial preoccupation with counting and classifying India’s complex and often fluid caste communities dates back to the nineteenth century and became increasingly visible in successive censuses. By the late nineteenth century, British officials were also influenced by a wider European search for a supposedly “scientific” basis for race. In colonial India, anthropologists such as H. H. Risley attempted to connect caste with biological race, grouping communities into imagined “Indian racial types.” This project also intersected with the classification of Indian languages. Linguistic families—such as Indo-European, Iranian, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman—were frequently treated not merely as language groups but as evidence of distinct racial origins (We explored this relationship between language, race and colonial classification in an earlier Censusnama article: indiastatestory.in/post/16-r… ) Risley’s racial theory of caste relied heavily on anthropometry—the measurement of the human body. Indicators such as the nasal index and cephalic index were presented as objective scientific measures of racial difference and social hierarchy. These methods formed part of the broader intellectual world of scientific racism that later became closely associated with eugenic thought. Our latest Censusnama article traces this revealing history of caste, race and anthropometry in the Censuses of 1901 and 1911. It also shows that colonial classification was never entirely stable. Successive Census Commissioners inherited Risley’s framework, but also modified, contested and eventually abandoned by 1941, Read the article by Gaurav Kalyani, Nishitha Mandava and me. indiastatestory.in/post/26-r… Have a thoughtful read. @indiastatestory #Censusnama #IndianCensus #CensusHistory #Caste #Race #Census1901 #BritishIndia #ColonialCensus #Eugenics

Explore the data and visualization on Literacy across provinces and states , by Caste and gender in 1911 public.flourish.studio/visua…