Classifying Caste

Census Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries I am grateful to the late Dr Arvind N. Das, Dr Dilip K. Menon and Prof. Neeladri Bhattacharya for their comments on an earlier version of this paper that appeared as a chapter in my doctoral thesis. That chapter could not have taken the present form of an article without Dr Lakshmi Subramanian's initiative. Sangeeta DasGupta has shared and shaped the ideas presented herein from the very beginning. I also thank Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and the two anonymous referees whose comments helped me enrich the arguments