What role did “number” play in the colonial imagination and state practices? This is the question Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai deals with in his 1993 essay: ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’. In essence, Appadurai seeks to contribute to—and unravel—the complex nature of the colonial logic of governance.
Contextually, Appadurai adds to the scholarly contributions of Edward Said’s “orientalism”[1], Bernard Cohn’s “colonial investigative modalities”[2], David Ludden’s “oriental empiricism”[3], Nicholas Dirks’ “cultural roots” in colonial governance[4].
The role of numbers in colonial imagination suggests that it helped structure a one-dimensional “volatile politics of community and classification” and sustain “bureaucratic power” over all colonial subjects. The British instrumentalised numbers in all forms of quantification: from censuses to maps to agricultural surveys, to racial studies, and other productions of colonial archives.
The use of numbers was not nearly new to the Indian subcontinent. The Mughals, before the British, had already used quantification measures for “counting, classifying, and controlling the large populations under their control”. However, the Mughals restricted those practices to create maps and measure lands for revenue practices.
Enumeration was more of an acknowledgement of the existence of different groups rather than the enumeration of group identities—and the individuals associated with those identities. Therefore, for these pre-colonial Indian states, number was not a paramount element of state-making but merely a mechanism to tax, account, and generate land revenue.
With the British collection of numbers, however, there was a complex utilitarian project that worked as “informational, justificatory and pedagogical techniques”. It means that when the British collected numbers regarding crops, forests, castes, tribes, religions, etc., they were indeed used for bureaucratic purposes.
These numbers helped the British levy agrarian taxes, resolve community disputes, assess military options, and adjudicate political representations. But, apart from all these bureaucratic purposes, there were also many new imaginations and representations about the society they were collecting the information about.
Besides the utilitarian uses of colonial quantification, Appadurai writes, “numbers gradually became, more importantly, part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions, both of people and of resources, at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (p. 246).
Paradoxically, however, in the long run, these enumerative strategies—how people were grouped, clubbed together, and numbered—“helped ignite communitarian and nationalist identities that undermined colonial rule” (p. 246).
The British colonial rulers treated the entire colonised population as “different” in racial discourse—which was at the heart of Orientalism.
Edward Said writes elsewhere: “There is, in addition, the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more sceptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”[5] The Orient in India was always looked from a distance—through the lens of caste (as it appeared to Western eyes).
In colonial India, the census became a paramount driver of understanding the Indian society through its occupations, class, caste, and religions. This created what David Ludden calls “orientalist empiricism”—a “hunt for information” and using numbers and numerical data to archive this information. In practice, these numerical imperatives were thought to help embark on “social control” or—in best cases, even reform colonies.
Michel Foucault calls these obsessive enumerative practices “governmentality”: an ability of the state/government to reduce people into numerical imaginaries that are easier to govern, control, coerce and repress. In so doing, by reducing people to mere numbers, governments can easily build institutions of governance like schools, hospitals, military stations, prisons, etc.
After 1870, numbers became an integral element of the colonial state apparatus in British India. In practice, caste, in its simplistic formation, was taken as the basis for census-making. Therefore, through mechanisms of census practices, caste became an essential element of “organising knowledge about the Indian population” (p. 258).
Caste in India, even if it was itself a very complicated part of the Indian social imaginary, and was refracted and reified in many ways through British techniques of observation and control, was nevertheless not a figment of the British political imagination. In this regard, Oriental essentializing in India carried a social force that can come only when two theories of difference share a critical assumption: that the bodies of certain groups are the bearers of social difference and of moral status. This is where India is a special case. But looked at from the vantage point of the present, India may also be regarded as a limiting case of the tendency of the modern nation-state to draw on existing ideas of linguistic, religious, and territorial difference to “produce the people” (p. 248).
There was a spillover effect of the numerical exercise of British colonialism. With numbers as the means of colonial governance, the Indian subjects began to attach community feelings to their fellow community members.
In so doing, the politics of representation, a politics of representativeness, as well as “politics of statistics”—where numbers became the organising force of political governance—began to take shape in the form of anti-colonial nationalist struggles across the colonised world.
Therefore, the colonial body counts, as they were, created not only the means for the British to rule but also enabled the colonised subjects to think of themselves as “self-consciously enumerated communities” (p. 262). With time, these colonised bodies came to treat themselves as homogenous and opposed the colonial rule.
Cover Photo: Colonialism illustrating its different elements, hierarchies and impact on the land and people (a factory in Hugli-Chuchura, Bengal, in 1665) | Photo: By Hendrik van Schuylenburgh – www.rijksmuseum.nl, Public Domain, Link
References:
[1] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
[2] Adarsh Badri, “Bernard Cohn and Colonial Investigative Modalities,” May 18, 2023, https://adarshbadri.me/history/bernard-cohn-investigative-modalities/; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[3] David Ludden, “A Shortened Version of: Orientalist Empiricism and Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, ed. Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
[4] Adarsh Badri, “Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: An Evocative Narration of British India,” May 5, 2020, https://adarshbadri.me/book-review/review-nicholas-dirks-castes-of-mind/.
[5] Said, Orientalism.