Populations, Castes, and Classes

The profusion of data that statistical agencies routinely disseminate about India is expected to conveniently sum up the behaviors and whereabouts of more than a bil-lion people.1 But this wealth of information may also hide India’s diversity behind a long list of national or regional indicators that do not accurately reflect the changing circumstances of individuals and local communities. While survey and data collection processes are notoriously partial, and at times unreliable, the seemingly awkward sta-tistical categories of India’s massive datasets – weird caste and tribe nomenclatures, “census villages, ” erratic age distributions, elastic administrative units, etc. – offer pre-cious tools by which to describe and explore India’s demographic diversity, tools that anthropologists have, much to their detriment, by and large avoided. Despite the prevalence in India of overly positivist narratives based on such statistics (the kind of which most humanistic social scientists are wary), anthropologists have much to learn from demography. Just as demographers are coming to better understand the impor-tance of contextualizing the social conditions under which survey research is con-ducted, anthropologists may yet find innovative ways of using such research for more elaborate interpretations of contemporary Indian life. This chapter reviews some of the key sources and monitoring tools available for describing India’s population and its rapid demographic and socioeconomic transforma-tions. It starts with two sections devoted to the nature of geographical and social catego-ries, followed by a more detailed examination of the major dimensions of the current revolution in family structures, marriage patterns, and reproduction. The last two sec-tions explore gender and socioeconomic inequality. However, an inventory of statistical Demography for Anthropologists