General Report on the Census of India, 1891

The 1891 Census was conducted under the supervision of Jervoise Athelstane Baines, then the census commissioner of British India. Baines joined the Indian Civil Service in 1870 and was the deputy superintendent of the 1881 Census of Bombay Presidency. He was later appointed the superintendent of the countrywide census in 1891. This census gathered data from the provinces of British India and the ‘feudatory states’. Unlike the 1881 Census, it covered Kashmir, Sikkim, Upper Burma and “the frontier tribes in Assam and the far east”. However, it did not cover Nepal, Bhutan, the border tribes of Balochistan, and the coastal settlements ‘dependent’ on Aden (in Yemen today). The population was surveyed on the basis of age, sex, caste, religion, race, literacy, kinship, marriage, occupation, infirmity and language. More than a million enumerators conducted the survey using schedules in various languages...