Британские переписи населения в Бастаре: ошибки, мифы и заблуждения колониальных чиновников

For years, Bastar remained an enigma to the British, who erroneously and conveniently dismissed it as a mysterious woodland inhabited by cannibals, painting it as an island of primitiveness amidst civilisations. In his enthusiasm to author a two-volume work on India, East India Company official Henry Harpur Spry went so far as to describe the people of Bastar as those who ‘sacrifice and eat their fellow creatures’. Spread of misinformation Consider this: Spry never set foot in Bastar, relying instead on hearsay from Company officers like Captain Crawfurd of the Bengal Artillery, who oversaw Chhattisgarh. Spry’s armchair account reads more like lengthy chatter rather than a valuable historical document. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that Crawfurd himself had any first-hand experience in Bastar. It is important to put it on record that Spry also made a glaring mistake on Bastar when he called its Rajput Raja a Gond. This mistake was possibly carried over from the past. While translating the Tarikh-i-Firishta, a medieval Persian history of the Deccan with intriguing references to the Bastar of 1610-11, John Briggs added an asterisk to the Bastar raja, mistakenly labelling him as a Gond chief. The isolation of Bastar fostered the spread of misinformation. A report from the East India Company in 1812, for example, provided a skewed perspective of the area and the people therein. The inhabitants were described as ‘rude and barbarous’, yet they were paradoxically praised for the staunch defence of their ‘ancient rightful inheritance’ – the lowlands. The report says that they, ‘although rude and barbarous, may yet be denominated warlike, as they have always distinguished themselves bold, persevering champions of the great law of nature’. It further adds: ‘Being driven to their wild unwholesome fastness, among the mountains, they frequently descend in harvest time, into the lowlands, to dispute the produce of their ancient rightful inheritance with their present possessors…’ Clearly, the report’s author had not visited the territory. Counting the people The first attempt to quantify Bastar’s population came on November 5, 1866 during a census in the Central Provinces. This inaugural headcount yielded a figure of 2,69,684. However, the census was plagued by significant anomalies. The administration faced a dilemma when the next census in 1872 showed an inexplicable 70 per cent drop in the population, bringing the total down to 78,856. The breakdown of this figure included 29,060 Hindus, 1,704 Muslims, and a substantial category of 48,092 classified as ‘others’. A deadly combination of cholera and famine ravaged central India in 1869, undoubtedly impacting Bastar. However, this alone would not explain the population plunge — a staggering 1,90,828 residents vanishing in just six years. The numbers reeked of error. J.W. Neill, officiating secretary to the Central Provinces’ chief commissioner, echoed these concerns in his report on the 1872 census. He pointed out glaring inconsistencies: The 1866 Bastar figures were likely mere estimates based on area, while the 1872 census, despite claiming a more rigorous method, also appeared flawed, as in many villages ‘the children were not enumerated’. The report quotes comments from the deputy commissioner of Upper Godavari district, under whose jurisdiction Bastar fell for census purposes. Neill’s report continued to expose the flaws of the 1872 census in Bastar. While forms and instructions reached the raja, ‘there is no means of knowing whether houses were numbered or lists of inhabitants taken previous to the night of the Census’. Some areas, such as Jagdalpur, Bhopalpatnam and Bijapur, showed decent efforts, but the rest carried errors. Most alarmingly, children under twelve were entirely omitted. While the Central Provinces overall saw a modest increase (from 9.06 million to 9.25 million), Bastar’s dramatic decline remained an enigma. In the census exercise of early British days, a headcount was conducted on a single day. The 1872 census wasn’t just plagued by regional discrepancies; there were some structural errors too. The sheer number of categories (caste, occupation, race, religion, remarks, etc. — a whopping nineteen) gave printers nightmares. Worse yet, a lack of training on open-ended questions led to a plethora of colourful yet inaccurate professions across the Central Provinces. Imagine finding entries like ‘con man’, ‘pimp’, ‘prostitute’, ‘idiot’, and ‘thief’ — a reflection more on the confusion of the enumerators than the reality of the population. Neill’s report candidly highlighted the hilarious mishaps. He blamed some of the bizarre entries on overzealous enumerators who seemed determined to write something or the other in the occupancy column against every individual. Infants, for instance, were listed as ‘sucking’, children as simply ‘playing’, and newcomers to a village as ‘guests’. Further confusion arose with the term pesha-i-khud, loosely translated as self-employed. Its frequent appearance left senior officers scratching their heads, unsure of the specific occupations it indicated. Neill even documented the enumerators’ struggle to differentiate between lunatics and idiots, wryly noting ‘it having been impossible to separate them, as the enumerators did not appreciate the distinction between the two classes’. (Excerpted with permission from Hachette India from Shantanu Nandan Sharma’s Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India’s Heartland) Published - September 03, 2026 08:00 am IST