Census in Rangoon

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Census in Rangoon

The colonial census was a bureaucratic device which provided an essential abstraction from social reality, a ‘statistical fix’ designed to map individual social groups in space.

Aspects are considered the contradictions associated with colonial knowledge systems as reflected in the census grafted onto Burmese society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It attempts to chart the general adoption and adaptation, in the Burmese context, of a classificatory scheme which categorised labour as either productive or unproductive. Colonialism introduced new attitudes towards work and labour which reinforced patriarchal values which contrasted with more egalitarian Burmese socio-economic systems. The paper suggests that a simple classification of women workers as either productive or unproductive in the Burmese census between 1872 and 1931 resulted in the devaluation of their status as workers. This devaluation was a function of both real economic transformation taking place in the empire and changes in census classification, reflecting a gendering of occupations that undermined the cultural norms of Burmese society.

The imperial census is one of the richest sources of administrative information on various aspects of the British Empire. Barrier’s lament, in 1981, that the Indian census was under-researched remains true even today, though it is increasingly recognised that the census as a discourse of colonial policy reflected an important aspect of the ‘official mind’ of empire. As an official instrument of ‘knowing’, the census was not simply a tool for governmentality: it tended to reshape the world that it examined, providing an essential ‘statistical fix’ for the mapping of individual social groups in space. However, contemporary research on the census is constrained largely by a lack of meaningful analysis, and post-colonial theorisation has often proceeded without actually engaging with the data that it yields. Scholarship, particularly in the 1970s, has mainly focussed on social and religious patterns. Thus, Baker examined the socio-economic situation of towns in South India. Robinson likewise utilised the data to understand main features of the Muslim population. By contrast, Kessinger has attempted to reconstruct the socio-economic structure of Indian villages using tax records. More generally, historians of South Asia, such as Conlon, Jones, Oddie and Moore, have collectively highlighted the importance of viewing the census primarily as a supplementary historical source. Among geographers, Schwartzberg’s classic work on the historical atlas of South Asia and more especially on the 1961 census identified key problems associated with constructing time-series data. His strategy for handling imperial census data was to focus on smaller spatial units such as a district, town or city as a homogenous administrative unit more conducive to analysis. He suggested that ‘definitional changes have to be adjusted for’ and it was important ‘to read the ‘‘fine print’’ and prose accompanying the statistical tables’.

Assigning a dependent status to women workers would have affected the labour force participation rates in Rangoon in the actual census returns of 1891 were it not (as noted above) for the enumerators’ misinterpretation of the instruction to classify women workers as ‘dependants’. In contrast, in the 1901 census the majority of women workers were returned as ‘dependants’ even if they contributed to the income of the household. Between 1911 and 1941, the census undertaking was generally consistent and did not reflect blatant devaluation; however, following the First World War and especially with the coming of economic depression in 1928, many women were forced back to traditional bazaar and home-based occupations, a fact which was not captured by the census occupational categories of the time. In general, the decline of the local economy uprooted the source of livelihood of women, as mostly male Indian or Chinese immigrants took over even ‘personal services’, a domain in which women had previously been visible in the urban economy.