The population of India as a colonial category: The British Censuses of 1872--1911.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most population or demographic research done today about India tends to involve some sort of statistical measurement of Indian characteristics or qualities. As is usually done with an eye to highlighting or isolating what is wrong with India's population so that it can be addressed in the name of development (the prevailing discourse generally focuses on India's economic and overpopulation 'problems'). The presence of an Indian population is, therefore, held paradigmatic in the research; few researchers question prior to their investigation whether the people of Indian actually form a population or not. This is not only true for India. Populations have become a paradigmatic springboard for demographers, so has the tendency to employ statistics as an epistemological optic for viewing and understanding aggregate Indian's behaviour. In this thesis I challenge the solidity of these research paradigms. Indian population is not a scientific fact; neither is the belief that quantification is the best way to describe human activity. Both are social and political constructions, largely carried out by the British Empire with the colonial census. I look at how quantification, enumeration, the utility of national censuses and the idea of 'population' as an object of scientific knowledge were first distilled in Britain and later imported to India, where they each played an integral role in generating perceptions about the existence of a numerically-describable Indian people. Particular attention is paid to the decennial Indian colonial censuses of 1872--1911, with a focus on how each census helped provide a theoretical blueprint for understanding how Indians collectively form an interdependent population.Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2000 .H33. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-03, page: 0610. Adviser: Lynne Phillips. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2000.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".