Between Enumeration and Erasure: Gender and Caste Visibility in Indian Census

Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality

Year: 2026

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Between Enumeration and Erasure: Gender and Caste Visibility in Indian Census

Nivedita Chawda

ABSTRACT:

Census procedures in India continue to erase women’s caste identities through a routine but consequential practice: when a surveyor records caste, the male head of household’s caste is automatically attributed to the entire family. Against a backdrop of unfavourably skewed sex ratios and shifting urban demographics, census methods treat households as homogeneous patriarchal units, unable to register the relational complexity produced by non-endogamous or hybrid caste identities. This disjuncture between lived kinship and state classification forms the central puzzle, thus this project asks: What social, affective, and bureaucratic infrastructures render women’s caste identities and non endogamous kinship structures invisible within the census?

To address it, the project introduces a feminist theory of enumerative harm, which reconceptualises injury not as numerical inaccuracy but as non-recognition, misclassification, and administrative erasure. Such bureaucratic erasure harms both collectively and individually: it renders marginalized groups invisible in official statistics– affecting resources, policies, and social legitimacy– while in everyday life it constrains identities, limits access to rights, and reinforces structural inequities by marking some lives as legible and others as expendable. Through a multi-methods approach of observations of public activity and document analysis of Census 2027, this study empirically demonstrates how caste and gender taxonomically destablise each other across households and administrative sites where endogamous norms are breached. This framework brings feminist concerns with visibility, absence, and relationality into sociological analyses of how the state constructs social knowledge.

Keywords: Bureaucratic Deflection; Endogamy; Kinship; Plurality; State Archives