India, Nov. 29 -- This is your third book in almost a year, after your release from jail. How did you get any writing done in what must have been difficult conditions? This was a difficult period because it came as something like a bolt out of the blue. I never imagined I would land in jail. For a short time, it was a shock, but the human organism adjusts to an environment. I thought I might not come out alive; so be it. I had done enough; I could call it a day. But then I adjusted and came out in one piece. There were deaths in the family - I lost one uncle and then my brother. But I carried on. The 1857 revolt gave a big jolt to the British. They realised they did not understand India enough. When the Crown took over in 1858, Queen Victoria declared she would not interfere with the Indians' culture and religious beliefs, but they adopted ideas from the Enlightenment in Europe of categorisation and classification. There is a dictum, more used in management than in social sciences: You cannot control what you cannot measure. So, they started measuring everything: length of ear, width of forehead, everything. They brought in ethnographers and enumerators. Between 1858 and 1871, they found that caste and religion were salient, and they picked it up and started measuring. Certainly, they induced caste consciousness and religious identities. Prior to that, the system was more fluid and localised. Although caste was pan-Indian, it did not operate with the same fixed boundaries. There has been longstanding debate over how much the British impacted the structure of caste. How do you see the effect of the census? The British census brought rigidity to caste. What was very fluid became rigid; what was contextual became hierarchical. It created a pan-Indian identity, which allowed groups to take higher claims than they previously could. The practice was first abandoned in 1931 by the British, because enough had been done; continuing was expensive and did not add to their logic. After Independence, people did not want to do it because the Congress leadership - Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad - were not enthusiastic. Congress believed if they spoke the caste language, national unity would be diluted. So, the Congress was not enthusiastic about caste enumeration. In the Constituent Assembly, the big discussions were around instituting reservations. The debates were dominated by the difficulty of identifying backward castes: How do you identify backwardness when it is a continuum? They evolved criteria such as social and educational backwardness, but these were vague in a country so backward at the time. So, enumeration did not prominently feature in the discussions. The question of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was settled, as the British surveys had already listed these groups. That became a schedule. Post-Independence, the process of adding to the schedule became politicised. Politics has reached such a stage that nothing should surprise anybody. The BJP was earlier against it. The 2024 election suggested that upper layers of backwards - relatively better-educated, well-off groups - were shifting away. The party needed to solidify the lower strata of its support, so it may have felt the caste census could help create a narrative: The Congress historically too was not enthusiastic, but picked up the idea to try to recover lost constituencies. Data is a tool of visibility - a diagnostic snapshot, like a national selfie. What you do with that data matters. Are you imagining that any political party is going to talk about redistributive logic? No. Data operates in a logic of recognition; it tells you where castes are placed on educational or economic spectrums. Beyond that, what do you do? You need political will, which I don't think exists. Real redistribution - say land distribution - is not on the agenda. Data without political will does not automatically lead to social justice. Yes, that's my worry and the book's thrust: Caste census would solidify boundaries and impel people to reassert caste identities. It will fragment solidarity among lower castes; it can become a zero-sum game where every group fights for a share of a contracting pie. That creates conflict rather than advancing the goal of annihilation of caste....