‘Ariane's Thread’: Sri Lankan Census Superintendents’ Reports as Guides to Identity Data

Abstract

National censuses collect, classify and tabulate vast quantities of personal data on a regular basis. The resultant numerical tables require analysis and interpretation. It has been the census superintendents, charged with the collection and processing of the data, who made the first comments on their work. Their reports provide guides for users seeking to make sense of the complex numerical tabulations. An examination of the reports on the censuses of Sri Lanka demonstrates the evolution of the census superintendents’ approaches to the collection and presentation of data on ethnicity, religion and language. The classification schemes developed in the early colonial censuses have been retained, with modifications, until the present. Continuity and change are documented in the official commentaries, which have acted as guides to make the results, and the reasoning behind them, more accessible to those who not only filled in the questionnaires, but also used the statistics.

KEYWORDS:

• Sri Lanka
• census
• reports
• identity
• ethnicity
• religion
• language

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation of South Africa towards the costs of this research is hereby acknowledged. The opinions expressed in this article and the conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the National Research Foundation.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Only nine of the British colonies and protectorates undertook censuses between 1939 and 1945. In 1946 some 24 (of the remaining 46) conducted enumerations, and a further 13 followed in the next two years.

2. The search for the descendants of the earliest inhabitants was common in many British colonial censuses, from the Caribs of the West Indies to the Saki of Malaya. The Census of India undertook an extensive ethnographic survey of the subject (Hodson, 1937).

3. In 1931 representatives were elected for geographically defined constituencies, instead of the previous community basis.

4. Tamil was designated a ‘national’ language in 1978 and raised to ‘official’ status in 1987. Also in 1987 English was recognised as the ‘link’ language.

Additional information

Anthony John Christopher (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Geosciences, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, P.O. Box 77000, Port Elizabeth 6031, South Africa.