Census Administration under the Raj and After

First edition, first impression.  228pp.  Black cloth-covered boards, gilt titles on spine.  8vo.  Cloth a little worn, with small white mark on upper panel.  Endpapers jsut starting to tan else internally neat, clean and tight.  Traces of dustiness along the top text block edge.  Glossy dust wrapper. not price clipped, a little faded and shelf worn, rubbed on extreme edges.

In the first study of its kind, Maheshwari examines the census in India, one of the oldest operations of the Indian Government, and also its largest administrative exercise.  He traces the beginning of the census under the Raj and describes the earliest evidence-gather exercises in headcounts, before the first official census in 1881, taking the story through the 1941 census, which the British cancelled but the Indian authorities conducted anyway: developments in census since Indian Independence in 1947 are discussed in the last chapter.