(Published in Mint Lounge, November 14 2026)
In the mid-19th century, there ruled in Jaipur a man called Ram Singh II (1833-80). He was a prince of many talents. Photography, for instance, interested him, and he would leave behind a heap of fascinating images, including the occasional naughty picture. Religion was another passion, though a somewhat unsavoury one—having become a staunch Saivite, the maharaja declared Vaishnava practices suspect and proceeded to persecute its votaries. But his favourite pastime was hoodwinking his overlords. Jaipur’s treaty with the Raj required it to submit a portion of all revenues over ₹4 million to the colonial power. When Ram Singh’s request to rescind this stipulation was denied, he simply began evading the surplus tribute. All it took was a habitual cooking of his books, with the result that invariably, year after year, the maharaja’s income fell below the threshold. Or as a British official grumbled in 1871, where revenues were “admitted to be 39 lakhs” they were actually “nearer to 50 or 60”. Ram Singh was subverting imperial claims while laughing his way to the palace treasury. And the secret behind this magic trick was really just an artful curation of data and an elastic approach to the truth.
Statistics and numbers have rarely been just innocent information points. They were, and remain, handy instruments of politics. Around the same time that Ram Singh was fudging records in Jaipur, for example, Travancore down south was making a virtuous show of official transparency. Starting in the 1860s, its rulers began to issue regular administrative reports, packed with tables on how many roads were built, how many schools established, what new heights trade had scaled, etc. To be clear a lot was indeed underway, and the principality was acclaimed by the Raj as a “model state”. Yet all this tabular zeal was also a shrewd form of self-advertisement. Only a few years prior, Travancore had been threatened with annexation for misgovernance; its enthusiasm now for nicely printed progress reports in English stemmed from a desire to impress the British and ward off interference. Gaps existed between the record and reality—for instance, while colonial “advice” saw public roads thrown open to all castes without discrimination in 1870, in practice little changed. So much so that the same “reform” was once more promulgated in 1884, and yet again with even greater fanfare four decades later.
Yet precisely because of its powers to mislead, paper—and what goes on it—can be a source of great power, able even to fix what we know as history. Take, for example, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919. Precisely 1,650 rounds were fired, but there is no consensus on how many were killed. Predictably, the British underplayed the event, claiming deaths in the 200s at first. When an Indian organisation, going door to door, declared a figure around 500, the authorities revised the “official” numbers, eventually settling at 379. This when whole families, out of fear, did not come forward with testimonies of their losses—they were afraid even to claim a place on the record. To be clear, 379 is a bad enough figure, yet compared with nationalist estimates of 1,000 killed, it minimises the scale of the tragedy. To this day nobody knows the precise facts, but the “official” number is what makes it to books around the world. All we can really say is that General Dyer shot human beings “like rabbits”. And perhaps the trauma of the episode is encapsulated less in hazy statistical data points, and more in the bullet marks still visible on the walls of that fated compound.
Importantly, a dislike of unflattering statistics among those in power can have truly diabolical consequences, including for those charged with putting together said numbers. Between 1932-33, millions died in Ukraine because of Soviet policies under Stalin—a man-made catastrophe. What came next was one of the world’s most rotten exercises in whitewashing the record. Distraught letters to soldiers from home were blocked; doctors were ordered to “invent” causes other than starvation for deaths around them; registries were destroyed. In 1937, when instead of a stout growth (suggestive of unprecedented prosperity under Soviet leadership) it was found that the population had shrunk, Stalin “abolished” the census. Official publications declared the whole thing a wicked conspiracy by “Enemies of the people”. As journalist and historian Anne Applebaum writes, “The statisticians themselves paid the price. The head of the census bureau…was arrested and executed by firing squad”. Yes-men were installed but before the new census was even finished, Stalin declared—in a tone oddly like a certain US President—an “astonishingly rapid, never-before-seen increase in population”.
Facts, in that sense, can be tortured to produce state-approved fictions. But equally, statistical details can be so disquieting as to trigger real-world changes, both good and bad. For instance, Indians historically wore a variety of identities—you might think along lines of caste in one context, religion in another, and region in a third. Yet the colonial privileging of religion as a master identity would reduce all this to two chief statistical choices: Muslim and Hindu. The British did not invent these categories, and yet the constant reinforcement through reports, lists, censuses, and policy documents, of the two as irreconcilable columns on the page, would serve as a catalyst for everything from communal politics (still ongoing) to Partition (also festering). Elsewhere the same fears led to some positive changes: in 1936, Travancore’s maharaja threw open 1,800 state-owned temples to all castes of Hindus. The immediate catalyst? A threat from marginalized groups to vacate the Hindu column, shifting a sizeable portion of the principality’s population into a rival statistical category. This would dilute the state’s proclaimed identity as a Hindu realm, so the maharaja staved things off by officially cancelling caste disabilities.
Unsurprisingly, these tendencies continue to animate our lives to this day. If anything, we are even more beholden to numbers to make sense of the world. To just take one example, Indians love highlighting the country’s diversity—we have 22 “scheduled” languages, and very many “dialects”. But there are all kinds of puzzling statistical rules policing even this catalogue of pluralism. The 2011 census recorded over 19,000 “mother tongues” in India. Yet only 121 ultimately qualified as “languages”. For reasons only bureaucrats can divine, “mother tongues” spoken by fewer than 10,000 people are folded into either a larger “language” or cast into a consolatory bin marked “Others”. Hindi dominates, seemingly spoken by over 500 million people. But there are strange gymnastics involved, whereby Bhojpuri with 50 million speakers—patently over the 10,000-people rule—is lumped under Hindi as a subordinate “mother tongue”, as is Rajasthani. Perhaps it is all innocent, perhaps it is just convenience, but history suggests that behind the statistics there is always a more complicated story. For as Ram Singh of Jaipur knew, then as today, numbers are a form of politics.
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