30 | Measuring Literacy in 1921 Census: Caste, Religion, and Education in Colonial India

By Umesh Bedkute and Gaurav Kalyani

Published on: 12 Aug 2026

Comparing Two Censuses (1911-1921)

By 1921, the rules for measuring literacy had finally been set. A decade earlier, the 1911 census established a simple but rigorous bar for literacy: could a person write a letter to a friend and understand the reply? This standardized test allowed officials to strip away the usual caveats and look directly at the changing face of a nation. 

Overall literacy rose from 59 per 1,000 people in 1911 to 82 per 1,000 in 1921, an increase of about 39 percent in ten years, while male literacy moved from 106 per 1,000 to more than 130. Female literacy, still very low in absolute terms, more than doubled from 10 per 1,000 in 1911 to 21 per 1,000 in 1921. Women were therefore improving faster in proportional terms than men, a pattern the 1911 Report had already picked out as the most hopeful finding in a set of otherwise discouraging figures. 

The clearest change between 1911 and 1921 was in the approach of the officials themselves. Rather than simply counting literate people, they began to treat literacy as something that could be planned for. In the United Provinces they worked out what it cost to produce a literate person; in the Punjab they built models to project how many literates the schools would produce in future. They were beginning to act as planners rather than only as observers.

Despite this new analytical rigor, the old burdens remained. The 1921 report cited the same deep-rooted barriers: a historical lack of state funding, the rigid walls of caste, and the relentless economic pressure that pulled children away from schoolrooms and into the fields. 

This article looks at what the 1921 census recorded about a society at the start of a long change. It traces where reading and writing had reached, who had access to them and who did not, and how the questions raised then still shape India’s path from basic literacy to the digital age.

Defining ‘Literate’

Before any figures could be compared across provinces, the census had to decide what counted as being literate. Until 1901, enumerators placed people in three groups — learning, literate and illiterate — but the middle group did not work well, since it left out both very young pupils and advanced students who already regarded themselves as literate.

The three-way classification was dropped in 1901 in favour of a straightforward division between literate and illiterate, but for the next ten years there was no agreed test of ability, and local officials applied very different standards. A precise definition was adopted only in the 1911 census, and it was carried into 1921 without change. It defined literate as someone who could write a letter to a friend and read the answer to it. 

Even so, this rule was applied unevenly. The report notes that many Muslims who could read the Koran in Arabic but could not write were left out, since reading alone did not qualify. In the North-West Frontier Province, some tribesmen declined to describe themselves as literate, treating it as an unmanly accomplishment, while enumerators in other provinces asked for a school-leaving standard higher than the census required.  

No question was asked about the language of literacy; because prior experience in 1901 had shown that almost everyone was literate only in their mother tongue, except in Baluchistan, Baroda, Kashmir and Mysore, where additional detail was collected.

The National Picture

At the all-India level, 139 males and just 21 females per thousand aged five and above were literate in 1921. Literacy climbed steeply with age among the young, from 29 per mille among boys aged 5-10 to 110 in the 10-15 group and a peak of 174 among males aged 15-20, before falling back to 171 for men over 20. 

Female literacy followed the same arc at a much lower level, rising to 36 per mille at ages 15-20 and dropping to 20 thereafter. Census officials flagged this unusual dip after age 20 as a puzzle. In 1911 it was reversed, with literacy actually higher among adults than among 15-20 year-olds. Three explanations were offered:

• some 15-year-olds had not yet fully mastered reading and writing, 

• enumerators judged younger respondents more strictly, 

• traders and shopkeepers often only became fully literate in the course of business, well after their teens.

Table: Literacy per 1,000 persons by age group and province/state, Census of India 1921

Set against the previous census, the improvement was real but limited. The number of literate people in India rose from roughly 18.5 million to 22.6 million over the decade, an increase of 22 percent against population growth of 12 percent. Leaving out children under ten, literate males increased by 16 percent and literate females by 71 percent, although the female total remained very small. 

Burma was well ahead of every other province, with 510 literate males per thousand, a result of the traditional kyaung Monastic schools. The census report cautions that this teaching was elementary and would rank lower under a stricter academic test. 

The princely state of Travancore came next with 380 literate males per thousand and 173 per thousand among women, the highest female literacy recorded anywhere in India, followed by Cochin at 317 and 115 respectively. The report attributes the position of these Malabar coast states to sustained missionary work in education and to local administrations that actively encouraged schooling among the higher castes.

At the other end, Kashmir recorded 46 literate males and 3 literate females per thousand, the lowest figures in the table. Hyderabad, Central India and Gwalior, and Rajputana and Ajmer followed closely, all clustered between 65 and 74 literate males per thousand. Most of these areas were under princely states.

Differences within a single province could be just as large. In Bombay, literacy ranged from 156 per thousand in Gujarat down to 62 in Sind, while in the Central Provinces the developed Nerbudda Valley reached 131 literate males per thousand against 18 in the Chota Nagpur states. 

Cities versus Villages

Urban India was more literate than rural India. Across India, literate males were three times as common in cities as in the population at large, and literate females six times as common. The report attributes this gap to the concentration in cities of law courts, government offices, schools and colleges, which drew in students who had already acquired literacy elsewhere to pursue higher studies.

Table: Literacy per 1,000, total population vs cities, 1921

Among the great presidency towns, Calcutta recorded 53 percent literate males and 27 percent literate females, Madras 50 and 19 percent, and Bombay 31 and 16 percent respectively.

A Frontier Reluctant to Admit Literacy

Census officers noted an unusual obstacle to accurate counting in the North-West Frontier Province: tribesmen there were sometimes unwilling to say they were literate, since in a martial frontier society, as the report puts it, ‘the sword is more respected than the pen,’ and literacy carried a suggestion of unmanliness. 

Elsewhere the pressure was the opposite. Members of the public were keen to be recorded as literate, and local schoolmasters were sometimes keen to improve their institution’s results, both of which may have pushed enumerators towards over-counting. The final figures were shaped by these two opposing pressures in different parts of the subcontinent.

English Literacy

Only 2.5 million people in the whole of India, i.e. 160 males and 18 females per ten thousand aged five and above, could read and write English in 1921. Despite the small numbers, English literacy grew fast over the decade. It was concentrated in Bengal, Assam, Bombay, and the progressive princely states of Cochin, Travancore, Mysore and Baroda. 

Counting the Costs

The Punjab Census Superintendent, Mr Jacob, carried out a careful statistical exercise to test whether the province’s spending on education was actually raising adult literacy. His findings revealed that despite the Education Department's efforts, the closure of private institutions and a significant "relapse into illiteracy", where an estimated 10,000 boys annually lost their reading and writing skills after leaving school, largely neutralized potential gains.

Utilizing an early form of demographic forecasting, Jacob projected that the province's male literacy would reach only 13.2 percent by 1931, highlighting a persistent gap between school enrollment and functional adult literacy a century before such projections became common.

In the United Provinces, Mr. Edye conducted a direct economic analysis to determine the per-capita cost of producing a literate individual by comparing primary education expenditure with the growth of literacy among the 10–20 age group. His findings indicated a rising cost of production and high marginal cost for new literates gained during the 1911–1921 decade.

While Edye cautioned that these figures were skewed by long-term capital investments in school buildings and a general decline in the value of money, he noted that the relative stability of government salaries for most of the period provided a unique window into the increasing financial burden of expanding functional literacy. 

Table: Cost of producing one literate, United Provinces (Mr Edye's calculation)

Religion and the Literacy

Religion shaped literacy outcomes almost as strongly as geography. Zoroastrians (Parsis) stood above every other community, reflecting their concentration in trade and commerce, where reading and writing were part of daily work. Hindus as a whole fell below the average for all religions, a figure shaped by the inclusion of large rural and lower-caste populations. 

Muslims fared slightly worse overall, a pattern the report links to the concentration of Muslims in agricultural tracts of Bengal, Punjab and Sind. Sikhs, despite valuing literacy for reading the Guru Granth Sahib in the relatively simple Gurmukhi script, had actually their literacy ratio decline over the decade. Punjab Census Superintendent attributed this to the conversion of largely illiterate Mazhabis into the Sikh fold.

The Koran Readers

The census definition of literacy, requiring both reading and writing, excluded a sizable group whose existence the report explicitly acknowledges as Muslims, chiefly in rural areas, who had learned enough Arabic script to read the Koran but could not write. This group had, in the report's words, 'some pretensions to literacy' and was significant enough that the Baroda state schedule recorded such readers separately, even though they did not count as literate in the official all-India tally. 

This detail suggests that true religious literacy, the ability to engage with sacred texts, was considerably more widespread among Muslims than the bare census literacy figures imply, since reading-only Koranic education was not reflected in the numbers.

Closer look at Christian Literacy

The census breaks Indian Christians down by sect, which brings out differences hidden within the overall Christian literacy figures. In Travancore, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, Syrian Christians numbered over 317,000 men and nearly 300,000 women and were considerably more literate than either Protestants or Roman Catholics in the same state.

In Madras, Protestants and Roman Catholics were more evenly matched, while in Bombay and Hyderabad Protestants were consistently ahead. The English literacy figures for Indian Christians tell a similar story: of Madras’s 666,105 male Indian Christians, only 36,464 were literate in English, and in Bihar and Orissa just 4,367 of more than 145,000 male Indian Christians knew English. Even within one of the historically most literate religious communities, English remained confined mainly to urban, educated pockets. 

Table: Indian Christians, literacy by select province, 1921

Caste, Occupations, and the literacy ladder

Imperial Table IX set out literacy caste by caste, and it shows that occupation mattered as much as social rank. In Bengal, the small Baidya community, traditionally physicians and scholars, led every other caste in literacy, and more than half of Baidya women in Assam could read and write, a high figure for the period. Brahmans generally ranked well, though not always first. 

At the bottom of the scale, literacy among the depressed classes and aboriginal tribes was rare. The report notes one exception, the comparatively high literacy of Santal women in Bihar and Orissa, which it attributes to the reach of mission schools, whose work also extended to some tribes in the Central Provinces. 

Inside the Caste Tables: Assam and Bengal

Imperial Table IX, which tabulated literacy for named castes, tribes and races by province, offers a granular view that the summary religion figures cannot capture. In Assam, the Kayastha caste led every other group with 46,005 literates out of a population of 121,569, a rate above 37 percent of the whole community including women and children. At the other end, the Mikir tribe recorded 332 literates out of 97,653 people, barely a third of one percent.  

In Bengal, the Baidyas again stood out: 59,172 literates out of just 102,870 people, an extraordinary rate of nearly 58 percent across the whole community, including 21,794 literate women out of just over 50,000, a female literacy rate unmatched by almost any other caste group anywhere in India.

Table: Literacy among selected castes, Assam and Bengal, 1921

The gulf between the Baidya and Kayastha/Brahman literacy rates and those of cultivating or artisan castes such as the Goala/Ahir (herders) or Kaibartta Chasi (cultivators) illustrates just how steep the social gradient in education remained a century ago.

Retained Literacy

One of the statistical debates from the literacy chapter concerns whether literacy once acquired in school, was retained in adult life. Village schooling in particular was widely seen as instrumental rather than valued for its own sake.

Yet when census officers tried to trace whether literacy rates actually declined after school age, by comparing the literate proportion among 10-20 year-olds in 1911 with the same cohort ten years later, now aged 20-30, they consistently found that literacy appeared to increase with age up to about 27, not decrease.

Table: Units where literacy was higher above age 20 than at ages 15-20 (per 1,000 males), 1921

Table: Units where literacy was lower above age 20 than at ages 15-20 (per 1,000 males), 1921

The report placed census figures alongside the separate statistics of the Education Department, whose institutions had grown from 170,322 to 205,003 over a decade, with enrolment up by 32 percent. Female pupils numbered barely a fifth of male pupils. Of every hundred scholars, 63 were Hindus, 24 Muslims, 4 Christians and 9 from other communities. 

Table: Education Department institutions and scholars, 1911 vs 1921

Impact of Influenza Epidemic

The influenza epidemic that spread across India between the 1911 and 1921 censuses left its mark on the literacy statistics as well. Census officials observed that the disease struck the illiterate rural poor harder than the better-off literate classes, resulting in literacy gains in some provinces looking larger than they were due to high mortality. 

The United Provinces Superintendent, Mr Edye, argued the reverse for his own region. The epidemic there had killed a disproportionate number of people aged 20 to 35, a group that would normally include an above-average share of literates, so the real educational advance in his province was probably understated rather than overstated by the raw numbers. 

The report concludes that literates, being concentrated in the better-off classes, were likely to have withstood the disease better than the poor, which makes it ineffective to attribute the decade’s literacy gains to selective mortality.

Female Literacy Gap

The report is direct about why female literacy lagged so far behind male literacy. It states plainly that both Brahmanical Hindu and Islamic tradition were ‘distinctly opposed to the education of the female sex,’ and that Indian women owed such new opportunities for learning as they had largely to the influence of foreign standards on Indian men rather than to any push for change from within.

Purdah and early marriage are named as the two strongest practical obstacles. They limited the number of girls sent to school in the first place and led to most of those enrolled being withdrawn before they had learned enough to be counted as literate.

The view that public life was unsuitable for women also made it difficult to recruit female teachers, which held back the expansion of girls’ schooling. The report further observed that Muslim men treated literacy as a religious obligation and Jain men as a professional necessity, yet in both communities a ‘higher class’ families remained reluctant to educate their daughters.

Table: Growth in literate females aged 10+ by decade, and absolute numbers, 1921

Travancore’s 224 percent increase in literate women during the decade stands out even beside its 89 percent growth in the previous one, and shows how far ahead the Malabar coast states had moved by 1921.

The United Provinces shows the opposite pattern: growth of 99 percent before 1911 slowed to 19 percent afterwards, a change the report does not fully explain and one that runs against the accelerating female literacy found almost everywhere else.

School Attendance versus Real Literacy

The report drew a careful distinction between enrolment statistics and true literacy. Of the 8.3 million pupils recorded by the Education Department in 1921, 76 percent were in primary schools, and nearly half of those were at the most basic stage of instruction. Officials openly doubted if most of these children ever became truly literate.

The report stated that 'probably the greater portion relapses into illiteracy after leaving school,' owing to short attendance spans, imperfect teaching, and irregular attendance. This explains why census literacy figures consistently fell short of what raw school-enrolment numbers might have predicted, a gap the report treats as the central weakness of the entire primary education system in 1921.

A final comparative table in the chapter set Education Department enrollment figures directly against census literacy ratios, exposing just how much school attendance and true literacy diverged.

Table: Scholars and literates per 1,000 of British-territory population, 1921

Burma was the clear outlier here. Its enrolment rate of 43 scholars per 1,000 was unremarkable, roughly in line with Madras or Bombay, yet its literacy rate of 317 per 1,000 stood far above every other province.

The report attributes this entirely to monastic education operating almost completely outside the Government school system and therefore invisible to Education Department enrolment figures, a reminder that the census literacy count and the state's own school statistics were measuring two only partially overlapping realities.

Conclusion

What stood out across both the 1911 and 1921 counts is how little the underlying structure of Indian literacy moved even as the raw numbers rose.

Taken together, the 1921 literacy chapter records a colonial society at the start of a shift towards mass education. Literacy was concentrated among trading and clerical castes, driven more by commercial usefulness than by any widespread tradition of learning for its own sake. It was also divided along lines of religion, caste, region and, above all, gender. A growth, even though slow and uneven, was observed.

Female literacy, though very small in absolute terms, was rising faster than male literacy in almost every province, laying groundwork that would take generations to mature.

However, a century later, the same fault lines it traced between men and women, cities and villages, privileged castes and excluded ones, formal schooling and functional literacy continue to shape the country's education and digital-access debates today, even as the specific numbers have been transformed almost beyond recognition.

(Authors: Umesh Bedkute is a an independent researcher, data analyst and data journalist working at the intersection of policy, education and governance;

Gaurav Kalyani works as Research Associate for the India State Stories Project at the Center for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME University, Pune

Umesh worked on research and primary writing. Gaurav contributed to writing and edited the article.)

Source:

Marten, J. T. (1924). Census of India, 1921: Volume I, India — Part I, Report, Chapter VIII: Literacy. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India.