37 | Literacy, Aspiration and Inequality in the 1931 Census of India

By Gaurav Kalyani, Umesh Bedkute and Shivakumar Jolad

Published on: 26 September 2026

Introduction

Literacy was asked across six earlier Indian censuses. Since 1872, it has been redefined and refined on what counts as literacy and how to count it. From 1901 the population was divided simply into literate and illiterate. From 1911 a person was counted as literate only if he or she could write a letter to a friend and read the reply. The 1931 Census kept this functional test. It did not ask about schooling or degrees. From the 1880s, primary education was placed in the hands of district and municipal boards. English-medium secondary schools and colleges grew much faster than village primary schools, since they led to government employment (Chaudhary, 2012). The census tried to track the results of this system. India therefore had two measures of education, one counting enrolment and the other counting people who could actually read and write.

It was also spread unevenly across the country. The literacy returns were tabulated by age, sex, religion, caste, province and state, and by town and village. This made it possible to compare it with previous censuses till 1901. Meanwhile, a vote based on literacy was under discussion, and the economic depression was beginning to test the value of an education. More than 5.5 million people had become literate during the previous decade, and schools had multiplied. Yet the report of the Census Commissioner, J. H. Hutton, did not read these gains as a story of simple progress (Hutton, 1933).

The literacy chapter of the 1931 Census remains one of the richest sources on how the written word was shared out in late colonial India. It touches upon gender, marriage, caste, language, school finance, political rights and the anxieties of the educated unemployed. This article draws on the literacy chapter from the main census report Volume I - parts I & II, along with later scholarship, to follow those threads.

Counting literacy in 1931 Census

The census of 1931 used a practical, functional definition of literacy. It did not ask about school attendance, examinations or degrees. A person was literate if he or she could both read and write a letter. This standard had been in use since 1901, which meant that the 1931 figures could be compared with those of the previous three decades (Hutton, 1933, p. 324).

The first censuses, up to 1891, divided people into three groups, namely "learning", "literate" and "illiterate". This caused confusion, because students often returned themselves as literate. In 1901 the census moved to two categories only. Even then, practice varied. The 1911 report admitted that in some places people "were entered as literate who could do little more than write their own name and spell out a few simple printed words" (Natarajan, 1972). From 1911 the letter test was applied more strictly. Local variations still survived. In Travancore in 1931, for example, a person was classed as literate only if he or she had passed the fourth standard in vernacular schooling, or had an equal command of reading and writing (Natarajan, 1972).

The educationist R. V. Parulekar later warned about another source of error. He noted that "there was pride in the ability to sign and such persons who could sign their names but could write little else claimed themselves as literate" (Parulekar, 1939 as cited in Rao, 2024, pp. 11–12). Census figures therefore rested partly on self-description. They were collected by local enumerators, many of whom were revenue staff or village schoolmasters working unpaid (Hutton, 1932; Shirras, 1935).

The definition also left people out. Those who could read but not write were counted as illiterate. The report noted that there was a considerable number of such people, mostly Muslims who were able to read the Quran in Arabic. Only Baroda State recorded this group separately. There, readers who could not write made up 50 per 1,000 of the population aged five and over. Children under five were always counted as illiterate, whatever their abilities. The script in which people wrote was not generally recorded. Literacy in English was entered in a separate column (Hutton, 1933).

Hutton was clear that schooling and literacy were not the same thing. People learned to read and write at home, from private tutors, in religious institutions and in the course of business. Others went to school for a year or two and forgot what they had learned (Hutton, 1933). The census measured a minimum skill, but the patterns it uncovered reached far beyond it.

Levels of Literacy

During the late colonial period, formal education operated as a hierarchical ladder structured from local-language primary schools up through English-medium secondary schools and university degree programs. Primary schooling aimed at achieving permanent literacy by Class IV, while secondary and higher education prepared a much smaller elite for professional and academic credentials.

Student enrollment shrank dramatically at each stage, dropping from over 10.5 million primary pupils to fewer than 100,000 college students. Despite this severe drop in participation, financial expenditure heavily favored higher education. Consequently, while the vast majority of children never progressed beyond basic schooling, the small minority reaching higher tiers obtained qualifications comparable to those in wealthier nations. 

Literacy variation across provinces

Measured as a rate, the regional differences were wide. Burma led with 368 literates per 1,000 people aged five and over. It was followed by Cochin (337), Travancore (289), Baroda (209), Coorg (176) and Delhi (163). The all-India figure was 95. At the other end were Hyderabad (50), the Punjab States (42), Jammu and Kashmir (40), the Bihar and Orissa States (39), Sikkim (35) and the Central Provinces States (22) (Hutton, 1933).

The report warned against reading every figure at face value. The very high rates for Baluchistan (54 per mille) and for the agencies and tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province were, in Hutton's words, "entirely misleading." They were calculated on small groups made up mainly of troops and people living in cantonments and frontier posts, and didn’t fully account for the real residents of those areas (Hutton, 1933).

Literacy rates by sex in selected units, 1931 (percent of people aged five and over)

Note. Data from Hutton (1933, Subsidiary Table II). Figures are rounded.

The leading regions reached high literacy by different routes. In Burma, the report noted, even though literacy was not of high order, it was still a habit, traditional in both sexes and for all classes. Boys and girls were taught in Buddhist monasteries, which were present in almost every Burman village. Most Burmese literacy therefore came from village monasteries rather than government schools. 

Baroda offers a contrast. Its ruler, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, had made primary education free and compulsory across the state in 1906, with fines for parents who kept children away (Rao, 2024). By 1931 Baroda had the fourth highest literacy rate among the major units, and its number of literates had grown by almost 60 percent in ten years (Hutton, 1933).

A decade of slow gains

At first sight, the decade from 1921 to 1931 looks like progress. The number of literates rose from 22.6 million to 28.14 million (a gain of 5.52 million ). This was an increase of 24.4 percent, while the total population grew by 10.6 percent. Literacy was spreading faster than the population (Hutton, 1933).

The report did not treat this as a large change, since the population had grown by almost 34 million. In a paper read to the Royal Society of Arts in 1932, before the final tables were ready, Hutton pointed out that,

The report also explained why a larger number of literates did not always mean higher literacy. In Sikkim the number of literates rose by one percent over the decade, yet the literacy rate fell, because the population grew faster. Hutton's early figures for Travancore showed a similar pattern. Its population grew by 27.2 percent, and its share of literates dipped slightly even though Travancore remained far ahead of most of India (Hutton, 1932).

Despite this increase, literacy remained very low. In 1931, only 8.0 percent of the total population was literate. Among those aged five and above, the literacy rate was 95 per 1,000: 156 per 1,000 for males, but only 29 per 1,000 for females (Hutton, 1933).

A similar pattern appears when literacy is measured among those aged ten and above. G. Findlay Shirras reported that male literacy rose gradually from 12.9 percent in 1901 to 14.0 percent in 1911, 16.1 percent in 1921, and 17.4 percent in 1931. Female literacy increased from 0.9 percent in 1901 to 1.3 percent in 1911, 2.3 percent in 1921, and 3.1 percent in 1931 (Shirras, 1935). Overall, literacy did improve across these decades, but the pace was slow, and the gender gap remained very large.

Literacy grew faster than population, but the share of literates remained small. Data from Hutton (1933).

Progress was also uneven across the country. Among the provinces, Delhi recorded the largest rise in literates, 70.6 percent, followed by Punjab (46.9), Assam (41.0) and the Central Provinces and Berar (38.1). Bengal grew by only 9.7 percent and Bihar and Orissa by 8.9 percent. Several princely states grew even faster. Cochin rose by 87.0 percent, Jammu and Kashmir by 71.5 and Hyderabad by 63.1 (Hutton, 1933).

Hutton observed that, "to some extent therefore, but by no means consistently, most progress has been made where there was most room for it" (Hutton, 1933, p. 324). Bihar and Orissa was an exception, with much room to grow but slow growth. Cochin was an exception in the other direction, since it already had high literacy and still grew quickly.

Increase in the number of literates, 1921 to 1931

Note. Data from Hutton (1933). Provincial figures include states in political relation with each province.

Gender disparity

The largest divide in the census figures was between men and women. Among people aged five and over, 156 of every 1,000 males were literate, compared with just 29 of every 1,000 females. Female literacy was growing, however. The number of literate women rose by almost 50 percent, from 2,782,219 in 1921 to 4,169,105 in 1931. Over the same period the female population counted for literacy grew by 11.4 percent. The report still called these figures of female literacy "absurdly low" (Hutton, 1933).

The balance between literate men and literate women varied greatly by region. In the Bihar and Orissa States there was only one literate woman for every fifteen literate men. In Sikkim there was less than one for every twenty-two. Even in Burma, literate men outnumbered literate women by 3.5 to one. The south-west told a different story. Cochin had more than one literate woman for every two literate men, and Travancore was close behind. Malabar had nearly one for every three, Coorg a little less, Baroda a little fewer, and Mysore about one for every five. Cochin now led India in female literacy, with Travancore second and Burma a close third (Hutton, 1933).

Hutton drew a broader lesson from these figures. He argued that literacy confined to men merely served as “economic implement, necessary to business, a means of livelihood, a political weapon, or useful for intercourse with the external world, but of little value for its own sake." He went on to suggest that "it is not perhaps until literacy becomes a domestic acquisition taken for granted among members of both sexes, that it will cease to be regarded as a mere doorway into government or other service" (Hutton, 1933).

Education Department figures for 1929 to 1930 showed the scale of the loss.

Of 1.3 million girls in Class I, only 26 percent went on to Class II. Of those in Class II, 63 percent went on to Class III, and of those in Class III, 58 percent reached Class IV, showing extremely high drop out, very low retention rates even in primary grades.

The overall loss was about 90 percent. The report described the situation as "a vicious circle, since the early age of marriages prevents the growth of female literacy, while the absence of female literacy seems largely responsible for the absence of any general change in the early age of marriage." Burma and the Malabar coast were named as exceptions. In Cochin, the report noted "an increasing tendency" for women "to seek careers of their own in preference to marriage at all" (Hutton, 1933).

The Auxiliary Committee of the Indian Statutory Commission (aka Simon Commission), chaired by the educationist Philip Hartog, reported in 1929 (Hartog Committee report) that "only ten per cent of the girls of school-going age attend school; the figure for boys is four times as high" (Indian Statutory Commission, 1929, as cited in Rao, 2024). The 1921 census had counted about 2.2 million girls married before the age of ten.

The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, known as the Sarda Act, set a minimum age of marriage for girls at 14 year, but its effects lay in the future when the 1931 count was taken. Of 30,284 women teachers in British India in 1927, only about 41 percent were trained (Rao, 2024). The economic historian Latika Chaudhary has found that higher public spending on primary schools raised male literacy in colonial districts but had no similar effect on female literacy. Building schools alone did not bring girls into them or keep them there (Chaudhary, 2012).

Literacy in Towns and Villages

Literacy was much higher in towns. In the 34 cities specially tabulated by the census, there were 348 literate males and 149 literate females per 1,000 of the total population. For India as a whole, the figures were 133 and 25. City men were about two and a half times as likely to be literate as men in the country at large. City women were about six times as likely as women in general (Hutton, 1933).

The gap in English was larger still. The same 34 cities had 1,473 males and 434 females literate in English per 10,000 of the population. The all-India figures were 181 and 23. The report explained the difference in plain terms. In towns, both the need and the opportunities of acquiring it were more. Cities brought together schools, offices, trade and government service, where reading and writing had clear practical value (Hutton, 1933).

Even with all unrecognised rural schools added, the total stayed below 230,000 (Hutton, 1933). The Hartog Committee listed the special difficulties of rural schooling. Schools were small, good teachers were hard to find and keep, women teachers could rarely live in villages, supervision was difficult, and regular attendance was harder to secure (Rao, 2024). Many village schools had a single, poorly paid teacher. In 1929, the average monthly pay of a primary teacher ranged from under Rs. 9 in Bengal to Rs. 47 in Bombay. Hartog linked low pay directly to high dropout (Rao, 2024).

Religion, caste, and language

The census used the social categories of colonial administration, which require careful closer look. Burma was tabulated by race rather than religion, and caste tables covered only selected groups (Hutton, 1933). Even so, the data show large differences between communities.

Parsis had the highest literacy, with 791 per 1,000 aged five and over. They were followed by Jews (416), Jains (353) and Christians (279). The all-India figure was 95. Sikhs recorded 91, Hindus 84 and Muslims 64. Tribal communities stood at just 7 per 1,000. The report explained part of this pattern by occupation. As Hutton noted, Parsis, Jews and Jains were, "mainly composed of trading classes for whom literacy is essential" (Hutton, 1933).

Change over the decade also differed by community. Sikhs made the fastest gains, with literacy rising by 23 per 1,000. This was notable because the Punjab census superintendent had written of their "educational stagnation" only ten years earlier. Jains, Muslims and Hindus followed in that order. Among males, the gains of Hindus and Muslims (14 per 1,000 each) were larger than those of Jains.

Among females, Jains led. Parsis, Christians and tribal groups showed small declines. The Parsi fall was confined to men and may have been linked to the depression. The report also suggested that some literate tribal people had returned themselves as Hindus, and that Christian figures included illiterate converts (Hutton, 1933).

With a franchise based on literacy under discussion, the report also gave figures for adults aged twenty and over. The pattern was the same. Among adults, Parsis had 851 literates per 1,000, Jews 482, Jains 389, Christians 305, Sikhs 107, Hindus 96, Muslims 77 and tribal groups 8 (Hutton, 1933).

Caste figures showed even wider gaps. The Baidhyas of Bengal and Assam had 672 literate men and 327 literate women per 1,000. The Nayars of Malabar had 647 men and 209 women, the Kayasthas 518 and 203, the Khatris 418 and 153, and Brahmans 416 and 106. At the other end, the Bhangis had 35 literate men and one literate woman per 1,000, the Doms 23 and one, the Gonds 19 and one, the Chamars 16 and one, and the Bhils 13 and one. Hutton noted that high social status did not always mean high literacy, but trading castes were always high in male literacy (Hutton, 1933).

Regional differences cut across caste. Among Brahman males, 800 per 1,000 were literate in Madras, 788 in Bombay and 645 in Bengal, compared with 293 in the United Provinces and 268 in the Punjab. Among castes such as the Madigas of Madras (9 per 1,000) and the Chamars of the Punjab (14 per 1,000), almost no one could read and write. Chaudhary's analysis of these figures confirms it separately (Hutton, 1933; Chaudhary, 2012). For the "exterior castes" as a whole, Hutton concluded that they were "a little better equipped than the primitive tribes; but not very much" (Hutton, 1933, p. 331).

In Punjab, the number of Dalit pupils rose from about 3,700 to 19,500 between 1922 and 1927, most of them in ordinary schools (Rao, 2024). These changes were recent, and their effect on adult literacy was still small.

Language was another decisive factor, especially for tribal communities. The Lushai (Mizo) of the Assam hills recorded 279 literate men and 101 literate women per 1,000. The report noted they showed "how literate an isolated hill tribe may become when given the opportunity." It linked this, and similar results among the Khasis, to the use of the local vernacular in primary schools in the hill districts. Elsewhere, hill children were usually taught in the language of the neighbouring plains. The missionary scholar P. O. Bodding blamed this policy for the low literacy of the Santals. In the Naga Hills, the report pointed to the "incredibly polyglot nature" of the area as a major obstacle (Hutton, 1933).

English literacy

English literacy was much rarer than literacy in Indian languages. Across India there were 181 English-literate males and 23 females per 10,000 people aged five and over. The numbers were so small that the census used 10,000 rather than 1,000 as its base (Hutton, 1933).

The gaps between communities were very large. Per 10,000, there were 5,041 English literates among Parsis, 2,636 among Jews, 919 among Christians and 306 among Jains. The figures fell to 151 for Sikhs, 113 for Hindus, 92 for Muslims and 4 for tribal groups. Sikhs had nearly doubled their rate during the decade, and Muslims had the next highest rate of increase. Christians were the only community whose English literacy did not keep pace with their growth in numbers. Among the major units, Cochin led with 307 English literates per 10,000, followed by Coorg (238), Bengal (211) and Travancore (158) (Hutton, 1933).

Caste figures for English showed some ‘divergence’ from those for vernacular literacy. The Baidhyas had 5,279 English-literate men and 1,373 women per 10,000. The Kayasthas had 2,418 men, the Khatris 1,320 and Brahmans 1,073 (Hutton, 1933). The Nayars, who ranked second in general literacy, had only 603 English-literate men.

English was tied more closely to towns, government employment, the professions and public life than general literacy was. It was, in effect, a narrower ladder, and fewer groups could climb it.

Schools, spending and wastage

The census compared its findings with Education Department returns. Between 1921 and 1931, the number of educational institutions rose from about 206,000 to 262,000, and the number of pupils from about 8.4 million to 12.7 million (Hutton, 1933).

Educational institutions and pupils, 1921 and 1931

Note. Data from Hutton (1933), based on Education in India, 1930–31.

A government review of the period described the years from 1922 to 1930 as "perhaps the most inspiring in the annals of Indian education." It spoke of "a burst of enthusiasm" that "swept children into school with unparalleled rapidity" (Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, as cited in Rao, 2024). After 1919 education passed to elected Indian ministers in the provinces and spending rose sharply, but by 1930 the depression had forced cuts and many new schools closed (Chaudhary, 2012; Rao, 2024).

The census report doubted that the growth matched the scale of literacy. In 1931, primary school students made up 74 percent of total student enrollment, representing a two percent drop from 1921. While the number of primary schools expanded by 28 percent over that decade, higher educational institutions grew at a significantly faster rate. The secondary schools increased by 51 percent and colleges grew by 44 percent. Spending showed the same bias. After standard exclusions, Rs. 6.82 crore was spent on primary education and Rs. 9.45 crore on secondary education. In 1930, a boy in primary school cost about Rs. 8 a year, while a boy in secondary school cost about Rs. 179. The report accepted that some secondary spending was needed, but judged the balance "disproportionately high in view of the large illiterate population" (Hutton, 1933).

Among other castes, he added, "there is no widespread demand" for education at all (Hutton, 1933).

Later research supports much of this view while adding the role of the state. Chaudhary shows that in 1931 public spending on education in British India was less than one rupee per person, or about 0.74 percent of national income (Chaudhary, 2012). Primary enrolment in 1930 was around 14 percent of the school-age population, well below Brazil, Mexico or Japan, while secondary enrolment was broadly comparable to that of France (Chaudhary, 2012). She also cites a Madras district officer who told a commission in 1908 that local boards were "not really in favor of increased primary education, because it makes labor more difficult to handle" (Chaudhary, 2012).

The deeper question was whether children stayed at school long enough to become literate for life. The Education Department judged that four years of schooling were needed for this ‘permanent literacy’. It therefore used pupils in Class IV as a rough measure of new literates. Over the decade, 7,660,419 pupils reached Class IV in British India. At least a fifth were thought unfit for promotion and likely to lapse into illiteracy. This gave a minimum estimate of 5,750,000 new literates. The census counted an actual increase of 4,073,030 literates in British India, which Hutton thought reasonably close once deaths among older and newer literates were taken into account (Hutton, 1933).

The Hartog Committee had put the problem clearly. "In the primary system, which, from our point of view, should be designed to produce literacy and the capacity to exercise an intelligent vote, the waste is appalling," it observed. In one province, despite a large rise in schools, pupils and spending, fewer pupils reached Class IV in 1927 than ten years earlier. The committee also noted that in rural conditions which lacked suitable vernacular literature, even those who became literate faced challenges of relapsing into illiteracy (Indian Statutory Commission, 1929, as cited in Rao, 2024). Enrolment was not the same as literacy, and literacy once gained was not always retained.

Franchise Committee - disappointed aspiration

The Indian Franchise Committee was set up in December 1931, on the recommendation of the franchise sub-committee of the Round Table Conference in London. It was chaired by the Marquess of Lothian and had eighteen members, both British and Indian. Its task was to prepare detailed proposals for widening the vote and drawing constituencies for the new central and provincial legislatures. Besides property, it proposed an educational qualification for voters, which gave the literacy figures of the census direct political weight (Indian Franchise Committee, 1932).

As the Franchise Committee prepared its work, some suggested that the census should count everyone who had reached the primary-school leaving standard. The census found that no uniform definition could be applied across the provinces. It also argued that a certificate test would leave out a large number of people as some had left school before such certificates existed. Others had never sat the examination, or had learned privately or in the course of business (Hutton, 1933).

The literacy chapter in the 1931 report showed a revealing table from the Central Provinces report. It listed members of the provincial legislative council by caste and community. The number of Brahmin members had fallen from 29 in the second council to 17 in 1931. Even so, higher castes held over two-thirds of the seats from general constituencies. Only one member from the depressed classes had ever been elected, and the representation of the tribal population, which formed a fifth to a quarter of the province, was described as "most striking" in its inadequacy (Hutton, 1933). Any franchise tied to literacy would have rested on a skill spread very unevenly by gender, region, caste and community.

The census also tried, for the first time, to count the educated unemployed through a separate schedule. Forms were left with men who claimed to know English and said they were unemployed. Few forms came back, and the results were left out of the main tables (Hutton, 1932; 1933).

In Burma, most of the educated unemployed were Indians in Rangoon, who feared the information would be used to send them back to India. In Bengal, some unemployed Bhadralok believed the government wanted a list of them for the police as ‘political suspects.’

In Madras, the typical response was summed up as "You will not give me employment, why should I fill up your schedule?" Hutton concluded that an appeal to the English-knowing individual to fill up a form was useless "if such an appeal is merely based on the individual's sense of duty as a citizen" (Hutton, 193; 1933).

The incomplete returns counted 16,309 educated unemployed, most of them matriculates or holders of school-leaving certificates. The report did not accept this as an adequate figure. Education Department data showed that in 1930 alone, 25,716 candidates passed matriculation, 9,300 passed the B.A. or B.Sc. and 1,426 passed the M.A. or M.Sc. More than 55,000 graduates had been produced between 1921 and 1930. The report notes that these numbers explain the outcry regarding lack of employment (Hutton, 1933).

The census superintendent for Assam gave the problem a name, the "cacoethes matriculandi," or the itch to matriculate. He quoted a former Director of Public Instruction in Assam who had written that "the social order is a despotism of caste tempered by matriculation." The superintendent added that "the respectability of a community in Assam can, in fact, be generally measured by the number of persons belonging to that community who are in Government service" (Hutton, 1933).

Cochin’s census superintendent reported a fall in the number of schools and pupils in the lower secondary and primary classes. He traced this less to the depression than to “a growing realization that literacy is losing its economic value as a qualification for a career." Graduates of Madras University, he noted, were joining the Police Department on salaries of Rs. 10 to 12 a month and were viewed as fortunate to even get an employment. Higher secondary classes kept growing, he thought, because pupils had "gone too far to withdraw" (Hutton, 1933).

Conclusion

The literacy chapter of the 1931 Census recorded real change. Yet the report was careful not to present the gains as a simple story of progress. Only 95 of every 1,000 people aged five and over could read and write, and only 29 of every 1,000 women and girls.

Literacy ranged from near-universal among small trading communities to almost absent among many Dalit castes and tribal groups. The figures showed that a school nearby was not enough. The language of instruction, the pay and training of teachers, early marriage, the cost to poor families and the value that communities placed on reading all shaped whether literacy took root.

Hutton's own distinction between literacy as an economic tool and literacy as a ‘domestic acquisition’ remains a useful way to read these findings. Where reading and writing had become part of family life, as in Burma and on the Malabar coast, literacy reached women and spread across classes. Where it remained a doorway to clerical work and government service, it stayed with men, towns and the castes that had long lived by it.

In 1911, arguing for compulsory schooling, G. K. Gokhale had said that elementary education "means more than a mere capacity to read and write" (Gokhale, 1911, as cited in Rao, 2024). The 1931 Census suggests that for most Indians even that basic capacity was still out of reach.

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

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

Dr. Shivakumar Jolad works as Associate Professor (Public Policy), and is the Chair of Center for Legislative Education and Research and Director India State Stories, FLAME University, Pune

Gaurav and Umesh contributed to research and primary writing;  Shivakumar contributed to conceptualization, research and editing)

Bibliography

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