Although some European states had begun to develop demographic tools to better understand their populations by this time, the British were creating a more thorough and expansive census for its Indian territories than they exercised at home. The first all-India census (1872) and the several city and provincial counts that preceded it each required those polled to give their religion. The resulting numbers alarmed Britons because the population of Muslims exceeded their expectations.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of colonial knowledge-gathering and how demographic tools served imperial administration.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 90