ABSTRACT
Colonial practices of demographic control, bio-politics, census, statistical enumeration, etc. furnished quantified differences among certain sets of communities: the Hindu and the Muslim, as well as rural and urban people. Among other things, this would segregate certain communities – based on religion, proximity to the urban center, and much else – as peripheral to colonial modernity. This chapter discusses the cultural politics of the techniques of demographic control, guided by a Malthusian approach, which went on to pathologize vagrancy in the early twentieth century. It discusses how the heuristics of vagrancy and that of demographics were co-constituted in the colonial gaze, leading to stereotyping the vagabond as a ‘homeless destitute’.
