Census in Assam: The Question of the Mother Tongue*

In all the census operations up to 1931, Bengali was returned as the mother tongue of more than 50 per cent of the district’s population. The bland neutrality of the administrative instructions given to the census enumerators do not on the face of it admit any ambiguity or subjective manipulation by the enumerators. Mother tongue is the language spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person. If the mother died in infancy, the language mainly spoken in the person’s home in childhood will be the mother tongue. In the 1971 Census, seven segments of this population accounting for over 1,000 speakers each, returned one or other of the tribal languages of middle India as their mother tongue. Indeed several organizations of the plains tribal people have taken formal resolutions directing their followers to return the respective tribal language as the mother tongue.