Demographic ·Modern ·Continental ·Asia

Census Districts of British India, 1881–1931

Decennial census districts with population and administrative attributes.

3,256 records 1881–1931 CE 22.56° N · 79.81° E

SCROLL ↓

Fig. 1 Interactive distribution of the 3,256 geolocated records on a live carto-positron base · globe / flat projection · decimal degrees (WGS 84).

Abstract

Administrative units of the decennial Census of British India, harmonised across six enumerations between 1881 and 1931. Each district carries population totals and provincial affiliation, supporting longitudinal study of demographic change under the Raj.

Record

Theme	Demographic — linguistic & population
Region	Asia
Temporal range	1881–1931 CE
Geographic coverage	Continental
Records	3,256 geolocated entities
Data source	Wikidata + curated CSV
Centroid	22.56° N · 79.81° E
Last revised	Apr 2026

Provenance & sources

Compiled from a curated CSV corpus (n = 3,256) and reconciled against Wikidata entities. Geographic coordinates were verified against published gazetteers prior to publication.

· accessed 2026-04-12

SPARQL query

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?coord ?inception WHERE { ?item wdt:P31 ?class . ?item wdt:P625 ?coord . OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P571 ?inception . } SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". } }

Recommended citation

Ortelius Editorial Board, ed. “Census Districts of British India, 1881–1931” [dataset]. Ortelius: A Research Atlas of Thematic Cartography, Study AT-027. 2026. doi:10.5281/ortelius.027

DATASET CC BY 4.0 · ENRICHMENT CC0 · CARTOGRAPHY MIT

Data & reproducibility

The published dataset is distributed as CSV with a derived GeoJSON edition; coordinates are decimal degrees on the WGS 84 datum. DOI 10.5281/ortelius.027.

↓ data.csv ↓ data.geojson