Caste is an important identity for the majority of Indian people. However, caste enumeration was discontinued after independence except for those castes and tribes notified by the President of India, which are known as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in order to provide them with special benefits. Recently the Government of India has also extended these special benefits to Other Backward Classes (OBCs), identified using information from the 1931 census, which led to a strong plea to include caste on the eve of the 2001 census. But this did not find favour with the Government. The paper attempts to examine the changing practices of caste enumeration and their categorisation in censuses and to demonstrate that the dilemma of including caste in the 2001 census is embedded in the British legacy.