When the history of modern India's engagement with caste is written, will Budhrai Debbarma be remembered?

Here he is, a wiry man in his 60s, from a village in West Tripura district, staring at the camera with a dignity that masks his confusion at the fuss over him. Only yesterday, he had shared the stage set up on the grounds of Sankhola village school with officials who had come from as far as Delhi and Agartala, as an enumerator led him through a list of questions.

"They asked me what I do, how much I earn, how many children I have...," he says, trailing off. And also, the contentious question: what is your caste?

He answered without a shrug, or a sense that it was of great import. "Amra Tripuri (We are Tripuris)," he says in Bengali when we ask him, and then nods on prompting, as if unconvinced: "Oy, ST (Scheduled Tribe)."

The first man in independent India, the first of 1.2 billion, to be asked by the government to identify himself by his "caste".

Strewn around him are the remains of that daythe stage on which he sits is bare of its red carpet, and the pavilion under which villagers had gathered to watch the proceedings reduced to a grid of bamboo poles now holding up just the sky. Budhrai, who has been a daily wage labourer for as long as he can remember living in these lush green plains, seems unsure of the benefits of his moment of glory, his brush with the inscrutable Indian state.

"They took pictures, they showed me on TV. But do you think they will help my son find a job?"

In September last year, the Union Cabinet announced it would hold a caste census across the country between June and September, 2011. The Socioeconomic and Caste Census was launched by the Ministry of Rural Development in Sankhola village in Hezamara block of West Tripura district on June 29.

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