The number of native speakers of the largest Indian languages between 1871 and 2011.
There was no Tamil genocide in 1981; heavy floods destroyed a lot of census data
Urdu and Hindi were often merged in census data from before 1961, so I couldn't separate them and this may have made the Hindi data weird
The 1941 census had no language data, presumably due to World War 2
Bengali speakers got reduced significantly in 1941-51 because of Partition
| Year | Hindi | Bengali | Marathi | Telugu | Tamil | Gujarati | Urdu | Kannada | Odia/Oriya | Malayalam |
| 2011-01-01 | 528347193 | 97237669 | 83026680 | 81127740 | 69026881 | 55492554 | 50772631 | 43706512 | 37521324 | 34838819 |
| 2001-01-01 | 422048642 | 83369769 | 71936894 | 74002856 | 60793814 | 46091617 | 51536111 | 37924011 | 33017446 | 33066392 |
| 1991-01-01 | 329518087 | 69595738 | 62481681 | 66017615 | 53006368 | 40673814 | 43406932 | 32753676 | 28061313 | 30377176 |
| 1981-01-01 | 257749009 | 51298319 | 49452922 | 50624611 | | 33063267 | 34941435 | 25697146 | 23102528 | 25700705 |
| 1971-01-01 | 202767971 | 44792312 | 41765190 | 44756923 | 37690106 | 25865012 | 28620895 | 21710649 | 19863198 | 21938760 |
| 1961-01-01 | 133435360 | 33888939 | 33286771 | 37668132 | 30562706 | 20304464 | 23323518 | 17415827 | 15719398 | 17015782 |
| 1951-01-01 | | 25121674 | 21049522 | 32999916 | 26546764 | 16311090 | | 14471784 | 13153109 | 13380109 |
| 1931-01-01 | 71547000 | 53469000 | 20890000 | 26374000 | 20412000 | 10850000 | | 11206000 | 11194000 | 9138000 |
| 1921-01-01 | 96714369 | 49294099 | 18797831 | 23601492 | 18779577 | 9551992 | | 10374204 | 10143165 | 7497638 |
| 1911-01-01 | 82003000 | 48367000 | 19807000 | 23543000 | 17729000 | 10682000 | | 10526000 | 10162000 | 6682000 |
| 1901-01-01 | 39367779 | 44624048 | 18237899 | 20696872 | 16525500 | 9687429 | | 10365047 | 9687429 | 6029304 |
| 1891-01-01 | 85375373 | 41343672 | 18892875 | 19885137 | 15299759 | 10619789 | | 9751885 | 9010957 | 5428250 |
