India, Oct. 6 -- The task to compile independent India's first voter list was done by hand.

Clerks, 16,500 of them, were hired on six-month contracts to type the rolls and collate them by constituency. About 380,000 reams of paper went into printing them, historian Ramachandra Guha writes in India After Gandhi.

Behind those figures was a process that spanned nearly four years, from November 1947 to the first vote in October 1951. It ran through a Partition that had driven close to 8 million refugees into India, and it enrolled an electorate of 173 million, most of whom could not read. The process of the time was starkly different from the digitised rolls of today, which election officials revise every year. But that first roll was where...