Anthropology in India: Asiatic Society, Scholar-Administrators, Risley and Colonial Census

Anthropology Optional › Paper II › Unit 04: Emergence and Growth of Anthropology in India

4 Emergence and growth of anthropology in India – Contributions of the 18th, 19th and early 20th Century scholar administrators. Contributions of Indian anthropologists to tribal and caste studies.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Unit 4

This article covers the first half of the syllabus line: how anthropology emerged in India, who the scholar-administrators were, what they produced, how the colonial state used their knowledge, and how the discipline grew after them. The contributions of Indian anthropologists to tribal and caste studies (S.C. Roy, Ghurye, Majumdar, Bose, Karve, Srinivas, Dube, Vidyarthi, Sinha, K.S. Singh and others) are in 4b.

1. Before Anthropology: Older Ways of Describing Indian Society

• Normative texts: the Manusmriti (about the 2nd century CE) and the Arthashastra of Kautilya describe how society ought to be arranged: varna duties, marriage forms, punishments and the king’s revenue. They are prescriptions (rules laid down by an authority), not observations, which is why the anthropologist M.N. Srinivas later called this the “book view” of Indian society (3.1).
• Foreign observers: Megasthenes, the Greek envoy at the Mauryan court (about 300 BCE), described seven “classes” of Indians in his Indica; Al-Biruni wrote Kitab al-Hind (about 1030) on Hindu beliefs, castes and sciences; François Bernier described Mughal society (1670).
• Missionaries: the French priest Abbé J.A. Dubois, after three decades in south India, wrote Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (English 1816), stressing the role of Brahmins in maintaining caste.
• Why these are not yet anthropology: they lack systematic fieldwork, comparison across many communities and a theory of why customs vary. They are still useful as historical evidence of continuity and change.

2. Phases in the Growth of Indian Anthropology

2.1 Three classic schemes

Indian anthropologists proposed periodisations (ways of dividing history into periods). The table sets them side by side.

Scholar	First phase	Second phase	Third phase
D.N. Majumdar (1950)	Formulatory (1774–1911)	Constructive (1912–1937)	Critical (1938 onward)
Surajit Sinha (1971)	British colonial (1774–1919)	Pre-Independence (1920–1949)	Post-Independence (1950 onward)
L.P. Vidyarthi (The Rise of Anthropology in India, 1978)	Formative (1774–1919)	Constructive (1920–1949)	Analytical (1950 onward)

The schemes differ more in dates than in substance. All agree that the subject began as colonial description, became professional when universities and Indian scholars took over, and turned analytical after Independence.

• Majumdar opened his critical phase in 1938, after his own problem-oriented monograph on the Ho (A Tribe in Transition, 1937); Vidyarthi began the constructive period in 1920, when anthropology became a post-graduate subject at Calcutta, and the analytical period in 1950.
• A correction on the starting date: all these schemes begin in 1774, but the Asiatic Society was founded on 15 January 1784 (Sir William Jones reached Calcutta only in 1783). The formative period is therefore better dated from 1784.
• A fourth, evaluative phase is often added for the years after about 1990: work turned to displacement, human rights, health, gender, indigenous knowledge and ethnicity, and to the colonial origins of the discipline itself.

2.2 What drove each phase

• Formative phase: the needs of rule. A trading company that became a government had to collect revenue, settle land disputes, recruit soldiers and keep order among people it did not understand. Knowledge of castes, tribes, customs and languages was administrative knowledge.
• Constructive phase: universities and nationalism. Anthropology entered Calcutta (1920) and sociology Bombay (1919); Indian scholars trained in Cambridge, Oxford, London and Harvard, and journals such as Man in India (1921) gave them a platform. The field kept its tribal focus but became intensive and monographic (one community studied in depth).
• Analytical phase: the new nation. Planning, community development and tribal welfare needed social knowledge; American scholars brought village studies, the study of civilization and culture and personality; Indian scholars built concepts of their own (Sanskritization, dominant caste, sacred complex: 4b).

3. The Scholar-Administrators of the Formative Period

3.1 An example: Buchanan’s survey of Bengal

In 1807 the East India Company’s government of Bengal sent Francis Buchanan (later Buchanan-Hamilton), a Scottish surgeon and naturalist, to survey the districts under its control. Over 1807–1814 he toured Dinajpur, Rangpur, Purnea, Bhagalpur, Patna and Gaya, Shahabad and Gorakhpur, recording for each district its topography, antiquities, people, castes, religion, agriculture, arts and trade. He had already surveyed Mysore (1800–01) after the fall of Tipu Sultan.

• What it shows: the earliest ethnography in India was a by-product of statistical survey for revenue and administration. Buchanan counted castes, noted their occupations and recorded claims such as those of the Nagbansi families of Gorakhpur to Rajput status, long before anyone used the word anthropology.
• Why it matters: his reports, largely unpublished for a century, were later mined by W.W. Hunter for the Statistical Account of Bengal (1875–77) and by later census officers: survey, gazetteer and census grew from the same root.

3.2 The Asiatic Society and the Orientalists

• Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta and a gifted linguist, founded the Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. Its object was enquiry into “whatever is performed by man or produced by nature” within the geographical limits of Asia.
• Language as the first clue: in his Third Anniversary Discourse (1786) Jones argued that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sprang from “some common source”. This launched comparative philology (the historical comparison of languages) and the idea of an Indo-European family, which later writers turned, wrongly, into the idea of an Aryan race.
• Publications: the Society’s journal Asiatick Researches began in 1788; the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal followed in 1832.
• Other forums: the Indian Antiquary (1872), the Anthropological Society of Bombay (founded 1886, with its own journal), the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Mythic Society of Bangalore.

The Orientalists studied India through texts: they looked to Sanskrit law books and epics to understand society. This textual bias later shaped the colonial image of caste as a fixed, Brahmin-defined system.

3.3 Survey, gazetteer and census

• District gazetteers and statistical accounts: W.W. Hunter’s Statistical Account of Bengal (20 volumes, 1875–77) and the Imperial Gazetteer of India (from 1881) described each district’s people, castes and customs. James Campbell‘s Bombay Gazetteer volumes were so detailed that later caste surveys of Bombay drew heavily on them.
• The census: the first all-India census was taken over 1867–1872; the first synchronous census (everyone counted on one date) followed in 1881. From the start it recorded caste and tribe, becoming a vast ethnographic source.
• The Ethnographic Survey of India: in May 1901 the Government of India, under Lord Curzon, ordered an ethnographic survey of the provinces, with Herbert Risley as Director of Ethnography and a Superintendent of Ethnography in each province. Funds were small and were withdrawn in 1909, but the survey produced most of the great “Tribes and Castes” volumes. Its questions followed a list agreed by Nesfield, Ibbetson and Risley at a conference in 1885.
• The Linguistic Survey of India: George A. Grierson, an Irish civil servant and philologist, began it in 1894; its volumes, published 1903–1928, described 179 languages and 544 dialects. It remains the basis for classifying Indian languages into families (2a).

3.4 The encyclopaedic “Tribes and Castes” volumes

The great reference works were arranged as glossaries: an alphabetical entry for each caste or tribe, giving its origin legends, subdivisions, marriage rules, religion, occupation and status. The table lists the main ones.

Author	Region	Work (year)	Distinctive contribution
M.A. Sherring (missionary)	North India, Banaras	Hindu Tribes and Castes (3 vols, 1872–81)	First all-India survey of castes from a missionary base
E.T. Dalton	Chota Nagpur, Assam	Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872)	Pioneer account of the Munda, Oraon, Ho, Santal, illustrated with lithographs from photographs
Denzil Ibbetson	Punjab	Outlines of Panjab Ethnography (1883), from the 1881 census	Caste shaped by occupation, tribe and political power; status can change
J.C. Nesfield	North-Western Provinces and Oudh	Brief View of the Caste System (1885)	Occupational theory of caste; denied a racial basis
H.H. Risley	Bengal, then all India	Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891); The People of India (1908)	Anthropometry and the racial theory of caste (§3.5)
William Crooke	North-Western Provinces and Oudh	Tribes and Castes of the NWP and Oudh (4 vols, 1896); Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India (1894)	Folk religion and folklore of north India
Edgar Thurston (with K. Rangachari)	Madras Presidency	Castes and Tribes of Southern India (7 vols, 1909)	Superintendent of the Madras Museum; anthropometry plus customs of south Indian groups
L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer	Cochin, Mysore	Cochin Tribes and Castes (2 vols, 1909–12); Mysore Tribes and Castes (4 vols, 1928–35)	First Indian author of a regional encyclopaedia (§5.2)
R.V. Russell and Rai Bahadur Hira Lal	Central Provinces	Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (4 vols, 1916)	Joint British and Indian authorship; Gond, Baiga, Bhil and many castes
R.E. Enthoven	Bombay Presidency	Tribes and Castes of Bombay (3 vols, 1920–22)	Built on Campbell’s Bombay Gazetteer

The volumes record customs that have since changed and remain the first place to look for a community’s past. But they treat each caste or tribe as a separate, fixed unit, rely on high-status informants, mix observation with hearsay, and rank groups on an evolutionary scale from “primitive” to “civilised”.

3.5 Risley and the “Aryan” debate

Herbert Hope Risley (1851–1911) of the Indian Civil Service is the most influential and most criticised scholar-administrator. The 2014 question asks for his contribution to the “Aryan” debate.

• Anthropometry: in Bengal (1886–88) he measured heads, noses and stature, and with later surveys built up measurements of about 5,800 individuals of some 87 castes and tribes. His key measure was the nasal index (nose breadth as a percentage of nose height), which the anatomists William Flower and Paul Topinard regarded as the best test of race.
• The “law”: he claimed that “the social position of a caste varies inversely as its nasal index”: the finer the nose, the higher the caste. He read this as proof that caste had a racial basis: lighter, fine-nosed Aryan invaders had placed themselves above the darker, broad-nosed Dravidian natives, and the varna order preserved that conquest.
• Seven types: in the 1901 Census report (republished as The People of India, 1908) he divided Indians into seven physical types: Turko-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid and Dravidian (details and critique in 2a).
• Origin of caste: he combined race with hypergamy (women marrying up), fiction of common descent and occupation, and listed several ways in which new castes form, such as change of occupation, migration and sectarian change (3.2a).
• Ranking by precedence: in 1901 he asked census officers to arrange castes “in order of social precedence as recognised by native public opinion”. Castes responded with petitions claiming higher varna names, and caste associations grew around the census (§4.1).

Criticism:

• Mixing language and race: the philologist Max Müller had insisted that “Aryan” names a language family, not a race; an ethnologist who spoke of Aryan blood or skulls was, he wrote, as great a sinner as a linguist who spoke of a “dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar”.
• The data did not fit: G.S. Ghurye (Caste and Race in India, 1932) re-examined the figures and found the correlation between nasal index and caste rank only in Hindustan (the Gangetic plain); in Punjab, Bengal, Bombay and the south it broke down, and even Risley’s Punjab figures did not rank castes in the order of their social status.
• Statistics: the statistician P.C. Mahalanobis showed that many of Risley’s samples were far too small, and that caste groups within one region resembled each other more than they resembled their namesakes in another region.
• Genetics: modern genome studies show that most Indians descend from a mixture of ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers, Iranian-related farmers and later Steppe-related migrants in varying proportions; no caste is a “pure” race (2a).
• Political effect: by giving caste a biological basis Risley made it look unchangeable and racially divided, which suited a policy of governing through differences.

3.6 Other scholar-administrators of north, central and south India

• E.T. Dalton, Commissioner of Chota Nagpur, gave the first broad picture of the Kol peoples (Munda, Ho, Oraon). He described the Aghariya, who claimed to be Kshatriyas who had laid aside the sacred thread: early evidence that status claims move in both directions.
• Denzil Ibbetson saw caste as a product of occupation, tribal origin and political power, open to change; in 1890, as President of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, he urged universities to found chairs of anthropology. Nesfield held that occupation alone, not race, created caste (3.2a).
• William Crooke, long a district officer in Mirzapur, showed that much of everyday Hinduism (village deities, spirit cults) lay outside Brahmanical texts.
• Edgar Thurston, Superintendent of the Madras Government Museum (1885–1908), measured and photographed south Indian groups within an evolutionary and racial frame.
• Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, co-author with R.V. Russell (1916), shows that Indians were contributors, not only informants, before 1920.

3.7 The North-East: Assam monographs and political officers

The 2026 question asks about colonial scholars of the North-East. From the early 1900s the Assam administration commissioned a series of tribal monographs, written mostly by political officers who knew the hill peoples at first hand.

Author	People	Work (year)
P.R.T. Gurdon	Khasi	The Khasis (1907)
T.C. Hodson	Meitei; Nagas of Manipur	The Meitheis (1908); The Naga Tribes of Manipur (1911)
A. Playfair	Garo	The Garos (1909)
Sidney Endle (missionary)	Bodo-Kachari	The Kacharis (1911)
J. Shakespear	Lushai (Mizo), Kuki	The Lushei Kuki Clans (1912)
J.H. Hutton	Angami, Sema Naga	The Angami Nagas (1921); The Sema Nagas (1921)
J.P. Mills	Lotha, Ao, Rengma Naga	The Lhota Nagas (1922); The Ao Nagas (1926); The Rengma Nagas (1937)
N.E. Parry	Lakher (Mara)	The Lakhers (1932)

• Contribution: detailed records of clan organisation, village councils, land tenure, feasts of merit, head-hunting, morung (men’s dormitory) and religion, often before missionary and state influence changed them.
• Policy influence: these officers tended to see the hill peoples as distinct societies to be protected from plains traders and moneylenders. That view fed the Inner Line (1873), the “excluded” and “partially excluded” areas of the Government of India Act, 1935, and later the Sixth Schedule (9.1).
• Limits: evolutionary and diffusionist assumptions, stress on the “primitive“, and an administrative interest in pacification.
• Later figures: Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf toured with Mills (The Naked Nagas, 1939); Verrier Elwin shaped policy for NEFA as Adviser for Tribal Affairs from 1954 (4b).

3.8 J.H. Hutton: from Naga hills to the census of caste

John Henry Hutton (1885–1968) shows how the scholar-administrator shaded into the professional anthropologist.

• Political officer in the Naga Hills, author of the Angami and Sema monographs (1921).
• Census Commissioner for 1931: the last census to publish full caste tables until Census 2027. He introduced the term “exterior castes” for groups then called “depressed classes”, and his report listed the disabilities they suffered.
• Caste in India (1946): explained caste as a product of many factors, with stress on tribal ideas of mana and taboo (soul-stuff that can be transferred and must be guarded against) behind rules of food and touch (3.2a).
• Professor of social anthropology at Cambridge (1937–1950), linking Indian material with British academic anthropology.

3.9 Central and south India: from administrator to anthropologist

• W.V. Grigson, an ICS officer who had administered Bastar: The Maria Gonds of Bastar (1938) and The Aboriginal Problem in the Central Provinces and Berar (1944), a report on land alienation and indebtedness that urged protective law.
• Haimendorf in Hyderabad: as Adviser for Tribes and Backward Classes to the Nizam’s government from 1945, he studied the Chenchu, Reddi and Raj Gond and drafted land-protection measures for the Gonds of Adilabad.
• Verrier Elwin (1902–1964): came as a missionary, became an ethnographer of the Baiga (1939), Agaria (1942), Maria (1943), Muria (The Muria and their Ghotul, 1947) and Saora (1955), and finally an administrator-scholar of independent India: Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey (1946), Adviser for NEFA (1954), author of A Philosophy for NEFA (1957). His ideas and the debate with Ghurye are in 4b.

3.10 Missionaries and academic visitors

• Missionaries learnt languages well: Stephen Hislop on the tribes of the Central Provinces (papers of 1866), P.O. Bodding on the Santal, John Hoffmann‘s Encyclopaedia Mundarica (1930–50). They often judged tribal religion against Christianity.
• British academics: W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas (1906), used the genealogical method; A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (1922), gave an early functionalist analysis of ritual. Rivers later supervised Ghurye at Cambridge. (C.G. Seligman‘s 1911 monograph, sometimes listed here, was on the Veddas of Ceylon.)

4. Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Classification and Control

4.1 How classification worked

• The census as a mirror and a lever: by asking every Indian for a caste and by ranking castes by precedence (1901), the census turned fluid, local identities into fixed, all-India categories printed in tables. Castes organised sabhas (associations) to claim Kshatriya or Brahmin status; the Indian sociologist G.S. Ghurye described how “ambitious castes” used the census to press their claims (4b).
• “Criminal tribes”: the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 declared whole communities hereditary criminals, subject to registration, roll-calls and settlements. After Independence the Act (as revised in 1924) was repealed in 1952 and these communities became Denotified Tribes, but Habitual Offenders laws and police suspicion continued. The anthropologist P.K. Bhowmick‘s work with the Lodha of Midnapore is the classic Indian response (4b).
• “Martial races” and “agricultural tribes”: army recruitment favoured “martial” groups; the Punjab Land Alienation Act, 1900 restricted land sales to notified agricultural tribes.
• Tribal areas: the Scheduled Districts Act, 1874, the Inner Line and the excluded areas of 1935 rested on the idea, supplied by ethnography, that tribes were separate, primitive peoples to be ruled differently (9.1).
• “Animism”: the censuses of 1901 and 1911 placed tribal religion under “animism“, a term from the Victorian anthropologist E.B. Tylor; the 1921 Census changed it to “tribal religion“.

4.2 The village as “little republic”

The 2018 question asks about the colonial view of the village.

• Charles Metcalfe, a Company official, wrote in 1830 that “the village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they can want within themselves”, surviving while “dynasty after dynasty tumbles down”.
• Henry Maine (Village-Communities in the East and West, 1871) saw the Indian village as a survival of the early Aryan community; B.H. Baden-Powell (The Indian Village Community, 1896) classified villages by land tenure.
• Purpose: the image supported revenue settlement with village bodies and the belief that Indian society was static, needing British rule to change it.
• Critique: villages were tied to markets, states, pilgrimage centres and castes spread across regions; they were hierarchical, not egalitarian. Srinivas called the self-sufficient village a myth; Dumont traced how the idea was built from Munro to Maine. Ambedkar, in the Constituent Assembly, called the village a “sink of localism” (5.1).

4.3 Was colonial anthropology a “handmaiden of colonialism”?

Scholars after 1970 asked whether anthropology simply served empire. The table sets out the main positions.

Position	Main voices	Argument
Handmaiden	Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973)	Anthropology grew within colonial power and supplied knowledge useful for rule
Objectification	Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987)	Census and survey turned identities into objects to be counted and ranked
Ethnographic state	Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (2001)	After 1857 colonial rule governed through anthropology; caste in its modern, all-India form is largely a colonial product
Colonial hardening, not invention	Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India (1999)	Caste was spreading and hardening from the eighteenth century under Indian kingdoms; colonial rule intensified it but did not invent it
Indian autonomy	Surajit Sinha, N.K. Bose, S.C. Roy	Indians used the same tools to defend tribes, criticise policy and build nationalist readings of Indian civilization

The debate leaves a balanced picture. Colonial anthropology produced much of the data the discipline still uses, and it shaped the categories of caste and tribe that the Indian state inherited (the Scheduled Castes order of 1936 and Scheduled Tribes lists drew on census lists). But Indians were never passive: they petitioned, organised and, from Roy onward, wrote their own ethnography, which is the “autonomy” the 2024 question asks about.

5. The Constructive Period: Institutions and the Indian Turn

5.1 New institutions

Year	Institution	Significance
1886	Anthropological Society of Bombay	First society devoted to anthropology in India
1916	Anthropological section of the Zoological Survey of India	Government physical anthropology; parent of the Anthropological Survey
1919	Department of Sociology and Civics, Bombay University (Patrick Geddes; Ghurye from 1924)	Sociology and social anthropology taught together
1920	Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University (Sir Asutosh Mukherjee)	First post-graduate anthropology department in India
1921	Man in India, Ranchi (S.C. Roy)	First Indian anthropological journal
1921	Department of Economics and Sociology, Lucknow (Radhakamal Mukerjee; D.N. Majumdar from 1928)	Base of the Lucknow tradition
1938	Silver Jubilee session of the Indian Science Congress, held jointly with the British Association	Indian and British anthropologists reviewed the field together
1945	Anthropological Survey of India (Banaras; Calcutta from 1948)	B.S. Guha first Director, Verrier Elwin Deputy Director
1947	Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi	Spread of departments after Independence

• Calcutta 1920: anthropology had been taught as part of ancient Indian history from 1918; in 1920 it became a full post-graduate subject. Ramaprasad Chanda was its first head (1920–21); L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer then led it until his retirement in the early 1930s. Early teachers and students included Panchanan Mitra, K.P. Chattopadhyay, B.S. Guha, T.C. Das, N.K. Bose, D.N. Majumdar and D. Sen.
• Holism: Indian departments taught physical anthropology, prehistoric archaeology and social anthropology together, a four-field (or three-field) holism closer to the American model than to British social anthropology.
• The Anthropological Survey: carved out of the Zoological Survey, it became the world’s largest government anthropological organisation, with regional stations across India.

5.2 L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer: the Indian scholar-administrator

The 2012 and 2026 questions ask about L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861–1937), who stands between the colonial encyclopaedists and the university anthropologists.

• Career: a schoolteacher and college science assistant in Kerala, he conducted the ethnographic survey of Cochin State in the early 1900s and later completed the Ethnographic Survey of Mysore, begun in 1903 by H.V. Nanjundayya, after the latter’s death.
• Works: The Cochin Tribes and Castes (2 vols, 1909–12), The Mysore Tribes and Castes (4 vols, 1928–35, with Nanjundayya), Anthropology of the Syrian Christians (1926) and Lectures on Ethnography (1925), the published form of his first Calcutta lectures.
• Teacher: head of the Calcutta department until his retirement in the early 1930s; he took students into the Munda country for fieldwork. He presided over the anthropology section of the Indian Science Congress and was made Dewan Bahadur.
• Content: detailed accounts of Nayar matrilineal households and sambandham unions, Nambudiri Brahmins, forest tribes such as the Kadar and Malayan, rites of passage, magic and serpent worship in Malabar.
• Limitations: like the colonial glossaries, his volumes treat each caste or tribe as an isolated unit described through life-cycle rites, with little on links between groups or on economic change.

The trajectory of south Indian encyclopaedic work (2012 question) thus runs from Buchanan’s Mysore journey (1800–01) through the district manuals of Madras, Thurston and Rangachari (1909), the state surveys of Cochin (Iyer), Travancore (his son L.A. Krishna Iyer‘s The Travancore Tribes and Castes, 1937–41) and Mysore (Nanjundayya and Iyer), to the People of India volumes on the southern states in the 1990s.

5.3 The first Indian ethnographers

The constructive period belongs to Indian scholars, whose work is treated in 4b. In brief:

• S.C. Roy, a Ranchi lawyer, wrote The Mundas and their Country (1912) and The Oraons of Chota Nagpur (1915), founded Man in India (1921) and was hailed by Hutton in 1938 as the “Father of Indian Ethnology“.
• G.S. Ghurye (Caste and Race in India, 1932), D.N. Majumdar (A Tribe in Transition, 1937), N.K. Bose (“The Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption”, 1941) and Iravati Karve (Kinship Organisation in India, 1953) moved the field from compilation to analysis.
• Their importance for this unit is that they took over the scholar-administrators’ material and questioned it: Ghurye tested Risley’s race theory, Roy defended tribal customary law in courts, and Bose read tribes as part of Indian civilization rather than as isolated primitives.

6. After Independence: American Influence, Applied Work and the Search for an Indian Anthropology

6.1 The American contribution

The 2011 question asks for the contribution of American anthropologists. The table lists the main figures.

Scholar	Site or theme	Contribution
W.H. Wiser (missionary-sociologist)	Karimpur, UP; The Hindu Jajmani System (1936)	First model of the jajmani system (3.2b)
Morris Opler (Cornell) with R.D. Singh	Senapur, eastern UP (from the late 1940s)	Long-term village research project; training of Indian scholars
Oscar Lewis	Rampur, near Delhi; Village Life in Northern India (1958)	Factions and leadership; evaluation of community development
McKim Marriott	Kishan Garhi; ed. Village India (1955)	Universalization and parochialization between little and great traditions (5.3b)
Robert Redfield and Milton Singer (Chicago)	Study of civilizations; Singer on Madras (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 1972)	Little and great traditions; the village as part of a civilization
Gerald Berreman	Sirkanda; Hindus of the Himalayas (1963)	Caste seen from below; comparison with US race
G.M. Carstairs (British psychiatrist), Gitel Steed	Rajasthan; Gujarat	Culture and personality studies

• Effects: village and peasant studies replaced the tribal monograph; work moved from description to hypothesis; Dube, Majumdar, Vidyarthi and Sinha trained or collaborated in American universities.
• Peasant-society approaches (1990 question): Redfield’s little community and peasant society as a “part-society” with a “part-culture“; Marriott’s two-way flow between little and great traditions; Srinivas’s Sanskritization and dominant caste; Dube’s multiple traditions; and Bailey’s economic frontier. These are developed in 5.1 and 5.3.
• Critique: village studies sometimes treated the village as a bounded isolate again, and American interest followed Cold War priorities of development and stability; the Indian anthropologist Surajit Sinha described Indian anthropology of the period as “a Western apprentice“.

6.2 Applied and action anthropology

• Tribal Research Institutes: from 1953 (the first at Ranchi, in Bihar), states set up research and training institutes for tribal welfare; their reports fed the Dhebar Commission (1960–61) and later plans.
• Community development: S.C. Dube‘s India’s Changing Villages (1958) evaluated the programme and showed that benefits went mostly to landed, upper-caste households (4b).
• Action anthropology: the American Sol Tax‘s idea of working with a community on its own goals influenced P.K. Bhowmick‘s work among the Lodha and L.P. Vidyarthi‘s action-research unit at Ranchi.
• Tribal Sub-Plan: the strategy adopted in the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1974–75) followed two bodies of 1972: the Planning Commission’s Task Force on the Development of Tribal Areas, chaired by L.P. Vidyarthi, and the Expert Committee chaired by S.C. Dube (9.1).

6.3 Institutions and the search for an “Indian” anthropology

• Institutions: the Indian Council of Social Science Research (1969); Contributions to Indian Sociology (1957) of Louis Dumont and David Pocock, which urged the use of Indian categories such as purity and hierarchy; the Tenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in New Delhi (1978), hosted by L.P. Vidyarthi as President of the IUAES (1973–78); and the Anthropological Survey’s People of India project (1985–92) on 4,635 communities under K.S. Singh (4b).
• Indigenisation: N.K. Bose urged models built from Indian data; J.P.S. Uberoi called for a “swaraj of ideas” (“Science and Swaraj”, 1968); Vidyarthi’s sacred complex of Gaya (1961) was offered as a step toward “Indianness” (3.3).
• Dependence on the state: almost all funding came from government, so Indian anthropology became applied and policy-oriented: relevant, but with limited critical independence.

7. Distinctive Features of Indian Anthropology

The 1992 and 1994 questions ask for the distinctive features and the factors behind them.

Feature	Explanation	Factor behind it
Tribe-centred	Most early work was on tribes	Colonial rule of “excluded” areas; welfare after 1950
Caste as the master theme	Caste studies from Risley to Dumont and Srinivas	Census, law and politics made caste central
Holistic training	Physical, archaeological and social anthropology taught together	Calcutta model; influence of American four-field teaching
Applied and state-linked	Anthropologists in the Survey, TRIs, planning and welfare	State funding; nation-building priorities
Study of one’s own society	Indians studying their own region or caste	Few funds for fieldwork abroad; nationalism
Civilizational perspective	Tribes, castes and villages seen as parts of one civilization	Bose, Sinha, Vidyarthi; Chicago influence
Text and field together	Use of Sanskrit texts with fieldwork	Indological tradition of Ghurye and Karve

Results achieved (1994 question): a huge ethnographic record; concepts used worldwide (Sanskritization, dominant caste, sacred complex); a role in tribal policy (Panchsheel, Scheduled Areas, Tribal Sub-Plan); and the People of India survey. Weaknesses remain: thin theory, uneven regional coverage, and a long neglect of Muslims, Dalits, women and cities, which later scholars such as Leela Dube and Virginius Xaxa corrected (4b).

Key Terms

Term	Meaning in simple words
Scholar-administrator	A government official who also wrote serious studies of the people he governed
Ethnographic glossary	An alphabetical reference book with an entry for each caste or tribe
Anthropometry	Measuring the human body (head, nose, stature) to compare groups
Nasal index	Nose breadth as a percentage of nose height
Racial theory of caste	Risley’s claim that caste rank follows race
Social precedence	The order of rank among castes, as Risley asked the 1901 census to record
Ethnographic Survey of India	The 1901 survey of castes and tribes, province by province
Criminal tribe	A community declared hereditary criminal under the 1871 Act
Denotified Tribe	A community freed from the criminal-tribe label after 1952
Little republic	The colonial image of the Indian village as self-sufficient and unchanging
Objectification	Turning fluid identities into fixed, countable categories
Village study	An intensive study of one village as a social system
Action anthropology	Research done with a community to help it reach its own goals
Indigenisation	Building concepts from local data rather than borrowing them
Exterior castes	Hutton’s 1931 term for the “depressed classes”

Contemporary Developments

• Census 2027 counts caste: the population-enumeration schedule notified on 14 August 2026 asks “SC/ST/Caste” (question 10), the first full caste count in a regular census since Hutton’s 1931 census; the 1941 caste data were never fully published, and the separate SECC 2011 caste data were never released.
• The colonial “criminal” label in law: in Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India (3 October 2024) the Supreme Court struck down prison-manual rules that treated members of Denotified Tribes as “habitual offenders” by birth and ordered caste columns removed from prison registers, tracing the practice to the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871.
• The Anthropological Survey at eighty: founded in 1945 at Banaras, it remains the only government anthropological survey of its kind; its roots lie in the Zoological and Anthropological Section of 1902 and the Zoological Survey (1916).
• Centenary of university anthropology: the Calcutta department, the oldest in India, passed its centenary (1920–2020); historians of the department have reopened questions about its early stress on race and anthropometry.

Diagrams to Master

1. Topic map: older traditions, scholar-administrators, census and classification, institutions, post-Independence growth.
2. Phases timeline: Majumdar, Sinha, Vidyarthi schemes; key dates from 1784 to Census 2027.
3. Scholar-administrators by region: name, region, work and year; label one strength and one distortion.
4. Risley and his critics: nasal index, the “law” of caste and race, seven types; critiques of Max Müller, Ghurye, Mahalanobis and genetics.
5. Colonial knowledge loop: survey → classify → govern → respond, with examples (census ranking, Criminal Tribes Act, caste associations).

Revision Grid

Scholar	Work (year)	Key idea
William Jones	Asiatic Society (1784); Third Discourse (1786)	Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share a source
Francis Buchanan	Bengal survey (1807–14)	Statistical survey of people and districts
Charles Metcalfe	Minute (1830)	Villages as “little republics”
E.T. Dalton	Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872)	Kol peoples and Assam tribes
Denzil Ibbetson	Outlines of Panjab Ethnography (1883)	Caste from occupation, tribe and power
J.C. Nesfield	Brief View of the Caste System (1885)	Occupational theory of caste
H.H. Risley	Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891); The People of India (1908)	Nasal index; racial theory; seven types
G.A. Grierson	Linguistic Survey of India (1903–28)	179 languages, 544 dialects
Edgar Thurston	Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909)	South Indian encyclopaedia
L.K.A. Iyer	Cochin Tribes and Castes (1909–12); Mysore Tribes and Castes (1928–35)	First Indian regional encyclopaedia
Russell and Hira Lal	Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces (1916)	Joint British-Indian glossary
J.H. Hutton	The Angami Nagas (1921); Census (1931); Caste in India (1946)	Exterior castes; mana and taboo
Talal Asad	Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973)	Anthropology and colonial power
Bernard Cohn	An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987)	Census as objectification
Nicholas Dirks	Castes of Mind (2001)	The ethnographic state

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