Herbert Hope Risley
Encyclopedia
Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE
CSI
(4 January 1851 – 30 September 1911) was a British ethnographer
and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of Bengal
. He is also remembered for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. Risley was influential in the 20th century resuscitation of the hierarchical varna system as a structure for social order in India. According to Lloyd Rudolph, Risley believed that varna, however ancient, could be applied to all the modern castes found in India, and "meant to identify and place several hundred million Indians within it."
in Buckinghamshire
on 4 January 1851. His father was a rector
and his mother was the daughter of John Hope, a man who had served in the Bengal Medical Service at Gwalior.
Risley was educated at Winchester College
, as had been numerous of his relatives, and then at New College, Oxford University
. His academic successes at Winchester were not repeated when at Oxford, from which he graduated with a second class BA degree in law and modern history in 1872. His underperformance has been attributed to the fact that he had already passed the competitive examination
for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1871. He entered the ICS on 3 June 1873 and arrived in India on 24 October of that year.
. This was an area inhabited in part by forest tribes. He soon took to studying them and retained an interest in the anthropology of such tribes for the remainder of his life. He also became involved in William Wilson Hunter's
Statistical Survey of India, which had started in 1869 and was to be embodied in the first Imperial Gazetteer, published in 1881. Hunter personally conducted the survey of Bengal and the anthropological, linguistic and sociological interests held by Risley were recognised in February 1875 by his appointment as one of five Assistant Directors of Statistics for Hunter's Survey.
Risley compiled the Survey's volume covering the hill districts of Hazaribagh
and Lohardaga
, and both the literary style and subject knowledge shown in this work were to prove beneficial to his career. He became Assistant Secretary to the Government of Bengal and then, in 1879, was appointed as Under Secretary in the Home Department of the Government of India. In 1880 he returned to work at district level, at Govindpur
, having married Elsie Julie Oppermann on 17 June 1879 at Simla
. His wife's linguistic proficiency was to help him in learning more about anthropology and statistics from non-English sources. The couple went on to have a son and a daughter.
The return to work in the districts was Risley's personal preference and was made despite his unusually rapid rise through the ranks. He went from Govindpur to Hazaribagh and then, in 1884, to Manbhum
, where he was charged with conducting an enquiry into land tenure arrangements.
In 1885, Risley was appointed to perform a detailed survey of the tribes and castes of Bengal. This was deemed to be a sensible exercise by Augustus Rivers Thompson
, who was the Lieutenant-Governor for the province. The Indian Rebellion of 1857
had come close to overturning British rule in India and the disruption led to the British government taking over administrative control from the British East India Company
. Members of the Indian Civil Service such as Richard Carnac Temple
thought that if further discontent was to be avoided then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of the colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas. As time went on, the ethnographic studies and their resultant categorisations were embodied in numerous official publications and became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism, and of those categorisations it was caste that was regarded to be, in Risley's words, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society". The desire for ethnographic studies was expressed by Denzil Ibbetson
in his 1883 report on the 1881 census of the Punjab,
Risley's survey task was aided when research papers of a recently deceased Indian Medical Service
doctor, James Wise, were given to him by the doctor's widow. Wise had researched the people of Eastern Bengal and it was agreed that, after ascertaining the accuracy of his work, those researches should be incorporated into Risley's survey results. In return, those volumes of the survey dealing with ethnographic matters would be dedicated to Wise. Further assistance came from the researches of Edward Tuite Dalton into the jungle tribes of Chhotanagpur and Assam
. Dalton, like Wise, had previously published his efforts but now they would be integrated as a part of a larger whole. Risley was able to deal with the remaining areas of Bengal by making use of a large staff of correspondents who came from disparate backgrounds, such as missionaries, native people and Government officials.
In 1891 Risley published a paper entitled The Study of Ethnology in India. It was a contribution to what Thomas Trautmann
has described as "the racial theory of Indian civilisation". Trautmann considers Risley, along with the philologist Max Müller
, to have been leading proponents of this idea which "by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilisation, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines." He notes, however, that the convergence of their theories was not a deliberate collaboration.
In the same year, 1891, the four volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal were published. These contained the results of the Bengal survey, with two volumes comprising an "Ethnographical Glossary", and a further two being of "Anthropometric Data". Risley took advice from William Henry Flower
, Director of the Natural History Museum
, and William Turner
, an Edinburgh anthropologist, in connection with the anthropometric
volumes. The volumes were well-received by the public and government alike. In the same year, he was elected an officier of the Académie Française
; and on 1 January 1892 he was invested a Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE). In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism", a theory prevalent for a century from around the 1840s that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilities and inherent tendencies among human beings. Race thus seemed to determine the course of human history."
Risley believed that ethnologists could benefit from undertaking fieldwork and that ethnologists of India had relied too much "on mere literary accounts which give an ideal and misleading picture of caste and its social surroundings ... [S]ome slight personal acquaintance with even a single tribe of savage men could hardly fail to be of infinite service to the philosopher who undertakes to trace the process by which civilisation has been gradually evolved out of barbarism." He also viewed India as an ethnological laboratory, where the continued practice of endogamy
had ensured that, in his opinion, there were strict delineations of the various communities by caste and that consequently caste could be viewed as identical to race. Whereas others saw caste as being based on occupation, he believed that changes in occupation within a community led to another instance of endogamy "being held by a sort of unconscious fiction to be equivalent to the difference of race, which is the true basis of the system."
The study was, in the opinion of William Crooke
, "the first attempt to apply, in a systematic way, the methods of anthropometry to the analysis of the people of an Indian Province." Risley was influenced by the methodology of the French physical anthropologist Paul Topinard
, from whose Éléments d'anthropologie générale he had selected several anthropometric techniques, including the nasal index. Topinard believed that this index - a ratio derived from measuring the breadth and height of the nose - could be combined with other cranial measurements to enable a Linnean classification of humans, for which purpose Trautmann says it is
Despite his comments regarding the use of literature by anthropologists, Risley himself used the ancient Rig Veda text, which speaks of Aryan invaders coming into India from the northwest and meeting with existing peoples. Dalton and J. F, Hewitt had posited that the native people comprised two distinct groups, being the Dravidian and the Kolarian, and Risley's use of the nasal index was in part intended to counter those theories by showing that the two groups were racially identical even if they were linguistically varied. Crooke believes that "The most important result of the inquiry was that there appears to be, from the physical point of view, no difference between the so-called Dravidian and Kolarian races occupying the hill country to the south of Bengal. The newer learning has now identified the Austro-Asiatic group of languages, with Munda as one of its sub-branches."
Risley's interpretation of the nasal index went beyond confirmation of the two-race origins. He believed that the variations shown between the extremes of those races of India were indicative of various positions within the caste system, saying that generally "the social position of a caste varies inversely as its nasal index." Trautmann explains that Risley "found a direct relation between the proportion of Aryan blood and the nasal index, along a gradient from the highest castes to the lowest. This assimilation of caste to race ... proved very influential." He also saw a linkage between the nasal index and the definition of a community as either a tribe or a Hindu caste. Further, he said that "community of race, and not, as has frequently been argued, community of function, is the real determining principle, the true causa causans, of the caste system." That is, he believed that the caste system had its basis in race rather than in occupation.
Subsequent to completion of the Bengal survey, Risley's work for some years consisted of heading an enquiry into policing and then more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments.
The outcome of the census is described by Crooke as "an exceptionally interesting report", produced in association with a colleague, Edward Albert Gait
. Crooke notes that in the report "he developed his views on the origin and classification of the Indian races largely on the basis of anthropometry." Risley believed that the Indian castes could each be described as belonging to one of seven physical types. Some of the material was later republished, in amended form, in Risley's 1908 work, The People of India, which D. F. Pocock describes as "... almost the last production of that great tradition of administrator scholars who had long and extensive experience in the Indian Civil Service and had not found their arduous activity incompatible with scholarship." Trautmann considers the census report and subsequent book to represent "Risley's grand syntheses of India ethnology", while the paper of 1891 had given "an exceptionally clear view of his project at the state of what we might call its early maturity."
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that
According to Susan Bayly
.
In the following year he became Home Secretary
in the administration of Lord Curzon and in 1909 was temporarily a member of the governing council. His experience of administrative matters, including with regard to policing, proved to be useful to Curzon during the government's 1905 partition of Bengal
along communal lines. So useful was his knowledge and ability that his term in India was extended for two years beyond the usual retirement age, in order that he could provide the summarisation, negotiation and drafting skills that proved to be necessary in order to see through proposals for administrative reform of the Provincial Councils for Curzon's successor as Viceroy
, Lord Minto
.
Already recognised by the Académie Française and by the award of CIE, Risley was made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India
on 24 June 1904 and a Knight of the Order of the Indian Empire
in 1907.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that during his time in India "... [Risley] cultivated an intimate knowledge of the peoples of India. In 1910 he asserted that a knowledge of facts concerning the religions and habits of the peoples of India equipped a civil servant with a passport to popular regard". Furthermore, that "On the processes by which non-Aryan tribes are admitted into Hinduism he was recognized to be the greatest living authority", and "His work completely revolutionized the native Indian view of ethnological inquiry" by legitimising an inquisitive methodology which had previously been resented by the colonial subjects.
of the judicial department of the India Office
, in succession to Charles James Lyall
, and in January of that same year he had become President of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
According to Crooke "the strain of [overseeing the Provincial Council reforms] on a constitution which at no time was robust doubtless laid the seeds of the fatal disease which was soon to end his life." Risley died at Wimbledon
in on 30 September 1911, continuing his studies to the end despite a "distressing illness". His widow remarried, and died in 1934.
Order of the Indian Empire
The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1878. The Order includes members of three classes:#Knight Grand Commander #Knight Commander #Companion...
CSI
Order of the Star of India
The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1861. The Order includes members of three classes:# Knight Grand Commander # Knight Commander # Companion...
(4 January 1851 – 30 September 1911) was a British ethnographer
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
. He is also remembered for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. Risley was influential in the 20th century resuscitation of the hierarchical varna system as a structure for social order in India. According to Lloyd Rudolph, Risley believed that varna, however ancient, could be applied to all the modern castes found in India, and "meant to identify and place several hundred million Indians within it."
Early life
Risley was born at AkeleyAkeley, Buckinghamshire
Akeley is a village and civil parish about north of Buckingham in the Aylesbury Vale district of Buckinghamshire. The village is on the Towcester road between the villages of Lillingstone Dayrell and Maids Moreton. The 2001 Census recorded a parish population of 545.-Village background:The...
in Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
on 4 January 1851. His father was a rector
Rector
The word rector has a number of different meanings; it is widely used to refer to an academic, religious or political administrator...
and his mother was the daughter of John Hope, a man who had served in the Bengal Medical Service at Gwalior.
Risley was educated at Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
, as had been numerous of his relatives, and then at New College, Oxford University
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...
. His academic successes at Winchester were not repeated when at Oxford, from which he graduated with a second class BA degree in law and modern history in 1872. His underperformance has been attributed to the fact that he had already passed the competitive examination
Competitive examination
A competitive examination is an examination angwhere candidates are ranked according to their grades. If the examination is open for n positions, then the first n candidates in ranks pass, the others are rejected...
for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1871. He entered the ICS on 3 June 1873 and arrived in India on 24 October of that year.
India: 1873-1899
His initial posting was to Midnapur in Bengal, as Assistant Magistrate and Assistant District CollectorDistrict collector
The District Collector is the district head of administration of the bureaucracy in a state of India. Though he/she is appointed and is under general supervision of the state government, he/she has to be a member of the elite IAS recruited by the Central Government...
. This was an area inhabited in part by forest tribes. He soon took to studying them and retained an interest in the anthropology of such tribes for the remainder of his life. He also became involved in William Wilson Hunter's
William Wilson Hunter
Sir William Wilson Hunter KCSI CIE was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service, who later became Vice President of Royal Asiatic Society.-Early life and education:...
Statistical Survey of India, which had started in 1869 and was to be embodied in the first Imperial Gazetteer, published in 1881. Hunter personally conducted the survey of Bengal and the anthropological, linguistic and sociological interests held by Risley were recognised in February 1875 by his appointment as one of five Assistant Directors of Statistics for Hunter's Survey.
Risley compiled the Survey's volume covering the hill districts of Hazaribagh
Hazaribagh
Hazaribagh is a city and a municipality in Hazaribagh district in the Indian state of Jharkhand. It is the divisional headquarters of North Chotanagpur division. It is famous as a health resort and for Hazaribagh National Park ....
and Lohardaga
Lohardaga
Lohardaga is a town and the district headquarters of Lohardaga district in the Indian state of Jharkhand, west of Ranchi, the state capital. Earlier Lohardaga was the commissionary headquarters for Chotanagpur. It was only later that the commissionary of Chotanagpur was shifted to Ranchi...
, and both the literary style and subject knowledge shown in this work were to prove beneficial to his career. He became Assistant Secretary to the Government of Bengal and then, in 1879, was appointed as Under Secretary in the Home Department of the Government of India. In 1880 he returned to work at district level, at Govindpur
Govindpur
Govindpur is one of the oldest colonies established by Allahabad Development Authority back in 1981 at the bank of river Ganges. It is very well connected by local transport with the rest of the city with indegineously developed vehicles called Vikrams supported by limited bus service. The...
, having married Elsie Julie Oppermann on 17 June 1879 at Simla
Shimla
Shimla , formerly known as Simla, is the capital city of Himachal Pradesh. In 1864, Shimla was declared the summer capital of the British Raj in India. A popular tourist destination, Shimla is often referred to as the "Queen of Hills," a term coined by the British...
. His wife's linguistic proficiency was to help him in learning more about anthropology and statistics from non-English sources. The couple went on to have a son and a daughter.
The return to work in the districts was Risley's personal preference and was made despite his unusually rapid rise through the ranks. He went from Govindpur to Hazaribagh and then, in 1884, to Manbhum
Manbhum
Manbhum was one of the districts of the East India during the British Raj. After India’s independence, the district became a part of Bihar state, and upon re-organization of the Indian states in the mid-1950s, the district became a part of the West Bengal...
, where he was charged with conducting an enquiry into land tenure arrangements.
In 1885, Risley was appointed to perform a detailed survey of the tribes and castes of Bengal. This was deemed to be a sensible exercise by Augustus Rivers Thompson
Augustus Rivers Thompson
Sir Augustus Rivers Thompson KCSI CIE served as Chief Commissioner of the British Crown Colony of Burma from April 1875 to March 1878. He was appointed a CSI in 1877, a CIE in 1883 and knighted with the KCSI in 1885.-External links:...
, who was the Lieutenant-Governor for the province. The Indian Rebellion of 1857
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...
had come close to overturning British rule in India and the disruption led to the British government taking over administrative control from the British East India Company
East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
. Members of the Indian Civil Service such as Richard Carnac Temple
Richard Carnac Temple
Sir Richard Carnac Temple CIE was the British Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and an anthropological writer.-Army and political career:...
thought that if further discontent was to be avoided then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of the colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas. As time went on, the ethnographic studies and their resultant categorisations were embodied in numerous official publications and became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism, and of those categorisations it was caste that was regarded to be, in Risley's words, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society". The desire for ethnographic studies was expressed by Denzil Ibbetson
Denzil Ibbetson
Sir Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson KCSI was an administrator in British India and an author. He served as governor of the Central Provinces and Berar from 1900 to 1902....
in his 1883 report on the 1881 census of the Punjab,
Risley's survey task was aided when research papers of a recently deceased Indian Medical Service
Indian Medical Service
The Indian Medical Service was one of the military medical services, which also had some civilian functions, in British India. It served during the two world wars, and was in existence until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947...
doctor, James Wise, were given to him by the doctor's widow. Wise had researched the people of Eastern Bengal and it was agreed that, after ascertaining the accuracy of his work, those researches should be incorporated into Risley's survey results. In return, those volumes of the survey dealing with ethnographic matters would be dedicated to Wise. Further assistance came from the researches of Edward Tuite Dalton into the jungle tribes of Chhotanagpur and Assam
Assam
Assam , also, rarely, Assam Valley and formerly the Assam Province , is a northeastern state of India and is one of the most culturally and geographically distinct regions of the country...
. Dalton, like Wise, had previously published his efforts but now they would be integrated as a part of a larger whole. Risley was able to deal with the remaining areas of Bengal by making use of a large staff of correspondents who came from disparate backgrounds, such as missionaries, native people and Government officials.
In 1891 Risley published a paper entitled The Study of Ethnology in India. It was a contribution to what Thomas Trautmann
Thomas Trautmann
Thomas R. Trautmann is an American historian and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of London...
has described as "the racial theory of Indian civilisation". Trautmann considers Risley, along with the philologist Max Müller
Max Müller
Friedrich Max Müller , more regularly known as Max Müller, was a German philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion...
, to have been leading proponents of this idea which "by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilisation, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines." He notes, however, that the convergence of their theories was not a deliberate collaboration.
In the same year, 1891, the four volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal were published. These contained the results of the Bengal survey, with two volumes comprising an "Ethnographical Glossary", and a further two being of "Anthropometric Data". Risley took advice from William Henry Flower
William Henry Flower
Sir William Henry Flower KCB FRCS FRS was an English comparative anatomist and surgeon. Flower became a leading authority on mammals, and especially on the primate brain...
, Director of the Natural History Museum
Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum is one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, England . Its main frontage is on Cromwell Road...
, and William Turner
William Turner (University Principal)
Sir William Turner was a British anatomist and was the Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1903 to 1916....
, an Edinburgh anthropologist, in connection with the anthropometric
Anthropometry
Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual...
volumes. The volumes were well-received by the public and government alike. In the same year, he was elected an officier of the Académie Française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
; and on 1 January 1892 he was invested a Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE). In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism", a theory prevalent for a century from around the 1840s that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilities and inherent tendencies among human beings. Race thus seemed to determine the course of human history."
Risley believed that ethnologists could benefit from undertaking fieldwork and that ethnologists of India had relied too much "on mere literary accounts which give an ideal and misleading picture of caste and its social surroundings ... [S]ome slight personal acquaintance with even a single tribe of savage men could hardly fail to be of infinite service to the philosopher who undertakes to trace the process by which civilisation has been gradually evolved out of barbarism." He also viewed India as an ethnological laboratory, where the continued practice of endogamy
Endogamy
Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such basis as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Greek Orthodox Christian endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another...
had ensured that, in his opinion, there were strict delineations of the various communities by caste and that consequently caste could be viewed as identical to race. Whereas others saw caste as being based on occupation, he believed that changes in occupation within a community led to another instance of endogamy "being held by a sort of unconscious fiction to be equivalent to the difference of race, which is the true basis of the system."
The study was, in the opinion of William Crooke
William Crooke
William Crooke was an English orientalist and "the central figure in Anglo-Indian folklore" according to Richard Mercer Dorson. He was a member of a family that had been settled in Ireland for many years, with his father being a doctor in Macroom. County Cork...
, "the first attempt to apply, in a systematic way, the methods of anthropometry to the analysis of the people of an Indian Province." Risley was influenced by the methodology of the French physical anthropologist Paul Topinard
Paul Topinard
Paul Topinard was a French physician and anthropologist who was a student of Paul Broca and whose views influenced the methodology adopted by Herbert Hope Risley in his ethnographic surveys of the people of India...
, from whose Éléments d'anthropologie générale he had selected several anthropometric techniques, including the nasal index. Topinard believed that this index - a ratio derived from measuring the breadth and height of the nose - could be combined with other cranial measurements to enable a Linnean classification of humans, for which purpose Trautmann says it is
Despite his comments regarding the use of literature by anthropologists, Risley himself used the ancient Rig Veda text, which speaks of Aryan invaders coming into India from the northwest and meeting with existing peoples. Dalton and J. F, Hewitt had posited that the native people comprised two distinct groups, being the Dravidian and the Kolarian, and Risley's use of the nasal index was in part intended to counter those theories by showing that the two groups were racially identical even if they were linguistically varied. Crooke believes that "The most important result of the inquiry was that there appears to be, from the physical point of view, no difference between the so-called Dravidian and Kolarian races occupying the hill country to the south of Bengal. The newer learning has now identified the Austro-Asiatic group of languages, with Munda as one of its sub-branches."
Risley's interpretation of the nasal index went beyond confirmation of the two-race origins. He believed that the variations shown between the extremes of those races of India were indicative of various positions within the caste system, saying that generally "the social position of a caste varies inversely as its nasal index." Trautmann explains that Risley "found a direct relation between the proportion of Aryan blood and the nasal index, along a gradient from the highest castes to the lowest. This assimilation of caste to race ... proved very influential." He also saw a linkage between the nasal index and the definition of a community as either a tribe or a Hindu caste. Further, he said that "community of race, and not, as has frequently been argued, community of function, is the real determining principle, the true causa causans, of the caste system." That is, he believed that the caste system had its basis in race rather than in occupation.
Subsequent to completion of the Bengal survey, Risley's work for some years consisted of heading an enquiry into policing and then more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments.
India: the 1901 Census
In 1899 he was appointed Census Commissioner, tasked with preparing and reporting on the forthcoming decennial census of 1901. The detailed regulations that he formulated for that exercise were also used for the 1911 census, and the work involved in co-ordinating the various Provincial administrations was considerable and detailed.The outcome of the census is described by Crooke as "an exceptionally interesting report", produced in association with a colleague, Edward Albert Gait
Edward Albert Gait
Sir Edward Albert Gait KCSI CIE was an administrator in the Indian Civil Service who rose to serve as Lieutenant-Governor of the British Raj Province known as Bihar and Orissa. He held that office for the years 1915–1920, with a brief absence during April–July 1918 when Edward Vere Levinge...
. Crooke notes that in the report "he developed his views on the origin and classification of the Indian races largely on the basis of anthropometry." Risley believed that the Indian castes could each be described as belonging to one of seven physical types. Some of the material was later republished, in amended form, in Risley's 1908 work, The People of India, which D. F. Pocock describes as "... almost the last production of that great tradition of administrator scholars who had long and extensive experience in the Indian Civil Service and had not found their arduous activity incompatible with scholarship." Trautmann considers the census report and subsequent book to represent "Risley's grand syntheses of India ethnology", while the paper of 1891 had given "an exceptionally clear view of his project at the state of what we might call its early maturity."
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that
According to Susan Bayly
India: later years
In 1901 Risley was appointed Director of Ethnography. There had been proposals for a wide-ranging survey of the subject - and Risley had himself discussed this in his article, The Study of Ethnology in India - but the implementation of the project had been hampered by economic circumstances, related principally to a series of famines. including that of 1899-1900Indian famine of 1899–1900
The Indian famine of 1899–1900 began with the failure of the summer monsoons in 1899 over west and Central India and, during the next year, affected an area of and a population of 59.5 million...
.
In the following year he became Home Secretary
Home Secretary
The Secretary of State for the Home Department, commonly known as the Home Secretary, is the minister in charge of the Home Office of the United Kingdom, and one of the country's four Great Offices of State...
in the administration of Lord Curzon and in 1909 was temporarily a member of the governing council. His experience of administrative matters, including with regard to policing, proved to be useful to Curzon during the government's 1905 partition of Bengal
Partition of Bengal (1905)
The decision of the Partition of Bengal was announced on 19 July 1905 by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon. The partition took effect on 16 October 1905...
along communal lines. So useful was his knowledge and ability that his term in India was extended for two years beyond the usual retirement age, in order that he could provide the summarisation, negotiation and drafting skills that proved to be necessary in order to see through proposals for administrative reform of the Provincial Councils for Curzon's successor as Viceroy
Viceroy
A viceroy is a royal official who runs a country, colony, or province in the name of and as representative of the monarch. The term derives from the Latin prefix vice-, meaning "in the place of" and the French word roi, meaning king. A viceroy's province or larger territory is called a viceroyalty...
, Lord Minto
Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto
Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto was a British nobleman and politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the eighth since Canadian Confederation, and as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, the country's 17th.-Early life and career:Minto was born in London, the...
.
Already recognised by the Académie Française and by the award of CIE, Risley was made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India
Order of the Star of India
The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1861. The Order includes members of three classes:# Knight Grand Commander # Knight Commander # Companion...
on 24 June 1904 and a Knight of the Order of the Indian Empire
Order of the Indian Empire
The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1878. The Order includes members of three classes:#Knight Grand Commander #Knight Commander #Companion...
in 1907.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that during his time in India "... [Risley] cultivated an intimate knowledge of the peoples of India. In 1910 he asserted that a knowledge of facts concerning the religions and habits of the peoples of India equipped a civil servant with a passport to popular regard". Furthermore, that "On the processes by which non-Aryan tribes are admitted into Hinduism he was recognized to be the greatest living authority", and "His work completely revolutionized the native Indian view of ethnological inquiry" by legitimising an inquisitive methodology which had previously been resented by the colonial subjects.
England, and death
Back in England, having left the ICS in February 1910, Risley was appointed Permanent SecretaryPermanent Secretary
The Permanent secretary, in most departments officially titled the permanent under-secretary of state , is the most senior civil servant of a British Government ministry, charged with running the department on a day-to-day basis...
of the judicial department of the India Office
India Office
The India Office was a British government department created in 1858 to oversee the colonial administration of India, i.e. the modern-day nations of Bangladesh, Burma, India, and Pakistan, as well as territories in South-east and Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of the east coast of Africa...
, in succession to Charles James Lyall
Charles James Lyall
Sir Charles James Lyall, KCSI, CIE, FBA was an English civil servant working in India during the period of the British Raj, and also an Arabic scholar.-Life:...
, and in January of that same year he had become President of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
According to Crooke "the strain of [overseeing the Provincial Council reforms] on a constitution which at no time was robust doubtless laid the seeds of the fatal disease which was soon to end his life." Risley died at Wimbledon
Wimbledon, London
Wimbledon is a district in the south west area of London, England, located south of Wandsworth, and east of Kingston upon Thames. It is situated within Greater London. It is home to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and New Wimbledon Theatre, and contains Wimbledon Common, one of the largest areas...
in on 30 September 1911, continuing his studies to the end despite a "distressing illness". His widow remarried, and died in 1934.