The People of India
Encyclopedia
The People of India is a title that has been used for at least three different books, all of which focussed primarily on ethnography
.
John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye
compiled an eight volume study entitled The People of India between 1868 and 1875. The books contained 468 annotated photographs of the native castes and tribes of India.
The origins of the project lay in the desire of Lord Canning to possess photographs of native Indian people. Photography
was then a fairly new process and Canning, who was Governor-General of India
, conceived of the collection of images for the private edification of himself and his wife. However, the Indian Rebellion of 1857
caused a shift in mindset of the London-based British government, which saw that events had come close to overturning British influence in the country and countered this by placing India under more direct control than had been the case when it relied on the capabilities of the British East India Company
to perform such functions. This was the beginning of the British Raj
period.
Initial attempts at ethnographic study by the British in India had concentrated on the issues of female infanticide
and sati
(widow immolation), which were thought to be prevalent in the northern and western areas of the country – especially among the Rajputs
– and which the colonial rulers wished to eradicate by a process of social engineering
. Following the rebellion, officers then serving in the Indian Civil Service, such as Richard Carnac Temple
, were of the opinion that if future unrest 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. Early efforts in the sphere of British ethnography in India were concentrated on obtaining an understanding of Indian folk-lore
, but another early consequence was that The People of India became an official British government publication.
The photographs compiled by Watson and Kaye were not the first to be taken of Indian people but the project was organised within the framework of attempts by officials to document the people in a methodical, statistically- and ethnographically-oriented manner, later expressed by Denzil Ibbetson
in his 1883 report on the 1881 census of the Punjab,
The collection was an attempt at a visual documentation of "typical" physical attributes, dress and other aspects of native life that would complement written studies, although it did itself contain brief notes regarding what were thought to be the "essential characteristics" of each community. Thomas Metcalf has said that, "Accurate information about India's peoples now mattered as never before ... [although imperfect] for the most part the work marked out a stage in the transformation of ethnological curiosity ..." Educated Indians were unimpressed with the outcome and with the general undertone that their people had been depicted both unfairly and dispassionately.
Sadhana Naithani has noted that almost all of the British in India at that time
, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society". Risley, who was an English administrator in the Indian Civil Service, also saw 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."
In 1908 Risley published his book, The People of India. By this stage in his career he had been, among other roles, Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, and he had for many years been a keen ethnographer and proponent of the anthropometric
theories of Paul Topinard
. Although Risley had acknowledged the earlier book of Watson and Kaye as being "famous in its day", he did not refer to it in his 1908 work. Risley had produced earlier works, including the four-volume The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, and continued his ethnographic writings and studies until his death in 1911.
The 25 illustrations contained in the book were lithographic prints – based largely on the photographs of Benjamin Simpson – that had been used to illustrate Edward Tuite Dalton's 1875 book, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. This meant that the illustrations were predominantly of hill tribes from one area of the country rather than the broad range that had been shown by Walton and Kaye.
The thoughts of Émile Senart are quoted extensively, although at the time of Risley's writing they were not available in English translation. The academic position of Risley himself has been described by Susan Bayly
A memorial edition of The People of India was produced in 1915, edited by William Crooke
, who had also served in the Indian Civil Service and was interested in anthropology. It contained an additional 11 illustrations and an ethnological map of the country.
Risley's career and works have been interpreted as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism", which was a theory prevalent for a century from around the 1840s that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilites and inherent tendencies among human beings. Race thus seemed to determine the course of human history." D. F. Pocock describes The People of India as
The last such work, according to Pocock, was J. H. Hutton's Caste in India, published in 1944.
(ASI) adopted the same title as the colonial works of 1868–1875 and 1908. The project was more detailed than the official ethnological surveys of the British Raj, which had a policy of ignoring communities of less than 2000 people and which laid much emphasis on anthropometry. The ASI adopted a cut-off point of 200 members and preferred blood groups to be "the crucial indicator of physical difference".
Kumar Suresh Singh
, a tribal historian and officer in the Indian Administrative Service
who held posts including that of Director-General of the ASI, had responsibility for the organisation, compilation and oversight of the survey and publications. The intent was to produce an anthropological study of the differences and linkages between all of the communities in India. The survey involved 470 scholars and identified 4694 communities during its period of fieldwork between October 1985 and 1994. Sinha notes a total of 3000 scholars, which figure appears to include those involved at various seminars and workshops. The full results of the survey will comprise 43 published volumes, of which 12 had been produced at the time of Singh's death.
The volumes are being produced as two collections, with the first eleven comprising the National series and the remainder being known as the State series.
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...
.
The People of India (1868–1875)
John William Kaye
Sir John William Kaye was a British military historian.The son of Charles Kaye, a solicitor, he was educated at Eton College and at the Royal Military College, Addiscombe. From 1832 to 1841 he was an officer in the Bengal Artillery, afterwards spending some years in literary pursuits both in...
compiled an eight volume study entitled The People of India between 1868 and 1875. The books contained 468 annotated photographs of the native castes and tribes of India.
The origins of the project lay in the desire of Lord Canning to possess photographs of native Indian people. Photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
was then a fairly new process and Canning, who was Governor-General of India
Governor-General of India
The Governor-General of India was the head of the British administration in India, and later, after Indian independence, the representative of the monarch and de facto head of state. The office was created in 1773, with the title of Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William...
, conceived of the collection of images for the private edification of himself and his wife. However, 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...
caused a shift in mindset of the London-based British government, which saw that events had come close to overturning British influence in the country and countered this by placing India under more direct control than had been the case when it relied on the capabilities of 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...
to perform such functions. This was the beginning of the British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
period.
Initial attempts at ethnographic study by the British in India had concentrated on the issues of female infanticide
Infanticide
Infanticide or infant homicide is the killing of a human infant. Neonaticide, a killing within 24 hours of a baby's birth, is most commonly done by the mother.In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible...
and sati
Sati
Sati may refer to:*An alternative name for Hindu goddess Dakshayani, Shiva's first wife*Sati , an ancient Indian tradition of the immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre, now illegal*Mindfulness...
(widow immolation), which were thought to be prevalent in the northern and western areas of the country – especially among the Rajputs
Rajput
A Rajput is a member of one of the patrilineal clans of western, central, northern India and in some parts of Pakistan. Rajputs are descendants of one of the major ruling warrior classes in the Indian subcontinent, particularly North India...
– and which the colonial rulers wished to eradicate by a process of social engineering
Social engineering
Social engineering may refer to:* Social engineering , efforts to influence society on a large scale* Social engineering , the practice of obtaining confidential information by manipulating and/or deceiving people....
. Following the rebellion, officers then serving in 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:...
, were of the opinion that if future unrest 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. Early efforts in the sphere of British ethnography in India were concentrated on obtaining an understanding of Indian folk-lore
Folk-Lore
Folk-Lore was released in 2002 by Celtic metal band Cruachan.-Track listing:#"Bloody Sunday" – 4:15#"The Victory Reel" – 1:21#"Death of a Gael" – 5:38#"The Rocky Road to Dublin" – 3:07#"Ossian's Return" – 4:44...
, but another early consequence was that The People of India became an official British government publication.
The photographs compiled by Watson and Kaye were not the first to be taken of Indian people but the project was organised within the framework of attempts by officials to document the people in a methodical, statistically- and ethnographically-oriented manner, later 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,
The collection was an attempt at a visual documentation of "typical" physical attributes, dress and other aspects of native life that would complement written studies, although it did itself contain brief notes regarding what were thought to be the "essential characteristics" of each community. Thomas Metcalf has said that, "Accurate information about India's peoples now mattered as never before ... [although imperfect] for the most part the work marked out a stage in the transformation of ethnological curiosity ..." Educated Indians were unimpressed with the outcome and with the general undertone that their people had been depicted both unfairly and dispassionately.
Sadhana Naithani has noted that almost all of the British in India at that time
The People of India (1908)
As time passed after the 1857 rebellion, British 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 the words of Herbert Hope RisleyHerbert Hope Risley
Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI 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...
, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society". Risley, who was an English administrator in the Indian Civil Service, also saw 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."
In 1908 Risley published his book, The People of India. By this stage in his career he had been, among other roles, Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, and he had for many years been a keen ethnographer and proponent of the anthropometric
Anthropometry
Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual...
theories of 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...
. Although Risley had acknowledged the earlier book of Watson and Kaye as being "famous in its day", he did not refer to it in his 1908 work. Risley had produced earlier works, including the four-volume The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, and continued his ethnographic writings and studies until his death in 1911.
The 25 illustrations contained in the book were lithographic prints – based largely on the photographs of Benjamin Simpson – that had been used to illustrate Edward Tuite Dalton's 1875 book, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. This meant that the illustrations were predominantly of hill tribes from one area of the country rather than the broad range that had been shown by Walton and Kaye.
The thoughts of Émile Senart are quoted extensively, although at the time of Risley's writing they were not available in English translation. The academic position of Risley himself has been described by Susan Bayly
A memorial edition of The People of India was produced in 1915, edited by 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...
, who had also served in the Indian Civil Service and was interested in anthropology. It contained an additional 11 illustrations and an ethnological map of the country.
Risley's career and works have been interpreted as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism", which was a theory prevalent for a century from around the 1840s that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilites and inherent tendencies among human beings. Race thus seemed to determine the course of human history." D. F. Pocock describes The People of India as
The last such work, according to Pocock, was J. H. Hutton's Caste in India, published in 1944.
The People of India (1992–)
The multi-volume series of books published from 1992 under the auspices of the government-run Anthropological Survey of IndiaAnthropological Survey of India
Anthropological Survey of India is the apex Indian organisation involved in anthropological studies and field data research for human and cultural aspects, working primarily in the fields of physical anthropology and cultural anthropology...
(ASI) adopted the same title as the colonial works of 1868–1875 and 1908. The project was more detailed than the official ethnological surveys of the British Raj, which had a policy of ignoring communities of less than 2000 people and which laid much emphasis on anthropometry. The ASI adopted a cut-off point of 200 members and preferred blood groups to be "the crucial indicator of physical difference".
Kumar Suresh Singh
Kumar Suresh Singh
Kumar Suresh Singh was an Indian Administrative Service officer, who served as a Director-General of the Anthropological Survey of India. He is known principally for his oversight and editorship of the People of India survey and for his studies of tribal history.-Life:Kumar Suresh Singh came from...
, a tribal historian and officer in the Indian Administrative Service
Indian Administrative Service
The Indian Administrative Service is the administrative civil service of the Government of India. It is one of the three All India Services....
who held posts including that of Director-General of the ASI, had responsibility for the organisation, compilation and oversight of the survey and publications. The intent was to produce an anthropological study of the differences and linkages between all of the communities in India. The survey involved 470 scholars and identified 4694 communities during its period of fieldwork between October 1985 and 1994. Sinha notes a total of 3000 scholars, which figure appears to include those involved at various seminars and workshops. The full results of the survey will comprise 43 published volumes, of which 12 had been produced at the time of Singh's death.
The volumes are being produced as two collections, with the first eleven comprising the National series and the remainder being known as the State series.