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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 E. T. 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.<ref name=Crooke1915/>
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 E. T. 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.<ref name=Crooke1915/>


The four volumes of ''[[The Tribes and Castes of Bengal]]'' were published in 1891 and contained the results of the Bengal survey. Two of the volumes comprised an "Ethnographical Glossary", with the remaining two being of "Anthropometric Data". Risley took advice from [[William Henry Flower]], Director of the [[Natural History Museum]], and [[William Turner (university principal)|William Turner]], an Edinburgh anthropologist, in connection with the [[Anthropometry|anthropometric]] volumes. 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."<ref name=Crooke1915/> He was influenced by the methodology of the French anthropologist [[Paul Topinard]], and he was elected an ''officier'' of the [[Académie Française]] in 1891. The volumes were well-received by the public and government alike, and on 1 January 1892 he was invested a [[Companion of the Indian Empire]] (CIE).<ref name=ODNB/><ref name=IndiaList1905p167>{{cite book |title=The India List and Office List |publisher=India Office |date=1905 |url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3VQTAAAAYAAJ |page=167 |accessdate=2011-11-11}}</ref> In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism".<ref>{{cite book |title=The Concept of Race in South Asia |editor-first=Peter |editor-last=Robb |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Delhi |year=1995 |first=Crispin |last=Bates |chapter=Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry |page=237 |isbn=9780195637670}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief |first=Henry |last=Schwarz |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |year=2010 |isbn=9781444317343 |page=68 |url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TakDPlqImkYC |accessdate=2011-11-21}}</ref>
The four volumes of ''[[The Tribes and Castes of Bengal]]'' were published in 1891 and contained the results of the Bengal survey. Two of the volumes comprised an "Ethnographical Glossary", with the remaining two being of "Anthropometric Data". Risley took advice from [[William Henry Flower]], Director of the [[Natural History Museum]], and [[William Turner (university principal)|William Turner]], an Edinburgh anthropologist, in connection with the [[Anthropometry|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).<ref name=ODNB/><ref name=IndiaList1905p167>{{cite book |title=The India List and Office List |publisher=India Office |date=1905 |url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3VQTAAAAYAAJ |page=167 |accessdate=2011-11-11}}</ref> In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism".<ref>{{cite book |title=The Concept of Race in South Asia |editor-first=Peter |editor-last=Robb |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Delhi |year=1995 |first=Crispin |last=Bates |chapter=Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry |page=237 |isbn=9780195637670}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief |first=Henry |last=Schwarz |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |year=2010 |isbn=9781444317343 |page=68 |url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TakDPlqImkYC |accessdate=2011-11-21}}</ref>

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."<ref name=Crooke1915/> 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. He also 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&nbsp;...[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."<ref>{{cite book |title=Aryans and British India |pages=198-200 |first=Thomas R. |last=Trautmann |location=New Delhi |publisher=YODA Press |edition=2nd Indian |year=2006 |origyear=1997 |isbn=81-902272-1-1 |url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dhbwDFfE9J8C |accessdate=2011-11-23}}</ref><ref>pp237-238</ref>


Subsequently, Risley's work consisted of heading an enquiry into policing and then more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments.<ref name=Crooke1915/>
Subsequently, Risley's work consisted of heading an enquiry into policing and then more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments.<ref name=Crooke1915/>

Revision as of 18:30, 23 November 2011

H. H. Risley

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 did extensive work 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.[1] 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."[2]

Early life

Risley was born at Akeley 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.[3]

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.[3][4]

India: 1873-1899

His initial posting was to Midnapur in Bengal, as assistant magistrate and District collector. 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.[3][4][5]

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.[3][5]

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.[3]

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.[5] 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 came to believe 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.[6]

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 E. T. 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.[5]

The four volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal were published in 1891 and contained the results of the Bengal survey. Two of the volumes comprised an "Ethnographical Glossary", with the remaining 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).[3][7] In more recent times, his use of contemporary anthropometric methods has led to his career being described as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism".[8][9]

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."[5] 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. He also 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."[10][11]

Subsequently, Risley's work consisted of heading an enquiry into policing and then more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments.[5]

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.[5]

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."[5] Rose 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.[5][12]

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that

From the date of his report a new chapter was opened in Indian official literature, and the census volumes, until then regarded as dull, were at once read and reviewed in every country. His categorization of Indian castes and occupations had an enduring social and political effect.[3]

Crooke believes that "The most important result of the inquiry [into Bengal castes and tribes] 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."[5]

According to Susan Bayly

Those like [Sir William] Hunter, as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley (1851-1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke (1848-1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt.[13]

India: later years

In 1901 Risley was appointed Director of Ethnography.[3] 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 1899-1900.[5]

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.[3]

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.[5][7]

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.[3]

England, and death

Back in England, having left the ICS in February 1910,[5] Risley was appointed Permanent Secretary of the judicial department of the India Office, in succession to Charles James Lyall,[14] and in January of that same year he had become President of the Royal Anthropological Institute.[3]

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.[3]

Views on racial types

He saw three fundamental races - being Dravidian, Mongoloid and Indo-Aryan - along with four secondary races, which were described as Cytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian and Pre-Dravidian.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ Ashok Kumar (2001). 2001 Census as Social Document. Anmol Publications. p. 15.
  2. ^ Lloyd I. Rudolph (1984). The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Susan Hoeber Rudolph. University of Chicago Press. p. 116. ISBN 0226731375.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Risley, Sir Herbert Hope". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35760. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ a b The India List and Office List. India Office. 1905. p. 600. Retrieved 2011-11-11.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Risley, Sir Herbert Hope (1915) [1908]. Crooke, William (ed.). The People of India (Memorial edition). Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved 8 August 2011.
  6. ^ Naithani, Sadhana (2006). In quest of Indian folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253345448.
  7. ^ a b The India List and Office List. India Office. 1905. p. 167. Retrieved 2011-11-11.
  8. ^ Bates, Crispin (1995). "Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry". In Robb, Peter (ed.). The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 237. ISBN 9780195637670.
  9. ^ Schwarz, Henry (2010). Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief. John Wiley & Sons. p. 68. ISBN 9781444317343. Retrieved 2011-11-21.
  10. ^ Trautmann, Thomas R. (2006) [1997]. Aryans and British India (2nd Indian ed.). New Delhi: YODA Press. pp. 198–200. ISBN 81-902272-1-1. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
  11. ^ pp237-238
  12. ^ Kennedy, Kenneth A. R. (2000). God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology of South Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 74–75. ISBN 978-0-472-11013-1. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
  13. ^ Bayly, Susan (2001). Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. The New Cambridge History of India, Volume 4.3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 126–127. ISBN 978-0-521-26434-1. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
  14. ^ Bates, Crispin (1995). "Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry". In Robb, Peter (ed.). The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 243. ISBN 9780195637670.

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