Emergence and Growth of Anthropology in India

Context: Why India Matters in Anthropological History

India occupies a unique position in the global history of anthropology. As the world's most complex civilisation combining the world's largest population of tribal communities, an intricate caste system with four thousand years of documented history, a vast corpus of ancient textual sources, and an extraordinary regional and linguistic diversity India both attracted foreign anthropologists seeking to test theories developed elsewhere and generated its own indigenous tradition of anthropological inquiry. The discipline in India did not develop in isolation from colonial politics: the very project of knowing Indian society was, from its inception, bound up with the project of governing it. Understanding the history of anthropology in India is therefore inseparable from understanding the history of British colonialism.

Phase I Formative Phase (1774-1919)

The Colonial Context and the Asiatic Society

The earliest institutional base for the study of Indian society and culture was the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones in 1784. Jones, a judge on the Calcutta Supreme Court with extraordinary facility in languages, was the first to demonstrate the systematic relationship between Sanskrit and the European classical languages Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Persian and thereby established the Indo-European language family, one of the foundational insights of comparative philology. The Society's journal published articles on Indian languages, literature, history, natural history, and what would today be called ethnography.

The Orientalist tradition that Jones inaugurated was characterised by deep, sympathetic engagement with Indian classical texts and a genuine admiration for Sanskrit civilisation. Jones himself argued that Sanskrit was "more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either." This Indomaniac phase of Orientalism in Edward Said's terminology produced scholarly editions and translations of the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Arthashastra, establishing the textual foundations of Indology. Henry Thomas Colebrooke continued this tradition with his treatises on Hindu law, grammar, and philosophy. Max Müller, from Oxford, translated the Rig Veda and elaborated the Aryan Invasion Theory, arguing that the upper-caste Hindus were of the same racial stock as the Europeans a politically charged claim that would ramify through Indian history for generations.

The Indophobic counter-tradition associated with James Mill's History of British India (1818) presented India as a land of superstition, despotism, and stagnation, whose people lacked individual liberty and required colonial intervention and Christian missionary activity to achieve progress. Karl Marx similarly characterised Indian civilisation as one without history merely a passive receptacle for successive foreign conquests. These opposed Orientalist and Indophobic traditions structured the colonial intellectual field within which anthropology in India developed.

Orientalism, Indology, and Edward Said

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) fundamentally reframed the debate. Said argued that Orientalism was not simply a body of scholarship but "a systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." The Orient was constructed as the binary opposite of the Occident irrational, sensual, static, and despotic in ways that justified colonial rule. Said drew on Foucault's notion of power-knowledge (knowledge is always implicated in power) and Gramsci's concept of hegemony (intellectual leadership as a form of domination).

Sumit Sarkar offered an important rejoinder: Orientalism had not always portrayed Indian civilisation negatively the Indomaniac tradition had presented a glorified image of Vedic society. India had not been a purely passive recipient of colonial knowledge but had itself generated knowledge through its own scholarly traditions. Indigenous Indology represented by scholars such as G.S. Ghurye arose as a reaction to the Indophobic strand, combining philological methods with sociological analysis to recover and celebrate the Vedic foundations of Indian civilisation.

The limitations of Indology as a methodological approach are significant: it gives priority to the "book view" over field observation, presenting Indian society as a static, timeless textual entity rather than the dynamic, contradictory, and conflict-ridden reality it is; it privileges upper-caste, Brahmanical traditions and largely ignores the lived experience of Dalits, tribals, and women; and, as A.R. Desai argued, it provides no analytical framework for understanding inequality, exploitation, and structural change.

The Ethnographic Surveys and the Census

The colonial administration's need to know, classify, and govern the bewildering diversity of India's population gave a powerful administrative impulse to ethnographic work. The Census of India begun in 1871 and conducted decennially thereafter became the largest and most consequential exercise in social classification in human history. H.H. Risley, Superintendent of Census Operations, used the census as an instrument for the ethnographic survey of India's tribes and castes. In 1885, the Government of Bengal appointed Risley to conduct a systematic study of the castes and tribes of Bengal the result was Tribes and Castes of Bengal (2 volumes, 1891) and The People of India. Risley applied nasal index measurements and racial science to classify Indian castes, arguing controversially and inaccurately that caste distinctions correlated with racial differences measured anthropometrically.

Under Risley's oversight as Census Commissioner, a separate wing for ethnographic survey was created under the Census, initiating the project "People of India." This produced a cascade of ethnographic surveys across the provinces: Edgar Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India (7 volumes), William Crooke's The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, E.T. Dalton's Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, and R.V. Russell and Hira Lal's Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces. These were massive data-collection exercises conducted by colonial administrators, typically without sustained fieldwork or language learning, and systematically distorted by their authors' assumptions about racial hierarchy and evolutionary stages.

The Census also had profound effects on Indian social life: by requiring every person to declare a single caste, it reified and hardened what had been more fluid social identities; by ranking castes in order of precedence, it created pressure groups lobbying for higher census rankings; and by creating the category of "Scheduled Tribes," it institutionalised a legal boundary that continues to structure Indian politics and welfare policy today. Ghurye was among the first to note this "objectifying power of the census" that it did not merely describe the caste system but actively transformed it.

British Social Anthropologists in India

Several major British social anthropologists conducted fieldwork in India during this formative period, generating ethnographic monographs of lasting importance. W.H.R. Rivers studied the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in 1902, producing The Todas (1906) a meticulous account of their polyandrous marriage system, dairy ritual complex, and buffalo cult that became a model of careful ethnographic observation and generated extensive theoretical debate. Rivers introduced the genealogical method the systematic collection of complete genealogies as a means of arriving at kinship terminology, land rights, and social organisation which became a standard tool of fieldwork. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown studied the Andaman Islanders (1906-1908), generating the material for his Andaman Islanders (1922), the founding text of structural-functionalism in social anthropology. Charles Gabriel Seligman and Brenda Z. Seligman wrote on the Veddas of Sri Lanka (1911).

Pioneer Indian Anthropologists

L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937) is regarded as the first indigenous Indian anthropologist and a founding figure of the discipline in India. He began his career as a science teacher in Cochin state. In 1902, the Dewan of Cochin asked him to undertake, on an honorary basis, an ethnographic survey of the state working during weekdays as a college lecturer and on weekends as Superintendent of Ethnography. Between 1904 and 1906 he produced twelve monographs, later compiled as Tribes and Castes of Cochin (2 volumes). He significantly modified the twenty-seven-point format that Risley had used for the census ethnographic survey, reducing it to a more practicable fourteen-point framework suited to Indian conditions: introduction, origin and tradition, habitation, marriage customs, pregnancy and childbirth, inheritance, tribal organisation, religion, magic and sorcery, funeral ceremonies, occupation, physical and mental characteristics, food, social status, and conclusion.

Unlike colonial administrators who collected ethnographic data at a distance, Ananthakrishna Iyer insisted on participant observation interacting with people in their natural environment, learning their languages, and observing lifecycle ceremonies in their social context. He arranged the tribes and castes of Cochin not alphabetically (the Western convention) but in the order of their social status an early recognition of the salience of hierarchy in Indian social organisation. He broke with the convention of restricting anthropological study to preliterate communities by including literate, high-caste groups such as the Nambudiris, Nayars, and Syrian Christians.

His work received appreciation from E.B. Tylor, W.H.R. Rivers, Frazer, and Haddon. He was chosen President of the Ethnology Section at the first Indian Science Congress in Calcutta, and went on to help establish the first postgraduate anthropology department at Calcutta University in 1920. After retirement, he lectured on Indian ethnology across European universities and received an honorary fellowship from the Institute of Anthropology in Florence and the French title Officier d'Académie.

Sarat Chandra Roy (1871-1942) is universally regarded as the Father of Indian Ethnography and the first Indian ethnologist in the modern sense. Roy was a lawyer by profession who, in the course of his legal practice in the interior of Chotanagpur, came into close contact with Munda and other tribal communities and was moved by the conditions of exploitation and dispossession they faced. His engagement with tribals was characterised by a combination of deep scholarly curiosity and genuine social commitment he used his legal skills to defend tribal rights and repeatedly advocated in the Bihar and Odisha Legislative Council (of which he was a member for fifteen years) for tribal welfare.

Roy's ethnographic output was remarkable in its range and depth. His monographs include: Mundas and Their Country (1912) the first major monograph by an Indian anthropologist, containing the first systematic account of Munda social organisation; The Oraons of Chota Nagpur (1915) which provided the first detailed description of the dhumkuria (youth dormitory), the Oraon village panchayat, and the paraha system of inter-village political organisation; The Birhors (1925) a study of a small nomadic tribe of 2,000 persons from which "nomadism" emerged as a distinctive mode of life; and The Kharias (1937) a comparative study of the three divisions of the Kharia tribe (Dudh, Dhelki, and Hill Kharia). He also published papers on totemism among the Asur and Ho of Singhbhum, Lepcha funerary practices, kinship among the Sikkim hill peoples, Khasi kinship terminology, Khond human sacrifice, and Korku memorial tablets.

Roy believed that knowledge of a tribe's history was essential for understanding its present culture his early monographs devote extensive chapters to historical reconstruction, an approach he later modified toward more thorough ethnographic description of contemporary social life. He regarded folklore as the "pre-history of the human mind" and argued that Indian students were uniquely positioned to collect and preserve folkloric traditions before they disappeared under the pressures of modernisation. He consistently advocated that anthropological training be made compulsory for administrative and judicial officers posted in tribal areas. In 1921 he founded Man in India, the oldest continuously published anthropological journal in Asia, which became the primary forum for publishing Indian ethnographic research during the formative and constructive phases.

The Anthropological Society of Bombay and Institutional Development

The Anthropological Society of Bombay, founded in 1886, published a journal in which a number of early anthropological studies were initiated the first institutional forum for anthropological publication in India. Anthropology was introduced as a subject in the Department of Sociology at Bombay University in 1919, marking the beginning of academic institutionalisation. The first full-fledged Department of Anthropology was established at Calcutta University in 1920, with Ananthakrishna Iyer, R. Chanda, and others joining as faculty. The founding of this department is the single most important institutional event of the formative phase.

Phase II Constructive Phase (1920-1949)

Institutionalisation and the Growth of Indian Anthropology

The constructive phase was characterised by the consolidation of institutional structures, the emergence of a trained generation of Indian anthropologists, and the deepening of ethnographic research on tribal and caste communities. The establishment of the Department of Anthropology at Calcutta University in 1920 was the pivot around which this development turned. Man in India, the first issue of which appeared in 1921 under S.C. Roy's editorship, provided the primary publication forum.

A landmark collective event was the 25th Indian Science Congress, held at Calcutta in 1938, whose theme was "Anthropology in India." Eminent Indian social anthropologists delivered lectures and extensive discussions were held on future research priorities marking, in L.P. Vidyarthi's assessment, "a big jump in anthropology" in India. The two key institutional developments of this phase were the establishment of the Anthropological Survey of India in 1945 the government body responsible for systematic anthropological research on India's diverse populations and the establishment of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delhi in 1947.

G.S. Ghurye (1893-1983): Indology Meets Social Anthropology

Govind Sadashiv Ghurye was trained at Cambridge under W.H.R. Rivers and was influenced by Rivers's diffusionism; but it was his pre-Cambridge education in Sanskrit and Orientalist thought that proved more durably formative. He became Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Bombay University the first such department in India in 1924 and held the position for over three decades, training the first generation of professional Indian sociologists and anthropologists almost single-handedly. He is known as the "Father of Indian Sociology."

Ghurye's approach combined the textual methods of Indology with empirical sociology, treating Indian civilisation as the product of the Vedic era and using ancient Sanskrit texts alongside field observation as sources of social data. His foundational work Caste and Race in India (1932) provided a historically grounded, comparative account of the caste system, drawing on both textual and ethnographic sources. He proposed six defining characteristics of the Indian caste system: segmental division of society, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, lack of unrestricted choice of occupation, restrictions on marriage (endogamy), and civil and religious disabilities and privileges for different sections. Unlike his contemporaries who explained caste in purely religious or racial terms, Ghurye emphasised its historical and comparative dimensions.

On the tribes-versus-castes debate, Ghurye took a position diametrically opposed to that of Verrier Elwin. Elwin argued that tribals were a distinct cultural group "children of the soil" who had been dispossessed and exploited by Hindu society and the colonial state, and who should be left to develop on their own lines in protected reserves (the "national park" approach). Ghurye argued that tribals were "backward Hindus" groups on the margins of Hindu civilisation who were already being absorbed into it through long historical processes of Sanskritisation and acculturation. He advocated not protection but integration their absorption into the mainstream of Hindu society. This debate had direct policy implications for the framing of India's tribal policy after independence, with Nehru's "Panch Sheel" approach (associated with Elwin's influence) ultimately prevailing over Ghurye's integrationist position in the framing of the Fifth Schedule.

D.N. Majumdar and the MARC Model

Dhirendra Nath Majumdar made significant contributions to both social anthropology and physical anthropology. His study of the Ho of the Kolhan region of Chotanagpur focused on culture contact and acculturation, becoming a foundational text for studying social change in tribal communities. Majumdar developed the MARC model Man, Area, Resource, and Cooperation as an analytical framework: Man (the human beings with their biological needs and physical properties); Area (the geographical space they occupy); Resource (the materials available in that space); and Cooperation (the patterns of relationship among the people). He argued that harmony among these four elements produces functional social unity, and that this unity breaks down when external pressures impinge on any of them. He was not in favour of creating reserves for tribals or of their absorption into Hinduism as a backward caste; he advocated what he called "creative or generative adaptation" integration into Indian society on terms that preserved cultural continuity.

His book The Changing Hoof represented a significant contribution to the study of cultural change. His work on races of India drawing on extensive physical measurements of different population groups contributed to the development of physical anthropology in India. Marriage and Family in Mysore by M.N. Srinivas and Hindu Methods of Tribal Absorption by N.K. Bose, published in this phase, further marked the constructive period's intellectual vitality.

Verrier Elwin and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf

Verrier Elwin, a British-born missionary who abandoned Christianity and became deeply committed to tribal welfare, conducted extensive fieldwork on the tribes of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. His major works The Baiga (1939), The Agaria (1943), and The Muria and their Ghotul (1947) combined detailed ethnographic description with passionate social advocacy. His observation that the Baigas were being destroyed by landlords and missionaries led him to recommend that the state should control interaction between tribals and outsiders. His study of the Ghotul the youth dormitory institution among the Muria of Bastar sparked controversy for its frank account of the institution's sexual education function, but also stimulated comparative work on youth dormitories in other tribal societies. Elwin ultimately became an Indian citizen and served as an advisor on tribal affairs to the Government of India.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, an Austrian ethnologist, spent nearly four decades in India, producing detailed ethnographies of several South Indian and Himalayan tribal groups: The Chenchus: Jungle Folk of the Deccan (1943), The Raj Gonds of Adilabad: Myth and Ritual (1948), and The Reddis of the Bison Hills: A Study of Acculturation (1945). His work paid special attention to the problems of land alienation and the encroachment of non-tribals into tribal territories concerns he documented in painstaking detail for Adilabad district as well as to the cultural mechanisms through which tribal communities adapted to contact with the surrounding Hindu society. These ethnographies remain models of sustained participant-observer fieldwork.

Phase III Analytical Phase (1950-1990)

The Post-Independence Shift: From Tribes to Villages and Castes

Independence in 1947 brought a fundamental reorientation of anthropological research in India. During the colonial formative and constructive phases, the dominant focus had been on tribal communities the "primitives" who provided, in the evolutionary framework, evidence of early stages of human social development and, in the colonial administrative framework, the populations most in need of governance and control. After independence, the focus of both foreign and Indian anthropologists shifted decisively toward village communities and the caste system the institutions that structured the lives of the overwhelming majority of India's population.

This shift was analytically productive: village and caste studies moved from descriptive ethnography to theoretically informed analysis of complex societies, engaging with debates about social change, modernisation, Sanskritisation, the relationship between great and little traditions, and the nature of Indian civilisation. L.P. Vidyarthi described this as the "analytical phase" because of this shift from descriptive tribal studies to analytical village and caste studies. Indian anthropologists and sociologists such as M.N. Srinivas, L.P. Vidyarthi, S.C. Dube, D.N. Majumdar, B.K. Roy Burman, Makhan Jha, P.K. Misra, K.S. Singh, T.N. Madan, N.K. Bose, T.C. Das, and Iravati Karve made notable contributions. American anthropologists Morris Opler, Oscar Lewis, and David Mandelbaum and their students came to India to study Indian society and test hypotheses developed in other fieldwork contexts.

Key Concepts and Contributions

M.N. Srinivas developed the concept of Sanskritisation in Social Change in Modern India (1966): "the process by which a low caste or tribe or other group takes over the customs, rituals, ideology and style of life of a high and, in particular, a twice-born (dwij) caste." Srinivas's other foundational concept was dominant caste a caste that predominates numerically and economically in a given region, regardless of its ritual rank. His fieldwork among the Coorgs and his analysis of Agrahara Brahmin villages established a model of meticulous fieldwork combined with comparative-theoretical ambition.

Robert Redfield's framework of Great and Little Traditions the civilisational "great tradition" of the literate, sophisticated centres versus the local, oral "little tradition" of the village was applied productively to India. McKim Marriot extended this framework through the concepts of universalisation (the "upward" movement of little-traditional practices into the great tradition) and parochialization (the "downward" devolution of great-traditional elements and their integration into the little tradition). These processes are complementary and simultaneous: the Bhakti movement represents universalisation; the local adaptation of pan-Hindu festivals represents parochialization. Marriot examined these processes in Kishan Garhi village in Uttar Pradesh.

L.P. Vidyarthi developed the concept of the sacred complex to analyse traditional Hindu pilgrimage centres as integrating mechanisms of Indian civilisation. His study of Gaya published as The Sacred Complex of Hindu Gaya (1961) identified three analytical dimensions: sacred geography (the spatial arrangement of shrines and pilgrimage routes), sacred performances (the ritual activities conducted at the site), and sacred specialists (the religious functionaries who mediate these performances). The sacred complex functions as a "meeting place of different kinds of peoples and traditions, of castes and sects, of classes and statuses," channelling cultural transmission and contributing to civilisational integration. He extended the framework through the Nature-Man-Spirit complex to study tribal communities particularly the Maler of Rajmahal Hills who stood outside the great tradition of Hinduism but whose relationship with nature and the spirit world formed an equally coherent integrating complex.

Iravati Karve made seminal contributions to both kinship studies and the study of regional cultural traditions. Her Kinship Organisation in India (1953) mapped the four major kinship zones of the subcontinent Northern, Central, Southern, and Eastern and showed that each zone was characterised by a distinctive type of kinship terminology, marriage rules, and descent reckoning. Her work demonstrated the systematic regional variation in Indian social organisation that underlies its apparent uniformity.

N.K. Bose, who served as Director of the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI), made contributions to the study of Hindu culture, tribal absorption into Hindu society, and the culture of Bengal. His concept of the "Hindu method of tribal absorption" described the historical process by which tribal groups on the margins of Hindu civilisation were gradually incorporated as low castes through conversion of totem ancestors into Hindu deities, adoption of Sanskrit names, ritual Hinduisation of lifecycle ceremonies, and integration into the jajmani system of economic exchange.

The Anthropological Survey of India

The Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI), established in 1945 under the Ministry of Science and Technology, became the primary governmental body for anthropological research. Its most ambitious project was the "People of India" survey launched under K.S. Singh's direction in the 1980s which aimed to document all of India's communities. The survey identified over 4,600 communities across India and documented them in a series of state-by-state volumes, constituting the most comprehensive ethnographic database on India's population ever assembled. The project combined quantitative survey methods with qualitative ethnographic observation, using a standardised schedule covering biological traits, historical background, language, occupation, social customs, religion, and developmental indices.

Phase IV Modern/Global Phase (1990 onwards)

From the 1990s, Indian anthropology engaged increasingly with global theoretical debates postmodernism, postcolonial theory, feminist anthropology, and the anthropology of globalisation while also responding to domestic intellectual and political challenges. The postmodern critique of anthropology's complicity with colonialism was particularly resonant in the Indian context: ethnographic surveys and census operations had literally been instruments of colonial governance. The "writing culture" critique (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) that ethnographic texts are literary constructions shaped by the power relations between Western researchers and non-Western subjects prompted Indian anthropologists to reflect on their own positionality relative to the communities they studied.

Feminist anthropologists challenged the male-centred character of much Indian ethnographic writing, highlighting the systematic omission of women's perspectives, women's economic activities, and women's ritual roles from canonical ethnographies. Studies of caste, untouchability, and Dalit experience moved from the margins to the centre of Indian sociological research, influenced by the Dalit movement's intellectual critique of Brahmanical scholarship. The field of legal anthropology examining how tribal communities' customary laws and land rights interacted with the modern Indian legal system acquired new urgency in the context of development-induced displacement (particularly from dam construction and mining) and forest rights legislation.

Physical Anthropology in India

Physical anthropology in India developed alongside social and cultural anthropology, with distinct institutional bases. The Anthropological Survey of India carried out systematic physical anthropological surveys alongside its ethnographic work, collecting measurements, blood group data, genetic markers, and demographic information on India's diverse populations. D.N. Majumdar's Races and Cultures of India provided one of the first systematic accounts of the physical anthropological diversity of the Indian population. The study of India's tribal populations particularly the Andamanese, Veddas, and Jarawa was significant for understanding the early peopling of South and Southeast Asia.

The prehistoric archaeological dimension of physical anthropology in India is addressed separately in the paleoanthropological evidence topic, covering the Siwalik primates (Ramapithecus, Sivapithecus), the Narmada fossil (Homo narmadensis), and the Lower Palaeolithic cultures of the Soan and Acheulian traditions.

Key Themes and Debates in Indian Anthropology

The tribe-caste continuum:: One of the most persistent debates in Indian anthropology concerns the analytical relationship between tribe and caste. F.G. Bailey proposed the "tribe-caste continuum" a spectrum rather than a binary division along which communities could be placed based on their degree of integration into the Hindu caste system. This challenged both the colonial assumption of a sharp boundary between primitive tribes and Hindu caste society and Ghurye's thesis that tribals were simply "backward Hindus."

Great and Little Tradition:: The framework developed by Redfield and applied in India by Marriot, Srinivas, and Vidyarthi generated extensive empirical work on the channels of cultural communication between "high" and "low" traditions and the mechanisms by which local practices acquired pan-Indian significance and vice versa.

Village studies:: The systematic study of Indian villages associated with M.N. Srinivas's Rampura studies, S.C. Dube's Shamirpet study, Oscar Lewis's Rampur study, and McKim Marriot's Kishan Garhi study established the Indian village as a unit of analysis and generated comparative data on social change, economic organisation, and political structure across regions.

Applied anthropology and tribal policy:: The Elwin-Ghurye debate generated the central positions in Indian tribal policy debate (isolationism versus integrationism) that were eventually negotiated in Nehru's "Panch Sheel" five principles for tribal development that rejected both forced assimilation and complete isolation in favour of development respecting tribal cultures.

Caste and its transformations:: Srinivas's Sanskritisation, Dumont's hierarchy, André Béteille's comparative-historical account of equality and inequality, and the Dalit intellectual tradition's critique of Brahmanical sociology together constitute the richest body of comparative sociological writing on caste in the world.