Most histories of anthropology in India explore its emergence either in terms of institutional practices or through biographies of pioneering scholars. Anthropologist and Imperialist by the anthropologist Chris Fuller combines both approaches in the history of the anthropology of caste by following the career of HH Risley. Risley served as an Imperial Civil Service (ICS) officer and anthropologist working at the height of British colonial rule in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through the biography of Risley, this book provides a pathway to a history of caste, intellectual debates, ideologies, and the complexities of anthropological practice of the time. It shows how research was shaped by the state and intercultural encounters during colonial rule.
The book consists of 15 chapters, which cover Risley’s family background and his tenure in the Civil Services until his retirement. There is a close engagement with Risley’s research, his work with the ethnographic survey and Census of India and in policy, which were important to discussions of caste and tribe. Colonialism involved both territorial conquest and the collection of knowledge, giving rise to frameworks of knowing about the world (Ludden, 1993). The figure of Risley epitomizes this process in interesting ways. Fuller points out that Risley initially explored caste in relation to race, drawing on theories now discredited. Yet when engaging with other thinkers of his time, it becomes clear that Risley’s own position shifted, which is often missed by contemporary writers. Fuller therefore shows how Risley’s research led to an understanding of caste in relation to social preference.
What is especially interesting in the book are the series of tensions that cover debates regarding race, categories to be employed in the collection of data, and the development of research projects alongside institutional practices of administration. What is significant in the research environment Risley and his contemporaries operated in was the decentralized nature of work, where surveys were managed as per the context of a province. This research practice was reflective of governance during colonial rule. As Fuller points out, Risley’s approach to Indian societies was also shaped by his interactions with upper caste Bengali Hindus, often referred to as Bhadraloks, who constituted his subordinates, possibly shaping his view of Indian society and caste. While this may have resulted in omissions such as the limited presence of Muslims in Risley’s research, it also suggests how analytical categories emerged through complex interactions between colonizer and colonized.
There are two aspects of the book that make for illuminating reading. The first aspect of the book is the way Fuller breaks open the project of research, especially in terms of how data collection projects and instruments were developed in practice which social scientists now take for granted. Even if Risley operated in a colonial state, his imprint (and that of others like him), whether it is in the development of anthropology or research methodologies, can still be seen in state projects that seek to ‘know’ a people, such as the Gazettes put out regularly by the Indian state, censuses and even in projects such as the People of India series under the direction of KS Singh, ICS, which provide encyclopedic repositories of information about different societies in India.
Another important aspect of this book is the way it portrays the project of imperial rule from the perspective of those who ran the state. From Risley’s selection to the service, descriptions of ‘crammers’ where hopeful ICS candidates prepared for the recruitment tests (which resonate in contemporary India where many seeking to join the IAS enrol in coaching institutes), to his interactions with other officers, we get to learn about what the colonial state was like in practice. This is portrayed in chapters that focus on his time as a district officer in Chhotanagpur that cover the management of a land dispute involving Santhals, a dispute over the Ghatwali tenure system and the 1881 census. What is especially intriguing is how the resolution of disputes involved negotiations with different groups such as the Santhals and Bhumij and other ICS officers who often differed on courses of action. The exploration of the disputes also reveals the complex relationship between ICS officers and European-owned businesses, which were seen by the officers like Risley to cause problems and yet had to be supported in the interests of the empire. The settlement of disputes involved officers like Risley to engage in research and survey work, inspiring the anthropological imperative of needing to know and making sense of social relations, cultures and practices, even if the survey of the Ghatwal system had its critics among state officials. These sections of the book also show how research was shaped by European imaginations of Tribal and non-Tribal populations. Risley’s position is also complicated by his involvement in the first partition of Bengal in 1905. The section that discusses this depicts how the role of the anthropologist would have to give way to the imperialist, revealing the tension between scholarship and statecraft.
While the imperative of the colonial state was always in place, Fuller shows how Risley’s involvement in scholarship was significant in terms of engaging with scholars of his time and institutions such as the Royal Anthropological Institute to a far greater degree than many other ICS officers, who simply administered. While to know a territory and its inhabitants is a part of a colonial state, and for that matter even a post-colonial one, it is evident from the book that figures like Risley pushed that project much further, generating data and frameworks that enabled the work of prominent academics such as Weber and Bougle, apart from contributing to the foundation for data collection projects to this day.
In recent years, there has been a vital discussion on decolonizing anthropology. Yet, decolonizing debates since the 1950s and 1960s in India have been complex as decolonization also coincides with varying notions of nationalization (see Guha, 2022) and the persistence of frameworks of data collection from Risley’s time in contemporary research and policy. Hence, through Risley’s biography, it is possible to see anthropological knowledge genealogically, thereby giving a clearer understanding of what anthropology is for students in India. Finally, this book engages with caste. Apart from providing an intellectual history of caste in anthropology, sociology and South Asian studies, Risley’s location between state, politics, and intellectual debates may hold important lessons for contemporary scholars who find themselves and their research caught in similar tensions. On the whole, this book is a valuable contribution that simultaneously addresses the emergence of a critical and foundational category for the study of Indian society, the practices of the colonial state and of anthropology itself.
References
Guha, A. (2022). Nation Building in Indian Anthropology: Beyond the Colonial Encounter, Oxon & New York: Routledge.
Ludden, D. (1993). ‘Orientalist Empiricism and Transformations of Colonial Knowledge’. In C. A. Breckenridge, & P. Van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament (pp. 250-78). University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ankur Datta is a Sociologist at the South Asian University. He has conducted research in Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi and is interested in the themes of violence, dislocation, narrative and being. He is the author of On Uncertain Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir (OUP, 2017).