THE PEOPLE OF INDIA

The People of India is a title that has been used for at least three books, all of which focussed primarily on ethnography. 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. 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 the author, the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society. He 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. An indispensable volume written by the director of Ethnology in India. The book has 35 illustrations and an ethnological map of India. This book is a reprint of the 1915 edition.