TRIBAL STUDIES AND BEYOND: Contributions of D.N. Majumdar to Indian Anthropology

Dhirendra Nath Majumdar was one of the pioneers of anthropological research in India. He joined the Department of Economics & Sociology, University of Lucknow in 1928. In the course of his 32 years of academic work he created in Lucknow an exceptional centre for anthropological studies through the institutions and journals he founded. Trying to relate the basic concepts of anthropology to the general public, he popularized the concept of ‘public anthropology’ and was also instrumental in promoting anthropology in Hindi. H.S. Saksena, one of his prominent students, has in this ‘expositional’ book on Majumdar’s life and works explicated his contributions to tribal ethnography, covering communities from a wide range of habitat, cultural and economic life, and social organization. The book also considers Majumdar’s post-1947 studies of changing caste structure and dynamics seen in the Indian villages, rural development programmes and problems, urban settlements, composition of the working class, and emerging problems such as unemployment among the educated. In his earlier works on tribal communities, Majumdar had improved upon available methods of ethnographic study and analysis. Majumdar’s anthropometric and serological surveys of select communities and groups in Bengal, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh as well as his contributions to other fields of anthropology have also been discussed. Professor T.N. Madan in his foreword describes this study, ‘as first full length study of the work on an Indian anthropologist’. He adds that ‘to write about a “general” anthropologist such as D.N. Majumdar, in our times of specialization is, needless to emphasize, a daunting task.’