"When he [Sir Herbert Risley] became Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, he was determined to carry out within its framework a grand experiment in classifying and ranking castes in the sub-continent as a whole. … Census-taking had often suffered … from the difficulty even of identifying discrete castes and foundered in some census regions over the impossibility of finding any meaningful way of classifying them that did not release a hornets’ nest of contention, as the Commissioner for the 1871 Madras Census put it. Commissioners in their reports often retreated from any greater ambition than providing a list of castes in English alphabetical order. It was clear … uniformity of classification across the country could not be hoped for. Risley’s scheme, therefore, was to send to every Census Commissioner, in each province, presidency, princely state, … a standard scheme, inviting them to set up committees of ‘native gentlemen’ to consider its local applicability and to propose modifications as required."
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Civil servantsNon-fiction authors from EnglandUniversity of Oxford alumniAnthropologists from England
Original Language: English
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Charsley, Simon. 1996. “‘Untouchable’: What is in a Name?” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) 2 (1): 1-23. quoted from Malhotra, R. & Viswanathan V. (2022). Snakes in the Ganga : Breaking India 2.0.
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Herbert Hope Risley
Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI FRAI (4 January 1851 – 30 September 1911) was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used the ratio of the width of a nose to its height to
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