Herbert Hope Risley - India: Later Years

India: Later Years

In 1901 Risley was appointed Director of Ethnography. There had been proposals for a wide-ranging survey of the subject — and Risley had himself discussed this in his article, The Study of Ethnology in India — but the implementation of the project had been hampered by economic circumstances, related principally to a series of famines. including that of 1899–1900.

In the following year he became Home Secretary in India in the administration of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, and in 1909 was temporarily a member of the governing council. His experience of administrative matters, including with regard to policing, proved to be useful to Curzon during the government's 1905 partition of Bengal along communal lines. So useful was his knowledge and ability that his term in India was extended for two years beyond the usual retirement age, in order that he could provide the summarisation, negotiation and drafting skills that proved to be necessary in order to see through proposals for administrative reform of the Provincial Councils for Curzon's successor as Viceroy, Lord Minto.

Already recognised by the Académie Française and by the award of CIE, Risley was made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India on 24 June 1904 and a Knight of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1907.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that during his time in India Risley's work legitimised an inquisitive methodology which had previously been resented by the colonial subjects and that

... cultivated an intimate knowledge of the peoples of India. In 1910 he asserted that a knowledge of facts concerning the religions and habits of the peoples of India equipped a civil servant with a passport to popular regard. ... On the processes by which non-Aryan tribes are admitted into Hinduism he was recognized to be the greatest living authority. ... His work completely revolutionized the native Indian view of ethnological inquiry.