Herbert Hope Risley - India: The 1901 Census

India: The 1901 Census

After completing the Bengal survey, Risley's work consisted of heading an enquiry into policing, and following that more usual administrative tasks for both the Bengal and Imperial governments. In 1899 he was appointed Census Commissioner, tasked with preparing and reporting on the forthcoming decennial census of 1901. The detailed regulations that he formulated for that exercise were also used for the 1911 census, and the work involved in co-ordinating the various Provincial administrations was considerable and detailed. He succeeded Jervoise Athelstane Baines, who held the office for the 1891 census, had himself adjusted the classification system and was an influence on Risley.

The outcome of the census is described by Crooke as "an exceptionally interesting report", produced in association with a colleague, Edward Albert Gait. Crooke notes that in the report "he developed his views on the origin and classification of the Indian races largely on the basis of anthropometry." By now, Risley believed anthropometric measurement enabled the Indian castes to be described as belonging to one of seven racial types, although he accepted that his own work indicated only three such types: the Aryan, Dravidian and Mongoloid. The seven that he believed to be capable of classification were the Aryo-Dravidian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid, Scytho-Dravidian and the Turko-Iranian. He went further still by holding that there was support for the racial theory in the various linguistic differences between Indian communities, an opinion that frustrated Müller but which was supported by the publication of the Linguistic Survey of India by another officer of ICS, George Abraham Grierson. Bates notes that the correlation in the theories of Risley and Grierson is not surprising because Grierson was

armed with the much earlier but as yet unproven hypotheses of Sir William Jones concerning matters of language and race, and was intimately acquainted with Risley's theories of racial origins. Grierson also followed a similar ex ante deductive methodology in his research.

Another event that occurred in 1901 and which related to Risley was the official approval of an India-wide ethnographic survey, intended to be conducted over a period of eight years and using in part the anthropometrical methodology established for Risley's survey of Bengal. Superintendents were appointed to each Province and Presidency and grants of £5000 per annum were given for the eight-year period. Bates considers that the results of this effort, which included works by Edgar Thurston and Robert Vane Russell, were rarely "quite so thorough, even by Risley's standards."

Some of the material from the 1901 census was later republished, in amended form, in Risley's 1908 work, The People of India, which sociologist D. F. Pocock describes as "... almost the last production of that great tradition of administrator scholars who had long and extensive experience in the Indian Civil Service and had not found their arduous activity incompatible with scholarship." Trautmann considers the census report and subsequent book to represent "Risley's grand syntheses of India ethnology", while the paper of 1891 had given "an exceptionally clear view of his project at the state of what we might call its early maturity."

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states:

From the date of his report a new chapter was opened in Indian official literature, and the census volumes, until then regarded as dull, were at once read and reviewed in every country. His categorization of Indian castes and occupations had an enduring social and political effect.

According to Susan Bayly, who studies historical anthropology:

Those like Hunter, as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley (1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke (1848–1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt.