Eickstedt’s Classification of Indian People: Weddid, Melanid, Indid and Palaeo-Mongoloid Types

Long before DNA sequencing changed how anthropologists study human populations, researchers tried to map India’s population diversity through something far more visible: skin colour, hair texture, and head shape. One of the most detailed early attempts came from a German scholar, Egon von Eickstedt, who spent the late 1920s travelling across the subcontinent measuring people, photographing communities, and recording their customs. What emerged from that fieldwork in 1934 was a four-part racial scheme that grouped India’s population into Weddid, Melanid, Indid, and Palaeo-Mongoloid types. It’s a classification that says as much about the assumptions of 1930s anthropology as it does about India’s people, and it still shows up regularly in Indian anthropology courses because of how it shaped later, more systematic attempts at the same problem. Reading through it today says less about India’s actual population history and more about how an entire generation of scholars tried, and largely failed, to fit human diversity into tidy boxes.

Where Eickstedt’s classification fits among earlier racial theories 🔗

Eickstedt was not the first to attempt this kind of exercise. The British administrator-anthropologist Herbert Risley had already proposed a racial scheme for India in the early twentieth century, leaning heavily on the nasal index as his key marker. Risley’s classification faced sustained criticism, particularly over how it handled groups such as the Dravidians and various frontier populations, and Eickstedt’s fieldwork-heavy, culture-inclusive approach a couple of decades later was partly a response to those gaps.

Building the classification: fieldwork, colour, and culture 🔗

Eickstedt led the German Indian Anthropological Expedition through India between 1926 and 1929, recording physical measurements alongside cultural details such as kinship rules, subsistence methods, and religious beliefs. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who worked almost entirely from skull measurements collected in museums, Eickstedt combined physical characteristics with cultural material gathered directly in the field. His starting point was the variation in skin colour across the subcontinent, which he used as the primary marker for sorting populations into four broad layers, each named after a defining physical or geographic trait.

That combination of biology and culture was fairly progressive for its era, even though the underlying assumption, that physical traits map onto cultural behaviour in any consistent way, has long since been abandoned by mainstream anthropology.

Weddid or ancient Indians: the first layer 🔗

At the base of Eickstedt’s scheme sit the Weddid, or ancient Indians, described as the most primitive forest-dwelling populations of the subcontinent. He split this group into two sub-types, Gondid and Malid, based on complexion, hair type, and the degree of outside cultural contact.

Gondid: totemic communities with dark brown skin 🔗

The Gondid sub-type shows a dark brown complexion and curly hair. Eickstedt placed communities such as the Oraons, Gonds, Bhils, and Juangs of central India in this category, groups long associated with totemistic beliefs, where a plant, animal, or natural object is treated as a clan symbol and a marker of kinship, and with a visible degree of matriarchal influence in how descent and property were organised within the household. Eickstedt recorded these communities across a wide belt stretching from the Chhotanagpur plateau through central India, an area that later anthropological surveys would return to repeatedly. He also noted their traditional use of the mattock, a simple hand tool for tilling forest soil, as part of their subsistence agriculture, and treated this shared toolkit as evidence of a common cultural layer beneath their regional differences.

Malid: an ancient culture reshaped by outside contact 🔗

The second sub-type, Malid, also has curly hair and a black-brown skin tone, but Eickstedt considered its culture ancient yet altered through long contact with more dominant, outside cultures. He grouped communities such as the Kurumbas of South India and the Veddas of Sri Lanka under this label, pointing to social patterns that seemed to have absorbed elements of neighbouring traditions over generations, even while retaining a distinct core identity.

Melanid or black Indians: a racially mixed layer 🔗

Moving beyond the forest-dwelling Weddid, Eickstedt identified the Melanid, or black Indian, element as a racially mixed group rather than a single, uniform lineage. He divided this layer geographically into South Melanid and Kolid sub-types, distinguishing them mainly by region and by the degree of totemic belief he recorded in each.

South Melanid: matriarchal communities of the coastal plains 🔗

South Melanid populations, represented by the Yanadi community, were placed in the southernmost plains of India. Eickstedt described their complexion as black-brown and noted a pronounced matriarchal influence running through their social structure, particularly in questions of inheritance and household authority, a pattern he considered distinct from the patriarchal systems he documented further north.

Kolid: totemic tribes of the Deccan forests 🔗

The Kolid sub-type inhabited the forests of the North Deccan and included communities such as the Santals and Mundas. Much like the Gondid group, Kolid communities carried strong totemistic beliefs, and matriarchal influence again featured prominently in Eickstedt’s notes on how these communities organised family and property. He treated the Kolid group as culturally primitive in the same sense as the Weddid, even though he placed the two under separate racial headings.

Indid or new Indians: the racially advanced, open-country dwellers 🔗

In contrast to the forest-based Weddid and Melanid layers, the Indid, or new Indians, occupied the open plains of India and were considered by Eickstedt to be racially more advanced, a value-laden term typical of the period’s anthropology and one that modern scholarship treats with considerable caution. This layer, too, split into two sub-groups.

Gracile Indid: slender build, patriarchal descent 🔗

The Gracile Indid sub-type is described as having brown skin with a slender, or gracile, build, along with a strong patriarchal system of descent. Eickstedt used the Bengalis as his representative example of this sub-type, linking their settled, agrarian lifestyle in the open Gangetic plains to what he saw as a more developed social organisation.

North Indid: lighter skin, patriarchal social order 🔗

North Indid populations show a lighter brown skin tone but share the same patriarchal orientation as the Gracile Indid. The Rajputs and the Todas of the Nilgiri hills were cited as representative communities of this sub-type, an interesting pairing given how geographically and culturally distant these two groups actually are from each other, and a good example of how loosely some of Eickstedt’s categories were applied in practice.

Palaeo-Mongoloid: the northeastern edge of the map 🔗

The fourth and final layer, Palaeo-Mongoloid, was defined by what Eickstedt called incipient Mongoloid characters, physical traits suggestive of, but not fully matching, populations further east and northeast of the subcontinent, closer to the Tibeto-Burman-speaking communities of India’s northeastern hills. He used the Palayan community of Wynad, in present-day Kerala, as his example of this type, a choice that itself hints at how scattered and non-contiguous his four racial layers were when actually plotted on a map of India.

How solid was Eickstedt’s framework? 🔗

Eickstedt’s classification is widely regarded as a serious, pioneering attempt to organise India’s population into a coherent racial scheme, and it drew on considerably more direct fieldwork than many classifications that came before it. At the same time, it faced real criticism, both for assuming that physical traits could be neatly tied to cultural practices such as totemism or matriarchy, and for treating racial categories as more fixed and separable than centuries of migration and intermixing across the subcontinent would allow. Small sample sizes in remote regions, subjective assessments of skin colour in the field, and overlapping physical traits between neighbouring sub-types added to the doubts. Scholars have pointed out that the classification, while appreciable as a pioneering effort, is not entirely convincing once examined closely. Reviews of the broader development of typological classification in India have placed Eickstedt’s scheme in this wider pattern: each generation of anthropologists inherited the categories of the one before, tweaked the boundaries, and added new sub-types, without ever resolving the basic problem that racial categories drawn from a handful of physical measurements rarely stay stable once more communities are sampled.

Later researchers extended and revised the framework rather than discarding it outright. The Indian anthropologist B. S. Guha, who led the anthropometric surveys for the 1931 Census of India, went on to offer a more systematic classification based on detailed anthropometric surveys covering cephalic index, nasal index, and stature, arriving at six major racial strains rather than four. Guha’s categories, Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean, Western Brachycephal, and Nordic, built on the same underlying premise as Eickstedt’s work but applied a more standardised measurement protocol across a larger sample of communities, making his scheme the more widely cited of the two in later Indian anthropology.

Why frameworks like this no longer hold up scientifically 🔗

It’s worth pausing to ask why classifications such as Eickstedt’s or Guha’s are studied today mainly as history rather than active science. Population genetics has shown that human physical traits, including skin colour, vary gradually across geography rather than falling into a handful of discrete racial blocks. International panels of anthropologists and geneticists convened over the decades, including several under UNESCO, eventually concluded that rigid racial classifications cannot cleanly sort human populations into separate categories, since the traits used to build them overlap and blend continuously across regions instead of marking sharp boundaries. Contemporary population studies in India tend to describe ancestry in terms of gradients and mixture between broad ancestral components, rather than sorting communities into a fixed set of racial types the way Eickstedt or Guha did, which is one of the clearest signs of how far the field has moved since the 1930s.

That doesn’t make Eickstedt’s work irrelevant to anthropology students. As a historical document, it captures how colonial-era researchers tried to read India’s social diversity, its languages, kinship systems, and subsistence patterns, through the narrow lens of physical measurement. Studying the Weddid-Melanid-Indid-Palaeo-Mongoloid scheme today is less about treating it as settled science and more about understanding how the race concept shaped, and often distorted, early academic descriptions of Indian communities, several of which are still around today under very different social and economic circumstances.

What do you think? Could a classification built mainly on skin colour and hair texture ever capture the social and cultural complexity of a country as diverse as India? And how much space should classifications like Eickstedt’s still occupy in anthropology courses, given how thoroughly the race concept itself has been revised since the 1930s?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp08/chapter/classification-of-indian-population/
2. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/S000001AN/P001117/M013262/ET/14634617853et.pdf
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp01/chapter/classification-of-races/
4. https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/044/03/0064
5. https://anthroholic.com/b-s-guha
6. https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/race-and-prejudice