D N Majumdar: Colonial Ethnography and the Study of Tribal Transition in India

Colonial India produced a small set of anthropologists who did more than record tribal customs for the record. D N Majumdar was one of them. Trained in Calcutta and Cambridge, he spent over three decades studying how tribal communities responded to contact with the wider world, and he built institutions in Lucknow that still shape Indian anthropology today. His fieldwork among the Ho of Chotanagpur, and his later studies of the Khasa, Korwa, and Tharu communities of Uttar Pradesh, offer a window into how colonial-era ethnography gradually turned its attention from static description to the study of change itself.

From Calcutta to Cambridge: an academic journey 🔗

Dhirendra Nath Majumdar completed his master’s degree in anthropology from Calcutta University in 1924. He joined Lucknow University in 1928 as a lecturer, at a time when anthropology in India had barely emerged as a distinct academic discipline. Encouraged by senior scholars in the field, he later travelled to Cambridge University to pursue his Ph.D. under Professor T C Hodson, one of the leading British anthropologists working on South Asia. While in England, he also attended Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminar at the London School of Economics, an experience that left a lasting mark on his approach to fieldwork.

This mix of Indian training and British academic exposure was fairly unusual for the period. Most Indian scholars of the time either stayed within the colonial university system or trained abroad without returning to build institutions at home. Majumdar did both, and it shaped the rest of his career.

Fieldwork among the Ho tribe of Chotanagpur 🔗

For his doctoral research, Majumdar chose the Ho tribe of the Kolhan region in Chotanagpur, an area that today falls within Jharkhand. Rather than simply documenting Ho customs, he focused on how the community was responding to sustained contact with neighbouring Hindu populations and with the colonial administration. This was a departure from the salvage ethnography common at the time, which treated tribal cultures as vanishing relics to be recorded before they disappeared.

Majumdar’s functionalist training, shaped heavily by Malinowski, pushed him to look at Ho society as an interconnected system rather than a checklist of traits. He wanted to understand how external pressures, economic, religious, and administrative, were pulling that system apart or reshaping it.

A tribe in transition and the integrationist approach 🔗

Majumdar’s doctoral research was published in 1937 as A Tribe in Transition: A Study in Culture Pattern. A contemporary review in Nature noted that the book went beyond a straightforward account of the Ho, aiming instead to show how they had reacted and continued to react to contact with their Hindu neighbours, particularly in marriage practices and festivals. The same review observed that Majumdar tried to combine Malinowski’s fieldwork method with Ruth Benedict’s idea of cultural patterns, without leaning too heavily on either.

The book is widely regarded as the first scientific study of the impact of modern civilisation on Indian tribal communities. It also set out Majumdar’s position in a debate that would shape Indian tribal policy for decades.

Rejecting isolation and assimilation 🔗

Two competing views dominated colonial-era thinking on tribal welfare. Verrier Elwin argued for an isolationist approach, favouring protected areas where tribal communities could develop away from outside interference. G S Ghurye took the opposite position, arguing that tribes were essentially backward Hindus who should be fully assimilated into mainstream society. Majumdar rejected both extremes. He believed tribal communities were already declining under the weight of external pressure, but that the answer was not isolation or forced assimilation. Instead, he argued for integrating tribes into Indian society while respecting their existing cultural patterns, a position he described as a form of creative adaptation rather than disruptive change.

This middle path anticipated the direction independent India would eventually take. Jawaharlal Nehru’s own tribal policy, laid out in what came to be known as the Tribal Panchsheel, called for tribal development that avoided the imposition of alien values while still respecting tribal rights over land and building tribal capacity for self-administration. Majumdar’s integrationist stance, worked out through fieldwork nearly two decades earlier, sits comfortably alongside this later state policy.

Contributions to census operations and regional studies 🔗

Majumdar’s interests did not stay confined to tribal Chotanagpur. He was closely involved in the 1941 decennial census, where he carried out anthropological and serological surveys in the United Provinces, working alongside the statistician P C Mahalanobis. This was one of the earliest large-scale efforts in India to combine physical anthropology with census data, using blood group and anthropometric surveys to study population patterns rather than relying only on descriptive ethnography.

His research base kept expanding through the 1940s and 1950s. He studied the Khasa of Jaunsar-Bawar in the Himalayan foothills, along with the Korwas and Tharus of what is now Uttar Pradesh. This work extended Indian ethnography well beyond its early focus on remote tribal groups, bringing caste communities and eventually urban populations, including a 1954 study of the industrial city of Kanpur, into the same analytical frame. It reflected Majumdar’s broader conviction that anthropology should study Indian society as a whole, not just its tribal margins.

Building institutions in Lucknow 🔗

Alongside his fieldwork, Majumdar spent his career building an academic home for anthropology in India. He helped establish a separate Department of Anthropology at Lucknow University in 1951 and headed it until his death in 1960. In the mid-1940s, he founded the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, which went on to launch The Eastern Anthropologist, a journal that remains an important publication in the field. Through these institutions, he trained a generation of Indian anthropologists and helped move the discipline from a colonial administrative tool into an independent academic field with its own research agenda.

Later works: races, culture, and Himalayan polyandry 🔗

Majumdar remained prolific through the later decades of his career. His book Races and Cultures of India (1944) brought together his physical anthropology research with his cultural fieldwork. In Caste and Communication in an Indian Village (1958), he turned to village studies, a field he had helped establish in India through a collaborative project with Cornell University. His final major work, Himalayan Polyandry, based on decades of fieldwork among the Khasa of Jaunsar-Bawar, was published in 1962, two years after his death, and remains a key reference on polyandrous kinship systems in the Himalayan region.

Why Majumdar still matters 🔗

Majumdar’s career bridges two very different periods of Indian anthropology. He trained and began fieldwork under colonial rule, using methods and mentors shaped by British academic anthropology. Yet his central argument, that tribal communities needed integration rather than isolation or forced assimilation, fed directly into independent India’s approach to tribal welfare. His insistence on combining physical anthropology, ethnography, and applied research also pushed the discipline toward practical relevance, an orientation that Indian anthropology departments still carry forward.

What do you think? Does Majumdar’s integrationist model still hold up against the isolationist and assimilationist positions he argued against, or has independent India’s tribal policy moved closer to one of the extremes he rejected? And how much did his exposure to both Indian and British academic traditions shape the kind of anthropologist he became?

References

1. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/majumdar-d-n
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/141450a0
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp10/chapter/d-n-majumder-v-elwin-g-s-ghurye-irawati-karve/
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp04/chapter/tribal-absorption-assimilation-integration/
5. https://www.mcrhrdi.gov.in/87fc/policies/NATIONAL%20POLICY%20ON%20TRIBALS.pdf
6. https://serialsjournals.com/abstract/23214_1.pdf