Indian Ethnography: The Emergence and Growth of Modern Anthropology of India

Walk into any Indian university’s sociology or anthropology department today, and you will find courses on caste dynamics, urban migration, religious pluralism and gender alongside classic tribal ethnography. That range did not appear overnight. It grew out of a long, layered history that begins in colonial India, runs through the freedom struggle, and matures into an independent academic discipline after 1947. Understanding how modern anthropology of India took shape tells us a lot about how the country itself came to understand its own diversity.

Three forces that shaped a new discipline 🔗

The idea of a modern, secular India and the discipline of anthropology grew up together, with roots stretching back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Three overlapping forces pushed this process along over roughly a hundred years.

The first was colonial data-gathering. The British administration wanted to govern a vast and unfamiliar population, so it invested heavily in collecting historical and ethnographic knowledge. The decennial census became a key instrument for this, and in 1901 the government also set up a dedicated ethnographic survey under H.H. Risley, tasked with producing detailed handbooks on the tribes and castes of British India. The second force was institution-building: learned societies, ethnographic journals and museums sprang up to house and circulate this growing body of knowledge, giving the study of Indian society a formal, academic home for the first time. The third, and arguably the most transformative, was the nationalist movement. As Indian intellectuals engaged more deeply with the freedom struggle, many began questioning the assumptions built into colonial knowledge systems, and used their scholarship to challenge how India was being defined both at home and abroad, as research on Indian anthropologists and the birth of the nation shows. Together, these three currents set the stage for anthropology to become a distinctly Indian discipline rather than a purely colonial import.

Pre-independence anthropology: descriptive and encyclopaedic 🔗

For much of the colonial period, anthropological work in India followed a fairly narrow template. It was largely descriptive and encyclopaedic, cataloguing customs, physical traits and social practices in painstaking detail. The goal, more often than not, was to present India as an exotic culture waiting to be catalogued and understood by outsiders. Risley’s ethnographic survey is a good example: it produced province-by-province handbooks on tribes and castes, treating communities almost like specimens to be classified rather than societies to be understood on their own terms. This administrative style of anthropology served a clear governance function, helping colonial officials make sense of, and ultimately manage, a population they saw as bewilderingly diverse.

Breaking away from administrative control 🔗

Change began in the 1920s and 1930s. University departments started training a new generation of scholars who were not colonial administrators first and anthropologists second. This generation began looking at Indian society from angles the earlier surveys had ignored, moving away from pure classification toward more analytical, theory-driven questions. This shift did not happen in isolation. The rising tide of nationalist politics made many scholars newly conscious of the biases embedded in colonial knowledge, and pushed them to imagine what an anthropology built on Indian priorities, rather than administrative convenience, might look like, a transition captured well in research tracing the discipline’s academic development between 1900 and 1970.

Post-1947: anthropology grows into an independent discipline 🔗

Independence marked a genuine turning point. Anthropology in India stopped being primarily a tool of colonial administration and became an independent academic and research discipline in its own right. The Anthropological Survey of India, established in Varanasi in the final years of British rule and later shifted to the Indian Museum in Calcutta, is a useful marker of this transition: it began under colonial patronage but was reoriented after independence toward nation-building priorities, under the direction of B.S. Guha, with Verrier Elwin as deputy director.

Beyond tribal areas: villages, cities and the wider social system 🔗

The discipline’s decolonisation picked up real pace through the 1960s, when research projects took on a more national scope. Teams were sent to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the North-East Frontier Agency, Nagaland, the Central Himalayas and Kerala, and the range of subjects studied widened considerably to include culture areas, religious centres, nomadic groups, fisherfolk, slum dwellers and minorities, alongside the tribal communities that had long dominated the field. Anthropologists were no longer confined to remote tribal belts; they moved into other states and union territories, and started examining urban life, religion, economic structures and political systems as legitimate objects of anthropological study. This expansion produced a wave of detailed, location-specific ethnographies. A textbook like the modern anthropology of India, organised state by state, reflects just how regionally rich this post-1947 body of work became, with each state developing its own distinctive themes and research traditions.

Global debates and Indian concepts reshape the field 🔗

Post-independence Indian anthropology did not develop in a vacuum. It was shaped by wider international conversations on social and symbolic value systems, on resistance to domination, and on the broader intellectual project of post-colonialism, which asked scholars everywhere to examine the assumptions embedded in earlier, colonial-era research. At the same time, Indian anthropology was working out its own homegrown concepts. Ideas about caste, untouchability and nationalism evolved considerably in this period, moving away from static colonial categories toward more dynamic, context-sensitive understandings.

Fieldwork over top-down theory 🔗

This tension between imported frameworks and Indian realities played out clearly in debates over how tribal and caste communities should be studied. Sociologist M.N. Srinivas, for instance, pushed back against contemporaries who favoured top-down solutions, such as folding tribal groups into mainstream Hindu society through assimilation. He instead traced how local processes, like the historical ties between tribal chiefs and Rajput kings, allowed communities to negotiate status and power on their own terms. This grounded, fieldwork-based approach also drew on the discipline’s older roots in Indology, archaeology and history, disciplines that had long studied Indian civilisation through texts, material remains and chronology. Anthropology after independence increasingly wove these historical and textual sources together with direct fieldwork, rather than relying on either approach alone.

Shifting focus: from tribal studies to caste and religion 🔗

Before independence, tribal societies were the discipline’s central preoccupation, largely because colonial administrators were most interested in understanding and controlling India’s frontier and forest regions. After 1947, the centre of gravity moved decisively toward caste and religion as the primary lenses for understanding Indian society. Srinivas’s concept of Sanskritization, describing how lower-caste groups adopted the customs and rituals of higher castes to claim upward social mobility, became one of the most influential ideas to emerge from this shift. It was later extended to tribal contexts too, feeding into broader debates about the tribe-caste-class continuum and complicating any neat separation between tribal and caste societies.

What counted as a worthy subject for anthropological study also kept evolving decade by decade. Village studies dominated the 1950s and 1960s, offering a manageable lens onto caste, kinship, religion and the agrarian economy all at once. Later decades broadened this further, bringing urban life, religious movements and political mobilisation more firmly into the discipline’s field of view. This evolving discourse, tracked closely in scholarship on the period, shows anthropology in India continually renegotiating its own boundaries, always in step with the country’s changing social and political concerns.

What do you think? Do you think Indian anthropology has fully shed the descriptive, cataloguing instincts of its colonial origins, or do traces of that approach still show up in how communities get studied today? And as India’s cities, digital spaces and diaspora communities keep growing, what do you think the next big shift in the discipline’s focus might look like?

References

1. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/84172/1/Fuller_Ethnographic%20inquiry_2017.pdf
2. https://hca.ed.ac.uk/research/about/research-projects/other-from-within-indian-anthropologists
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropological_Survey_of_India
4. https://www.india-seminar.com/2000/495/495%20k.%20suresh%20singh.htm
5. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780203523223/modern-anthropology-india-peter-berger-frank-heidemann
6. https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/mn-srinivas-gave-india-a-new-way-to-see-caste-his-feet-were-firmly-on-the-ground/2380070/
7. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1047276/full