Tribal Monographs in the Formative Phase: Early Colonial-Era Ethnography in India

Long before Indian scholars began studying their own society, tribal life across the subcontinent was being written down by outsiders. Colonial officers touring remote districts, foreign anthropologists on research grants, and a handful of local lawyers-turned-ethnographers together produced the first serious body of tribal documentation in India. This early period is what anthropologists call the formative phase, and it laid the groundwork, methods, and even the biases that later Indian anthropology would spend decades responding to.

How anthropologists mapped their own discipline’s history 🔗

Anthropology in India eventually became reflective enough to study its own past. S.C. Dube pointed out weaknesses in Indian research methods in 1962, and N.K. Bose surveyed the discipline’s growth the following year in a booklet on fifty years of science in India. Building on this kind of stock-taking, scholars including D.N. Majumdar, L.P. Vidyarthi, and later Basu Roy proposed a periodisation that is still taught today: a formative phase, followed by a constructive phase, an analytical phase, and finally an evaluative phase.

The exact boundaries shift slightly depending on who you read. Majumdar placed the end of the formative phase at 1911, while Vidyarthi extended it to 1920, arguing that the period was defined less by a fixed date than by a shared style of work: tribe-by-tribe description, a natural-history approach to culture, and an interest in tracing customs back to earlier, “primitive” stages of human development, as detailed in a history of anthropology in India compiled for university students. Basu Roy’s later revision kept this basic structure but added the evaluative phase to account for the discipline’s more self-critical, globalised turn after 1990. The constructive phase would bring university departments; the analytical phase would bring village studies after independence. But the formative phase came first, and it is where tribal monographs as a genre begin.

The Asiatic Society and the colonial ethnographers 🔗

The conventional starting point for this story is 1784, when the philologist Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta to encourage systematic Oriental studies. The Society was not set up to study tribes specifically, but it created an institutional home for the kind of organised inquiry into Indian society, language, and custom that tribal ethnography would later grow out of.

Over the following century, a set of British scholar-administrators turned this impulse toward the tribal and caste populations they governed. Herbert Risley, working first in Chota Nagpur, compiled the four-volume Tribes and Castes of Bengal in the early 1890s, combining an ethnographic glossary with anthropometric measurements he believed could rank groups by caste and race, a project later assessed in detail by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Edward Tuite Dalton, commissioner of the Chota Nagpur Division, produced the Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal in 1872. Elsewhere, William Crooke documented the tribes and castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, R.V. Russell covered the Central Provinces, L.S.S. O’Malley wrote up Bengal’s district gazetteers, and Edgar Thurston surveyed the Madras Presidency. Their motives were rarely disinterested: census operations and land administration needed neat categories, and these monographs supplied them, even as they left behind a genuinely useful record of customs, kinship, and material culture.

Foreign anthropologists and their early fieldwork 🔗

W.H.R. Rivers among the Todas 🔗

Not every early ethnographer was a colonial official. W.H.R. Rivers, a Cambridge physician turned anthropologist, spent several months in 1901 and 1902 living among the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, a small pastoral community centred on elaborate buffalo-dairy rituals. His resulting book, published as The Todas in 1906, is remembered for its genealogical method: rather than relying on secondhand accounts, Rivers reconstructed kinship and marriage patterns by mapping entire family trees, a technique that shaped fieldwork practice for decades afterward.

Radcliffe-Brown among the Andaman Islanders 🔗

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown carried out fieldwork among the indigenous communities of the Andaman Islands, including the Onge, between 1906 and 1908. His study, published in 1922 as The Andaman Islanders, moved away from speculating about a culture’s history and instead asked how customs, rituals, and kinship rules functioned together to hold a society in balance. This shift, later formalised as structural-functionalism, would go on to influence how anthropologists everywhere, not only in India, approached small-scale societies.

The Seligmans among the Veddas of Sri Lanka 🔗

Just across the water, Charles and Brenda Seligman spent 1907 and 1908 studying the Veddas, a forest-dwelling community in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. Their joint publication, The Veddas, appeared in 1911 and became the standard reference on Vedda social organisation, religion, and material life, valuable partly because the community’s traditional way of life had already begun disappearing even as they documented it. Though outside India’s borders, this study belonged to the same wave of Cambridge-trained fieldwork that shaped Rivers’ and Radcliffe-Brown’s Indian research.

S.C. Roy: the father of Indian ethnology 🔗

Sarat Chandra Roy is usually credited as the first Indian to write exhaustive tribal monographs, and he arrived at anthropology from an unlikely direction. Trained as a lawyer, Roy moved to Ranchi to practise in the courts of Chota Nagpur, where his work brought him into daily contact with Munda, Oraon, and other tribal litigants. What began as professional familiarity turned into a lifelong research project, carried out largely without formal training in anthropology, as recounted in a profile of his life and scholarship.

His breakthrough work, The Mundas and their Country (1912), traced Munda history and social organisation using folklore, language, and historical evidence together, a genuinely original synthesis for its time. He followed this with Oraon Religion and Customs (1928), which documented Oraon belief systems in depth, including the Bhagat movement, a set of religious reform currents among Chota Nagpur’s tribes. One offshoot of this, the Tana Bhagat movement, began in 1914 when a young Oraon named Jatra Bhagat announced he had received instructions to purge Oraon religion of practices such as animal sacrifice and spirit worship; the movement later absorbed Gandhian ideas of non-violent resistance against zamindars and colonial taxation, a trajectory traced in accounts of the Tana Bhagat revival. Roy went on to write further monographs, including studies of the Birhors, the Hill Bhuiyas of Orissa, and the Kharia, building a body of tribal documentation from Chota Nagpur that no single foreign scholar could match in depth or duration.

Other formative-phase ethnographies 🔗

Alongside Roy’s work, a series of government-commissioned monographs mapped tribal communities in the northeast. P.R.T. Gurdon, Superintendent of Ethnography in Assam, wrote The Khasis in 1907 as the first volume in an official series on the province’s tribes and castes. J.P. Mills contributed The Lhota Naga, covering one of the Naga groups of Assam’s hill districts, while J. Shakespear documented the Lushei Kuki Clans of the Lushai Hills in 1912, a study still cited in later Naga ethnography. G.W. Briggs, working further west, produced The Chamars, an account of a major scheduled caste community in North India. None of these scholars aimed to build theory; their brief was closer to a detailed census, but the resulting descriptions of ritual, kinship, and custom remain some of the fullest available for these communities from this period.

Mapping South India’s tribal diversity 🔗

South India received its own extensive survey through Edgar Thurston’s seven-volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India, published in 1909 with K. Rangachari. Thurston had begun his fieldwork in the Nilgiri Hills in 1894, studying the Todas, Kotas, and Badagas before broadening his survey across the Madras Presidency to cover the Kurumba, Paniyan, Kadar, Irula, and Muthuvan communities, among many others, using anthropometric instruments borrowed from the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

In the princely states, L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer carried out a parallel project. Commissioned by the Cochin government, he produced Cochin Tribes and Castes in two volumes, covering both tribal and caste communities of the region, an effort described in detail by Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which holds many of his original photographs. He later led a similar survey for the Mysore state, published as the multi-volume Mysore Tribes and Castes, cementing his place alongside Thurston as one of the two most systematic ethnographers of South Indian communities during this period.

What do you think? Most of the monographs from this formative phase were written either by colonial administrators who needed tribes classified for governance, or by foreign scholars visiting for a few months at a time. Does S.C. Roy’s position as a lawyer embedded in Chota Nagpur’s courts seem likely to have given him a genuinely different vantage point on the communities he studied? And how much should the administrative motives behind Risley’s or Thurston’s surveys change how we read the ethnographic detail they left behind?

References

1. https://nsdl.niscpr.res.in/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/519/PDF%204.11HISTORY_OF_ANTHROPOLOGY_IN_INDIA01.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asiatic-Society-of-Bengal
3. https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/herbert-risley/
4. https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_299776
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-R-Radcliffe-Brown
6. https://anthroholic.com/s-c-roy
7. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Oraon_Tana_Vagat_Movement
8. https://museums.cam.ac.uk/story/namboothiris-and-nairs-kerala/