26 | Race and Caste in the early 20th century censuses (1901 and 1911): H.H. Risley's Anthropometric Theory of Caste and Its Afterlives

By Gaurav Kalyani, Nishitha Mandava and Shivakumar Jolad

Published on: 28 July 2026

Introduction

Despite Charles Darwin’s insistence that there existed no fixed divisions such as races, the notion that races were ancient and biologically immutable loomed large in evolutionary thought especially since the late 1800s (Jackson and Weidman, 2005). This shift was shaped by a lineage of intellectuals who extended evolutionary ideas in ways that emphasised racial hierarchy. 

Among the most prominent were Herbert Spencer, who put forth a theory of social evolution steeped in racial interpretations, and William Z. Ripley, whose influential racial classifications presented Europe as divided into distinct biological races with enduring physical and psychological characteristics. 

By the turn of the twentieth century, one influential strand of evolutionary thought had coalesced into an ideology that historians have termed scientific racism (Jackson and Weidman, 2005). New theories of heredity began to displace older explanations which held environmental factors accountable for human variation. This change reinforced the belief that racial features remained stable across generations. Physical traits such as cranial form, facial angle, skin colour, and anthropometric measurements came to be perceived as objective indicators of innate racial difference. Both scientific inquiry and the Empire were intertwined in this inquiry. 

Colonial India emerged as one of the early sites in which these theories were developed and tested. The colony had become a "laboratory of scientific racism" (Weaver, 2022). The endogamous structure of caste offered an ideal setting for studying inherited characteristics. 

Within this intellectual milieu, Herbert Hope Risley (1851–1911) occupies a distinctive place. As an officer of the Indian Civil Service he rose to become Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India and later headed the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He became drawn to the discipline of ethnology while surveying for land tenures in rural areas and the writing of gazetteers (Trautmann, 1997).

Risley spent much of his career bringing together the spheres of imperial governance and the science of physical anthropology. His central project was to link the Indian institution of caste to the biological category of race through anthropometry, a systematic measurement of the human body. 

This essay examines Risley's racial theory of caste and its impact on colonial censuses, arguing that the 1901 census marked a crucial moment in the incorporation of scientific racism into the machinery of colonial governance and 1911 census carried on its lasting impact. Although his theories were later discredited, the racialisation of caste they institutionalised continued to shape colonial knowledge and contemporary understandings of social identity in India. 

Anthropometry and Racialising Caste

Anthropometry, as the historian of science Claude Blanckaert defines it, was less a simple system of bodily measurement than “a style of normative analysis associated with the rise of physical anthropology.”  It was born out of a desire to classify people according to unequal, hierarchical principles. Its method was formalised after 1860 by Paul Broca, founder of the Société d'anthropologie de Paris, who sought to draw physiological conclusions about the relative aptitude of races for civilisation from measured human variability. 

The two indices on which the science principally relied were the Cephalic Index (the ratio of the skull's maximum breadth to its maximum length) and the Nasal Index (the ratio of the nose's breadth to its height). Anders Retzius had devised the basic measure for cranial classification in 1842, distinguishing dolichocephalic (long-headed) from brachycephalic (short-headed) skulls; Broca refined the system in 1861 and coined the term ‘cephalic index’.

Risley was not a trained anthropologist. As John Henry Hutton, who compiled the 1931 Census Report, later recalled, Risley, lacking formal background in the subject, sought guidance from William Henry Flower of the British Museum, who recommended the works of the French anthropologist Paul Topinard. It is from Topinard’s scholarship that he would borrow the concept of ‘nasal index.’ Topinard developed an elaborate system of racial classification based on measurements of the human nose. 

Topinard’s Scheme for Types of Noses

But for now Risley tested the method experimentally in the district of Rangpur, sending his results to Topinard and Flower for approval before applying it more widely. This process is very much reflective of the circulation of colonial knowledge wherein the metropole and the colony interacted rather than through a one-way diffusion of ideas. 

Risley for his 1890 paper, “The Study of Ethnology in India,” would measure eighty-nine tribes and castes across Bengal, United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), and Punjab, using instruments approved by Flower and Topinard. The findings were structured into a threefold classification: Aryan, Dravidian, and Mongoloid types, classificatory schemes that had already become familiar across Britain, France and Germany. Risley’s work became authoritative not so much from whether it was objectively true but on their endorsement by recognised European authorities such as Topinard and Flower. 

Along with drawing on Topinard’s scholarship, Risley would justify his focus on the nasal index using the Vedas. He suggested that Vedic accounts of the Aryan advance frequently mention the noses of the peoples whom the Aryans encountered, even describing them as “the noseless ones.” Risley’s claim that the Vedas repeatedly emphasised the noses of indigenous peoples rested largely on a single passage (Trautmann, 1997). The significance of the nose in the Vedic evidence was therefore greatly exaggerated in order to place the modern science of anthropometry in a much longer historical genealogy.

Risley would later defend this approach by arguing that Dravidian South Indians had much smaller and flatter noses as opposed to the Aryan North Indians who often displayed longer and narrower noses. Groups whose measurements fell between these extremes were interpreted as the products of racial intermixture. 

His famous claim that “the social position of a caste varies inversely as its nasal index” suggested that the narrower the nose, the higher the caste’s social position, while broader noses were associated with lower castes and tribal populations. The caste hierarchy could thus be interpreted as a scale of racial descent. Thomas Trautmann (1997) argues that Risley’s measurements did not independently discover the racial foundations of caste. Instead, they were interpreted through an already racialised account of Indian history. 

Risley's career exemplifies what the historian Clive Dewey has called the “scientific administrator,” a type of colonial civil servant who combined bureaucratic duties with scholarly ambition. His ethnographic interests developed through contact with the tribes of the Midnapur district (now part of West Bengal), and in 1885 the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal commissioned him to survey the castes and tribes of the province (Fuller, 2024). 

The resulting four-volume work, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891–1892), divided into an ethnographic glossary and a set of anthropometric data tables, marked the formal beginning of large-scale anthropometric inquiry in British India. Risley rose through the ranks, becoming the President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1898 and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London in 1910. In 1899, he was appointed Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census, the office from which he completed and publicised his theory of caste and race. He would become the first to attempt to classify castes of British India into racial groups through anthropometry (Fuller, 2024). 

“Infrastructure” and “Superstructure”

The substantive content of Risley's theory, sketched out in his Caste chapter in the 1901 Census Report and developed further in The People of India (1908), held that caste in India was fundamentally a racial phenomenon, even if it found expression through religious and social institutions. Risley articulated this through a distinction between an “infrastructure of facts” and a “superstructure of fictions.” 

In his account, whenever one people conquered or gradually displaced another, the conquerors took women of the subject population as wives or concubines while giving their own daughters in marriage only within their own circle. Where the two peoples were of similar race or colour, this hypergamy was quickly succeeded by full amalgamation. But where marked differences of race and colour intervened, a class of mixed descent formed, marrying only among itself and thereby constituting, in his words, “a caste” in the literal, physiological sense. 

The specifically Indian “superstructure” consisted of the religious beliefs and social rules that legitimised these distinctions once they had emerged from racial mixture, while the “infrastructure” was the supposedly universal biological process of racial differentiation through restricted marriage.

He argued that the strict prohibition on exogamous marriage had arrested racial fusion at an early stage, preserving in the physical characteristics of existing caste groups a record of the original cross-breeding that produced them. On this basis he proposed a sevenfold racial classification of the subcontinent's population, which is summarised in the table below:

Table: Risley's Sevenfold Racial Classification (1901)

Source: Risley and Gait, 1903

Within this framework, the cephalic index, the nasal index, and a third measure Risley termed the ‘Orbito-Nasal Index’ (designed to capture facial flatness relative to eye sockets) were treated as objective proxies for racial descent. Risley assembled caste groups from Bengal, Bihar, and the United Provinces and arranged them by average nasal index. He claimed that the resulting order “substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence.” This correlation was presented as empirical proof that caste hierarchy is racial in origin.

He summarised this in an often-quoted formulation: that social status varied in inverse proportion to the mean relative breadth of the nose, at least where there was an appreciable strain of Dravidian blood. This correlation, presented as a near-natural law, supplied what Risley considered scientific confirmation of a social ranking that colonial administrators in any case already relied upon for governance.

Thomas Trautmann (1997) rightly suggests that Risley’s approach of separating different Indian castes into racial groups is reflective of the larger narrative of “the opposition of the dark-skinned savage and the fair-skinned civilized European.”

Anthropometry in the 1901 Census

Risley's theory did not remain confined to scholarly publication; it shaped the decennial Census of India from 1901 onwards. The censuses of 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, and 1941 form a connected sequence, with Risley's anthropometric ethnography setting the terms within which his successive Census Commissioners worked, modified, contested, or eventually abandoned his approach.

Risley’s approach was largely maintained in 1911 by Gait, who continued to endorse the correlation between race and caste while documenting the intellectual debate between Risley and Nesfield. By 1921, under J.T. Marten, caste enumeration remained a central feature of the report, even as it began to face increasing controversy regarding its political effects.

The subsequent decades witnessed a significant retreat from these methods, leading to their eventual abandonment. In 1931, Commissioner J.H. Hutton critically reviewed the work of his predecessors, especially Risley and his selection criteria for physical measurements. This shift culminated in the 1941 census led by W.W.M. Yeatts, which represented an explicit break from the past; the final report contained no mention of anthropometry, race, or ethnology.

Conducting Anthropometric Measurements 

The 1901 anthropometric survey drew in a wide network of subordinate officers across British India, working under Risley's supervision according to “Anthropometric Instructions” he published in 1893. It detailed how subjects were to be selected and seated. Indian subordinate staff, such as Kumud Behari Samanta and Balkrishna Atmaram Gupte, carried out much of the physical measurement, while European officers such as Edgar Thurston in Madras and Laurence Austine Waddell in Assam extended its geographic reach and contributed their own publications.

Risley justified the utility of this exercise in explicitly administrative terms. Addressing the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1900, he stated that, 

This formulation summarises the underlying logic of his census project. 

Anthropometric classification was conceived as more than a scientific exercise. It was an instrument for more effective administration of a colonised population, in which knowledge of social categories was a precondition for bolstering governmental authority.

Risley's contemporaries themselves recognised the dual character of the ethnographic survey. Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé, in his presidential address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1898, explained that the survey had been designed from the outset for two purposes, the first administrative and the second properly scientific, a distinction the published volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal maintained by separating the administratively useful glossary of tribes, castes, sects, and professions from the anthropometric tables. 

This bifurcation reflects what the historian Bernard Cohn identified as a structural feature of British rule: the entanglement of scientific methodology with the apparatus of imperial governance, in which knowledge production and administrative control were mutually reinforcing.

However, the census was not devoid of practical difficulties especially given how unstable caste was as an analytic category. As Risley himself noted, no column in the census schedule produced a more bewildering variety of responses than caste, tribe, or nationality, since a person might give the name of a well-known caste, an obscure sub-caste, a sect, an occupational title, or a place of origin, each requiring standardisation by enumerators of varying competence. 

To address this, Risley proposed organising data by “social precedence as recognised by native public opinion,” using indicators such as whether Brahmans would take water from a given caste or whether it prohibited widow remarriage. This approach still required continuous judgments about relative rank, sparking extensive petitioning from caste associations seeking recognition at a higher rank than colonial classification had assigned them. The census in this way emerged as an active site of flashpoint for social identities. 

Caste, Tribe and Race in 1911 Census

The 1911 census continued along Risley’s line. The Imperial Table XIII of the 1911 Census provided a detailed statistical portrait of Indian social segmentation, enumerating hundreds of communities despite administrative efforts to streamline data by omitting groups under 500 and cross-referencing synonyms. The findings highlighted a significant demographic concentration, where the twenty largest communities accounted for over one-third of the Empire's population.

However, Census Commissioner of 1911 census, Edward Gait, cautioned that intercensal comparisons with 1891 were complicated by a "traffic in names", such as Chandals and Koch transitioning to Namasudras and Rajbansi, and shifting methodologies for aggregating small castes. Ultimately, the value of Table XIII lies less in exact precision than in its role as a disciplinary instrument that forced a standardized vocabulary upon the fluid, ‘moving target’ of caste identity. 

By 1911, the census authorities approached caste with considerably greater conceptual confidence than their predecessors, but this confidence did not eliminate the fundamental problem of classification. The chapter on ‘Caste, Tribe and Race’ begins with a question: ‘what is meant by a caste?’ According to the report the difficulty partly stemmed from the complexity of Hindu social organisation and also from the fact that the population did not necessarily understand social identity in exact categories recorded by the census. 

People were said to possess ‘somewhat vague ideas’ on the subject and to be largely indifferent to distinctions that did not directly concern them. While their responses were not entirely meaningless as they helped identify people through locality, occupation, or broad social position, they were inadequate for an administration seeking to isolate precise caste identities of the subjects. This problem was especially evident during enumeration. Gait’s solution was to distinguish four levels of Hindu social organisation: Varna, Jati, sub-caste, and exogamous lineage. 

Such an elaborate scheme points out how far the census and its knowledge production had grown. This allowed it to decide which answers represented the correct level of social reality: 

Table 1. The four kinds of social distinction among Hindus

Conceptually, Gait argued that castes were not the historical descendants of the four original classes, but rather independent social formations that developed alongside the varna system. He characterized varna as an "external view" of ritual purity, primarily used by Brahmans to determine commensality and social distance. Despite their independent origins, the varna categories remained socially significant as frameworks for mobility; many castes frequently petitioned the census to be classified within the "twice-born" ranks to enhance their perceived status in the social hierarchy. 

The 1911 census was trying to reconcile at least two different social maps. One was the dense, internal distinctions through which communities organised marriage and belonging, and second the broader hierarchical classifications through which outsiders located them.

This made them encounter even more difficulties. The census struggled to establish an entirely stable definition of caste. Endogamy and commensality were identified as its most characteristic features, but neither provided a universal test. The right of intermarriage often extended only to a sub-caste, while rules concerning eating and smoking varied considerably. Nor could occupation or a common name provide certainty. Some occupational terms denoted actual social communities, others merely described a function, and still others did both in different circumstances.

The report therefore arrived at a deliberately composite definition, treating a caste as an endogamous group, or collection of such groups, held together by some combination of common name, traditional occupation, reputed origin, deity, status, ritual practices, and priests. More importantly, it conceded that the decision as to what did and did not constitute a caste was ‘largely a matter of degree.’ Caste was thus treated as a real social formation, but one whose boundaries could not be determined by any single universal definition. 

The tension between this recognition and the demands of enumeration is especially clear in the report’s discussion of the categories actually used in census tables. ‘Brahman,’ for instance, was retained as a single caste designation even though the communities grouped under it did not intermarry and differed considerably in race, status, and custom. Elsewhere, communities bearing the same name were grouped together for all-India statistical purposes despite the report’s admission that they might not belong to the same caste at all. 

Repulsion, Attraction and the Seven Types

Contrary to the perception of caste as an immutable structure, the 1911 report emphasized its inherent fluidity, likening its gradual transformation to the subtle movement of a watch's hour hand. This social evolution was characterized by what Gait called the dual forces of "repulsion" and "attraction."

Repulsion occurred when subgroups developed distinct customs or occupations and withdrew from established marriage circles, while attraction facilitated the absorption of outside groups into existing castes through shared professional interests and the eventual adoption of common religious fictions.

While occupational function acted as a primary driver of caste formation, its impact was geographically variable. For example, the Banjaras originally integrated diverse groups through their shared role in the provision trade before segments later split off into distinct castes like the Wanjari. 

Function was the most potent caste-maker, but not the only one. Gait reproduces Risley's sevenfold typology with fresh examples, noting that its relative weights varied regionally

Table 2. Risley's seven types of caste, as adopted and illustrated in the 1911 Report.

Sub-castes, likewise, were of two great classes. First, were the sub-castes of fusion which were made up of groups of diverse origin aggregated under one functional name. Gait's catalogue of the causes of fission (Table 3) is one of the chapter's interesting interventions:

Table 3. Why sub-castes split: the six recorded causes of fission.

The 1911 census had clearly developed a sophisticated understanding of caste as relational, historically produced, internally heterogeneous, and continually changing. By 1911, the problem was no longer simply that officials did not understand Indian society. It was that they had developed a fairly elaborate theory of what caste was and therefore increasingly recognised how poorly the singular census question:

Gait also highlights that the wall around a caste was lower than theory suggested, and lowest where it mattered least to theory. He illustrated that through several examples in his commentaries. He noted, 'At each succeeding census the Provincial Superintendents are overwhelmed with petitions from various upstart communities praying to be entered in the schedules under some new name.'

Distinction from Tribe

The traditional ‘Tribe’ was distinguished from the caste primarily by its political rather than economic foundation, as it was defined by a community of interest and mutual defense rather than strict occupational or endogamous boundaries. 

While originally characterized by their ability to freely incorporate diverse lineages into a shared bond of union, many tribal groups, particularly those transitioning away from the imperial frontiers, had increasingly adopted the rigid social restrictions typical of the caste system. 

This reflected a broader pattern of social fluidity and "accretion," where tribal identities function as flexible, fluctuating confederacies that absorb smaller groups while simultaneously organizing themselves into internal circles of prohibited degrees. 

Is Caste the same as Race?

The debate surrounding the biological basis of caste in the 1911 census was centered on the conflicting theories of John Nesfield and Risley. Nesfield posited that the Indian population was racially homogeneous, arguing that caste hierarchies were derived purely from occupational specialization rather than biological origins. 

Conversely, Risley maintained that caste was rooted in a racial encounter between "Aryan" conquerors and "Dravidian" aborigines, asserting that social status could be scientifically measured through anthropometry, as we discussed before. 

While physical measurements eventually disproved Nesfield's theory of racial unity by revealing local diversity, Risley’s specific correlations were challenged by regional experts like Crooke and O'Donnell, the latter of whom identified broad-nosed Brahmans in Bengal that contradicted Risley's hierarchy. 

Gait refined these perspectives by highlighting the structural porosity of castes, noting that the constant movement of individuals and groups into functional categories made "main castes" heterogeneous. He argued that anthropometric data was often unreliable because it failed to account for distinct sub-castes. 

Furthermore, the rise of environmentalism, supported by Franz Boas’s research on changing head shapes and the cultural practice among the Brahui by manually molding infants' features, suggested that physical traits were not fixed biological markers. Although Risley proposed seven physical types of India, ranging from Turko-Iranian to Dravidian, Gait remained cautious to classify such racial taxonomies on what he thought was "uncertain ground".

Limits of Risley’s Theory

The racial theory of caste that Risley promoted faced substantial criticism in his own lifetime, from contemporaries working within the same broad framework of physical anthropology. These critiques identified two significant limitations: first, difficulties concerning the scientific validity and practicability of anthropometric method itself, and secondly the difficulties concerning the adequacy of caste as a governing concept.

On the question of scientific validity, the racial theory underlying anthropometry had already attracted criticism within Europe. Contemporaries such as Pierre Gratiolet, who objected as early as 1861 that intelligence could not be measured by the weight of the brain and that cranial size was not decisive. Within India, Risley's racial explanation of caste also faced competition from non-racial theories advanced by fellow colonial administrators. 

John Collinson Nesfield, who published a study of caste in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh in 1885, argued for an essential homogeneity of the Indian population and rejected the idea that physiological traits could reliably indicate caste membership. Instead, he proposed that castes had originated through functional differentiation of occupation. 

Denzil Ibbetson, who conducted the 1881 Punjab census, expressed a comparable position, describing caste as fundamentally a social rather than a religious institution with no necessary connection to Hindu belief, since conversion to Islam did not by itself dissolve caste identity. 

Risley himself did not hold a single, unchanging position across his career; Fuller (2024) demonstrates that ‘The People of India (1908)’ shows Risley moving closer to elements of Nesfield's functional account while still promoting anthropometry, complicating any simple narrative of Risley as an unwavering racial determinist.

A further set of difficulties concerned the practical feasibility of measurement in the field. Risley's own instructions for selecting subjects directed measurers to exclude, from samples of lower and higher castes respectively, men with “very dark skin and broad noses depressed at the root” and men with “very light skin and features of the higher caste”. 

This built the expected racial pattern into the sampling itself, predetermining the correlation the survey claimed to discover. Measurement also depended on cooperation that was frequently not forthcoming. Thurston, surveying the Irula people of the Nilgiri hills, recorded a man who, suspecting his intentions and fearing prosecution for a prior offence, refused to be measured or photographed, evidently associating the procedure with criminal identification techniques then being introduced into Indian policing. Such episodes show that anthropometric data could not be treated as a neutral record, since its collection was shaped by relations of suspicion and unequal power.

These difficulties contributed to the broader decline of anthropometric measurements within physical anthropology itself during the early twentieth century. Blanckaert, as cited by Sharanjit (2026), observed that many anthropologists grew weary of the tedious accumulation of contradictory figures that anthropometric surveys produced.

Critiques from Social Historiography

A forceful critique of Risley’s work has been advanced by later scholars, who question not merely the scientific adequacy of Risley's anthropometry but the assumption that caste as enumerated by the census reflected a pre-existing, stable social reality awaiting discovery. 

Nicholas Dirks has argued that the castes recognised in colonial administration were in significant part the product of colonial strategies to institutionalise fluid social identities into fixed categories. Sharanjit (2026) notes that this position does not deny the existence of an unequal Indian society prior to colonial intervention, but questions the claim concerning the form and rigidity caste categories acquired under colonial rule. 

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a foremost critic of the caste system and an anthropologist by training, argued that the identification of caste with race was a "gross perversion of facts". His rejection of Risley’s theories was built on several key points. Ambedkar argued that the people of India were already a mixture of various groups, including Aryans, Dravidians, Mongolians, and Scythians, making the idea of “pure” racial types within India scientifically untenable. He challenged the biological basis of caste by pointing out regional physical similarities (Chirez-Garza, 2018). 

Ambedkar used Risley’s own scientific tools to subvert his conclusions. He argued that if head measurements (anthropometry) were actually dependable, they would prove that Brahmins and Untouchables belong to the same race. He pointed out the racial bias of the European scholars such as Risley, which led them to mistakenly imagine color and race as the chief factors in the Indian caste problem. He defined caste not as a physical character, but as a notion or what he famously called, a ‘state of the mind’ (Chirez-Garza, 2018). 

By rejecting the racial theory of caste, he asserted that caste was culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed. This allowed him to argue that it was possible for Untouchables to achieve liberation through education, political action, and religious conversion (Chirez-Garza, 2018).

In Chris Fuller's biography of Risley (2024), he offers a comprehensive reassessment of Risley specifically. Fuller situates him within the category of the “scientific administrator,” cautioning against treating British India as if governed by anthropologists in any direct sense. He further emphasizes that administrators such as Risley and Ibbetson, when confronted with political challenges, repeatedly moved away from the anthropological theses that they had developed. 

Fuller demonstrates this through Risley's intellectual evolution between 1890 and 1908, showing that his later work incorporated elements of Nesfield's functionalist critique while still promoting anthropometry.

Contemporary Understanding of Caste and Anthropology in India

The historiographical reassessment of Risley's anthropometric project carries consequences extending well beyond an academic interest in the history of colonial science. Sharanjit (2026) situates this legacy within the longer arc of caste politics in post-independence India, observing that while the first post-independence generations sought to move beyond a caste system widely regarded as inegalitarian, contemporary India displays contradictory tendencies.

The continued practice of census enumeration and policies of positive discrimination (reservation) maintain an administrative approach to caste, even though its purpose differs fundamentally from Risley's racial-hierarchical project.

At the same time, political movements promoting Hindu nationalism have tended to reactivate and instrumentalise caste identities for political and economic mobilisation, a development the sociologist Madhusudan Subedi, quoted in Sharanjit (2026), describes as a shift in the discourse of caste away from ritual hierarchy and social discrimination and toward its function as an instrument of mobilising people for economic and political ends.

The trajectory from Risley's confident theorisation in 1901 to Yeatts's disavowal of anthropometry in 1941 shows that the colonial census, often treated as monolithic, was an evolving, internally contested project whose practitioners abandoned key elements of its rationale within four decades.

Finally, this scholarship bears on how anthropology in India relates to its own institutional origins. Risley's career exemplifies how the early professionalisation of anthropology in the subcontinent was inseparable from colonial administration. Recognising this does not require dismissing the ethnographic data Risley and his collaborators collected, much of which is still consulted by historians, but it requires reading that data critically and attentive to the assumptions and motives that shaped its collection.

Conclusion

As later scientists and scholars have established, caste cannot be adequately explained as a biological phenomenon, and that the categories through which colonial science described Indian society were themselves, to a significant degree, products of the colonial biases. This recognition continues to inform contemporary scholarship and policy debate on caste in India.

(Authors:  Gaurav Kalyani works as Research Associate for the India State Stories Project at the Center for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME University, Pune; 

Nishitha Mandava, is an independent researcher and research consultant for Center for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME University, Pune

Shivakumar Jolad works as Associate Professor (Public Policy), and is the Chair of Center for Legislative Education and Research and Director India State Stories, FLAME University, Pune)

(Gaurav and Nishitha did research and primary writing, Shivakumar contributed research and writing, Gaurav did editing)

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