Deconstruct the colonial history of Indian Anthropology highlighting the critical role played by the Indian Anthropologists in sustaining its autonomy.

Colonial apparatus

Asiatic Society collecting, missionary grammars, and official ethnography — Risley’s anthropometry and People of India, Thurston in Madras, Russell and Hiralal in the Central Provinces, Hutton and the census — produced the tribe and caste gazetteer. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 (later 1924) turned ethnographic types into police categories, a harm P. K. Bhowmick later fought for the Lodha. Forest Acts (1865, 1878, 1927) needed a picture of “shifting cultivators” as wasteful. Verrier Elwin began as a missionary-adjacent outsider inside this world, then wrote The Aboriginals (1943) against rapid assimilation.

Anthropology in India was thus administrative, racial and museum-based before it was a university subject. B. S. Guha at the Anthropological Survey (founded 1945, on a colonial survey logic) still used racial types even as he Indianised the institution.

Indian professionalisation

S. C. Roy of Ranchi, often called the father of Indian ethnography, published The Mundas and Their Country (1912) and founded Man in India (1921). He wrote as a lawyer-scholar of Chotanagpur, not as a district officer. G. S. Ghurye at Bombay built sociology-anthropology on Indology and diffusion, arguing tribes were backward Hindus — a nationalist assimilation that opposed Elwin’s isolationism. That Ghurye–Elwin debate is itself Indian autonomy: the quarrel is about the nation’s tribal policy, not about London’s syllabus alone.

D. N. Majumdar at Lucknow combined physical and social anthropology and village work (Caste and Communication in an Indian Village). N. K. Bose offered the Hindu method of tribal absorption and a swadeshi cultural politics close to Gandhi. Irawati Karve mapped kinship regions and refused to treat India as a copy of African segmentary models. M. N. Srinivas brought British structural-functional fieldwork home as sanskritisation, dominant caste and the field view, training a generation that could study India without a district gazetteer as the last word. L. P. Vidyarthi at Ranchi built a tribal research centre, the sacred complex, and nature–man–spirit, an Indian conceptual set for Chotanagpur and beyond. S. C. Dube, T. C. Das, K. P. Chattopadhyay and later Surajit Sinha (tribe–caste continuum) thickened the same autonomy.

Departments at Calcutta, Bombay, Lucknow, Delhi, Ranchi and the Anthropological Survey of India created jobs, journals and a Hindi–English teaching corpus. After 1947, anthropologists sat on the Scheduled Tribes lists, the Dhebar Commission, and planning cells — a new risk of becoming the state’s experts, which Xaxa later criticised.

How autonomy was sustained

Autonomy was not autarky. Srinivas trained at Oxford; Karve read Kroeber; Vidyarthi used Redfield. The critical move was problem choice: Indian village, Indian tribe, Indian civilisation, Indian development. They rejected Risley’s racial ranking as policy, even when some still used anthropometry in the lab. They built Indian terms — sanskritisation, sacred complex, tribe–caste continuum, dominant caste — that the world now cites.

• They also fought colonial leftovers: denotification of “criminal tribes”, opposition to a purely museum tribal, and, in Elwin’s NEFA philosophy, a brake on extractive integration. A. Aiyappan, C. von Fürer-Haimendorf (an émigré who Indianised his field) and B. K. Roy Burman (buffer zone, development anthropology) continued that civic role.

Limits remain. English journals, Delhi–Ranchi hierarchies, and dependence on ministry grants can reproduce a new centre. Autonomy is a practice of fieldwork in Indian languages and of conceptual invention, which the colonial census never needed.