Delineate the major features of S. S. Sarkar's classification of Indian populations. Was his classification better than Risley? Explain

Risley’s scheme

• Risley (1901 census, The People of India) offered seven types: Turko-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid, Dravidian. The nasal index was his favourite number. He tied type to caste rank: finer noses higher in the varna ladder. The scheme served empire: it made inequality look like biology.

B. S. Guha later used a different set of types for the 1931 census and the Anthropological Survey. Both remain typological races.

Sarkar’s scheme

S. S. Sarkar, working in the mid-twentieth century, proposed a simpler set often taught as Australoid, Indo-Aryan, Irano-Scythian, Mundari-speaking (or Mundari-Malayan), Mongolian, with regional notes on Negrito traces in the south-west hills. He paid more attention to tribal India, language families and prehistoric archaeology than Risley did. He treated many South Indian and central Indian populations as having an Australoid base with later overlays, rather than as a single “Dravidian race” invented to match a language.

• Features of his approach: fewer grand types; more weight on tribes (Munda, Bhil, Chenchu, Kadar debates); scepticism of Risley’s nose-to-caste ladder; use of blood groups as they became available, still inside a racial typology.

Was it better?

Better as science than Risley: Sarkar dropped the crudest caste-equals-race move. He saw language and biology as different maps. He took tribal variation seriously. Not good enough as modern biology: both men sorted living people into boxes. Cavalli-Sforza, later craniometrics, and Reich’s ancient DNA show clines, mixture and caste endogamy as social history, not seven or five races. The so-called Negrito problem in India remains a weak, recycled label.

Guha is often preferred in Indian syllabi because of anthropometry at a national scale. Sarkar is preferred to Risley because he is post-colonial in mood and less serviceable to census ranking. Neither is a substitute for genetics plus ethnography.

The Anthropological Survey of India’s People of India project and the Census’s refusal to list race are the institutional aftermath: the state still counts SC, ST and OBC, not Risley types. Indra Sawhney and later reservation law treat backwardness as social and educational, which is the right lesson from the failure of racial census.