Revision summary
Risley used nasal index and seven racial types tied to caste rank for the colonial census. Sarkar offered fewer types, more tribal and linguistic caution, and less nose-to-varna politics. Sarkar is better than Risley as a critique of colonial ranking, not as a modern genetic map. Guha’s 1931 types are another typological cousin. Reservation law now uses social backwardness, not racial census boxes.
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Introduction
Herbert Hope Risley classified Indian peoples for the colonial census by nose, colour and caste ranking. S. S. Sarkar classified them later as a human biologist, using a wider set of morphological and genetic hints. The question is whether Sarkar improved on Risley, not whether either scheme is true for ever.
Body
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.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
Sarkar’s classification is better than Risley’s because it weakens the nose–caste ladder and attends to tribes and language. It is still a racial typology. Living anthropology uses clines, caste endogamy and history, not Risley or Sarkar as a final map.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Describe the distinctive features and distribution of Upper Palaeolithic of India
Next question on this syllabus topic (2025 · Q3(a)). View answer →
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Should Sarkar’s types be used in administration?
No. ST, SC and OBC lists are political-legal lists. Biology does not issue caste certificates.
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Did Sarkar prove an Indian Negrito stratum?
He discussed it. Later genetics has not established a separate living Negrito race in India comparable to Andaman isolates in the popular sense.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2023 · Q4(b) · Anthropology GS 2 · 15 marks
Critically compare Risley's and Sarkar's approaches to the classification of peoples of India.
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