The Other From Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of the Nation

Description

This project traces the development of anthropology as an academic discipline in India and as an instrument of state formation and decolonisation in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Rather than simply looking at anthropology as an outgrowth of colonial ideas, we also try to answer questions like:

• Where do the intellectual origins of Indian anthropology lie?
• Who were these anthropologists anyway? Who were they influenced by?
• How did Indian anthropologists contribute to global networks that sought to re-shape the outlook and legacy of the discipline, especially in a world marching towards decolonisation?
• How was this aided or impeded by the role of India’s government and other academic and cultural institutions?
• Did India’s developmental path benefit from the knowledge that these anthropologists produce? 
• And how crucial was the contribution of interlocutors and collaborators to Indian anthropology?

Apart from tracing the many circulations, networks, and movements of ideas, intellectuals, and their practices, we also focus on the subjects of their discipline: who were the people that these anthropologists studied? How did they react to these researchers’ work?

A stamp commemorating the centenary of the Indian census in 1971. The Indian census is one of the sources used for this project. Image credit: Sergey Nezhinkiy/Alamy Stock Photo

Contributions to the Field

The first of its kind, this project examines in a holistic and systematic way how anthropology shaped the relationship between India’s state and its subjects, and how it contributed to what we describe as India’s ‘intellectual decolonisation’ in the years between 1910-1970.

The history of anthropology in India is largely underdeveloped. There are two reasons for this: 

• First, the attempts to trace the history of anthropology across the world are relatively new, starting in the late 1980s. Not surprisingly, these inquiries have had little to say about the growth of anthropology in the Global South, let alone India.
• Secondly, the role of Indian anthropologists working in the twentieth century has been overshadowed by the focus on the role of colonial ethnographers and the legacy of the colonial state in South Asia.

A more thorough engagement with the lives and careers of Indian academics is necessary to reveal that the tensions of anthropological knowledge in India were not merely a European problem, nor were they resolved by independence. In fact, after 1947, newer questions about decolonisation, development, national unity, and ‘modernity’ often exacerbated these tensions.

The first generations of Indian social scientists were British-educated and often accepted many western theories about their own people. Yet, the rise of nationalist politics awoke them to the problems of colonial disciplines like anthropology, pushing them to shape newer ways of defining India, both at home and abroad. By tracing the formation of an Indian school of anthropology, this study sheds much needed light on the often neglected history of intellectual decolonisation.

The legacy of these ideological battles may be found not only in the writings of these scholars but also in the institutions they left behind. Organisations such as the Anthropological Survey of India, the Indian Sociological Society, the Bombay Anthropological Society and the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, for example, defined the main characteristics of Indian culture and discarded what they saw as foreign elements. These institutions had strong international connections. Their staff collaborated, for example, with the Ford Foundation, UNESCO, and the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford.

Bearing these diverse elements of anthropology in India in mind, this project adopts a holistic, inter-disciplinary approach that combines elements of intellectual, institutional, and social history.

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