He combined his official role and his amateur interests to create a series of works about the history and geography of India, and in particular the area then known as Rajputana that corresponds to the present day state of Rajasthan, and which Tod referred to as Rajast'han.

Back home in England, Tod published a number of academic works about Indian history and geography, most notably Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, based on materials collected during his travels.

[4][5] Those ancestors included people who had fought with the King of Scots, Robert the Bruce; he took pride in this fact and had an acute sense of what he perceived to be the chivalric values of those times.

[7] He left England for India in 1799[c] and in doing so followed in the footsteps of various other members of his family, including his father, although Tod senior had not been in the company but had instead owned an indigo plantation at Mirzapur.

Charanas were called upon to create a master list of the 'Thirty Six Royal Races of Rajasthan' with Tod's guru Yati Gyanchandra presiding the panel.

During the next five years Tod earned the respect of the chiefs and people, and was able to rescue more than one princely family, including that of the Ranas of Udaipur, from the destitution to which they had been reduced by Maratha raiders.

In 1821 his favouritism towards one party in a princely dispute, contrary to the orders given to him, gave rise to a severe reprimand and a formal restriction of his ability to operate without consulting Ochterlony, as well as the removal of Kota from his charge.

This and other losses of status, such as the reduction in the size of his escort, caused him to believe that his personal reputation and ability to work successfully in Mewar, by now the one area still left to him, was too diminished to be acceptable.

[28] Norbert Peabody, an anthropologist and historian, has gone further, arguing that "maintaining the active support of groups, like the Rajputs for example, was not only important in meeting the threat of indigenous rivals but also in countering the imperial aspirations of other European powers.

Influenced by this, he thought that each princely state should be inhabited by only one community and his policies were designed to expel Marathas, Pindaris and other groups from Rajput territories.

The geographical and political boundaries before his time had in some cases been blurred, primarily due to local arrangements based on common kinship, and he wanted a more evident delineation of the entities,[h] He was successful in both of these endeavours.

He saw the system as one that prevented achievement of true nationhood, and therefore, as Peabody describes, "utterly subversive to the stated goal of preserving them as viable entities.

His ingenious use of these viewpoints later enabled him to promote in his books the notion that there was a shared experience between the people of Britain and this community in a distant, relatively unexplored area of the empire.

[40][41][42] There was another appeal inherent in a feudal system, and it was not unique to Tod: the historian Thomas R. Metcalf has said that In an age of industrialism and individualism, of social upheaval and laissez-faire, marked by what were perceived as the horrors of continental revolution and the rationalist excesses of Benthamism, the Middle Ages stood forth as a metaphor for paternalist ideals of social order and proper conduct ... [T]he medievalists looked to the ideals of chivalry, such as heroism, honour and generosity, to transcend the selfish calculation of pleasure and pain, and recreate a harmonious and stable society.

[43] Above all, the chivalric ideal viewed character as more worthy of admiration than wealth or intellect, and this appealed to the old landed classes at home as well as to many who worked for the Indian Civil Service.

[43] In the 1880s, Alfred Comyn Lyall, an administrator of the British Raj who also studied history, revisited Tod's classification and asserted that the Rajput society was in fact tribal, based on kinship rather than feudal vassalage.

He had previously generally agreed with Tod, who acknowledged claims that blood-ties played some sort of role in the relationship between princes and vassals in many states.

[53] Freitag has argued that the Annals "is first and foremost a story of the heroes of Rajasthan ... plotted in a certain way – there are villains, glorious acts of bravery, and a chivalric code to uphold".

[54] So dominant did Tod's work become in the popular and academic mind that they largely replaced the older accounts like Nainsi ri Khyat[55] and even Prithvirãj Rãso.

[56] Kumar Singh, of the Anthropological Survey of India, has explained that the Annals were primarily based on "bardic accounts and personal encounters" and that they "glorified and romanticised the Rajput rulers and their country" but ignored other communities.

[57] One aspect of history that Tod studied in his Annals was the genealogy of the Chathis Rajkula (36 royal races), for the purpose of which he took advice on linguistic issues from a panel of pandits, including a Jain guru called Yati Gyanchandra.

He was interested in numismatics as well, and he discovered the first specimens of Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins from the Hellenistic period following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which were described in his books.

The anonymous author of the introduction to his posthumously published Travels states that The only portions of this great work which have experienced anything like censure are those of a speculative character, namely, the curious Dissertation on the Feudal System of the Rajpoots, and the passages wherein the Author shows too visible a leaning towards hypotheses identifying persons, as well as customs, manners, and superstitions, in the East and the West, often on the slender basis of etymological affinities.

Tod's work relating to the genealogy of the Chathis Rajkula was criticised as early as 1872, when an anonymous reviewer in the Calcutta Review said that It seems a pity that Tod's classification of 36 royal races should be accepted as anything but a purely ornamental arrangement, founded as it was on lists differing considerably both in the numbers and names of the tribes included in it, and containing at least two tribes, the Jats and Gujars, with whom the Rajputs do not even generally intermarry.

[66] Other examples of dubious interpretations made by Tod include his assertions regarding the ancestry of the Mohil Rajput clan when, even today, there is insufficient evidence to prove his point.

[67] He also mistook Rana Kumbha, a ruler of Mewar in the fifteenth century, as being the husband of the princess-saint Mira Bai[68] and misrepresented the story of the queen Padmini.

[72] That reputation persists, with one modern writer, V. S. Srivastava of Rajasthan's Department of Archaeology and Museums, commenting that his works "are erroneous and misleading at places and they are to be used with caution as a part of sober history".

Works such as Jyotirindranath Tagore's Sarojini ba Chittor Akrama and Girishchandra Ghosh's Ananda Raho retold Tod's vision of the Rajputs in a manner to further their cause.

[76] In other recognition of his work in Mewar Province, a village has been named Todgarh,[77] and it has been claimed that Tod was in fact a Rajput as an outcome of the process of karma and rebirth.

[62]Furthermore, Freitag points out that "the information age has also anointed Tod as the spokesman for Rajasthan, and the glories of India in general, as attested by the prominent quotations from him that appear in tourism related websites.