The People of India

[2] G. G. Raheja has remarked that "the colonial imagination had seized upon caste identities as a means of understanding and controlling the Indian population after the blow to administrative complacency occasioned in 1857.

"[3] Initial attempts at ethnographic study by the British in India had concentrated on the issues of female infanticide and sati (widow immolation), which were thought to be prevalent in the northern and western areas of the country – especially among the Rajputs – and which the colonial rulers wished to eradicate by a process of social engineering.

[4] Following the rebellion, officers then serving in the Indian Civil Service, such as Richard Carnac Temple, were of the opinion that if future unrest was to be avoided then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of the colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas.

[6]The collection was an attempt at a visual documentation of "typical" physical attributes, dress and other aspects of native life that would complement written studies, although it did itself contain brief notes regarding what were thought to be the "essential characteristics" of each community.

[10] Risley had produced earlier works, including the four-volume The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, and continued his ethnographic writings and studies until his death in 1911.

[13] The academic position of Risley himself has been described by Susan Bayly Those like [Sir William] Hunter, as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley (1851–1911) and his protégé Edgar Thurston, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke (1848–1923), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H.

Risley's career and works have been interpreted as "the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism",[16][17] which was a theory prevalent for a century from around the 1840s[18] that "race was one of the principal determinants of attitudes, endowments, capabilities and inherent tendencies among human beings.

"[19] D. F. Pocock describes The People of India as ... almost the last production of that great tradition of administrator scholars who had long and extensive experience in the Indian Civil Service and had not found their arduous activity incompatible with scholarship.

The project was more detailed than the official ethnological surveys of the British Raj, which had a policy of ignoring communities of less than 2000 people and which laid much emphasis on anthropometry.

[20] Kumar Suresh Singh, a tribal historian and officer in the Indian Administrative Service who held posts including that of Director-General of the AnSI, had responsibility for the organisation, compilation and oversight of the survey and publications.