William Crooke CIE FBA (6 August 1848 – 25 October 1923) was a British orientalist and a key figure in the study and documentation of Anglo-Indian folklore.
[8] In the aftermath of the 1857 revolt, members of the ICS such as Temple believed that if a similar event was to be avoided in the future then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of their colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas.
These amateur studies led to his 1888 book, A Rural and Agricultural Glossary of the NW Provinces and Oudh,[7] following his contributions to The Indian Antiquary that began in 1882.
[b] Published from Allahabad, Sadhana Naithani believes that the journal demonstrates "the emergence and growth of that brand of ethnography for which Crooke should be better known and in which he differs from most other colonial ethnographers."
The April 1891 edition made this clear:The title has for the present been extended so as to include, roughly speaking, that portion of India where the language of the people is of the Aryan type.
"[13]Although intended for the British audience in India, as were numerous other such publications of the time, it was Indians who provided almost all of the content for the revised Notes and Queries format.
It initially maintained Temple's coverage of a vast range of subjects, from antiquities through folklore, philology, history, numismatology, ethnology, sociology and religion, as well as examining fields such as arts and manufacture.
The work on folklore was to prove important, according to Naithani, even though it came towards the end of a prolonged period during which various missionaries and British colonial officials had been documenting the phenomenon.
[16] It was work in which Chaube was heavily involved as a methodical collector, collator and translator, and the output was based on what were considered to be scientific principles of analysis and depiction.
[c] Naithani has suggested that Crooke's provision of this outlet for the Indian voices which lamented the loss of the past and the drive towards what the British deemed to be civilisation could have been one reason why he was marginalised within the bureaucracy.
Crooke's study may have been the first to look at the religion through eyes other than those of missionaries or the Hindu elite and was in the opinion of Naithani, "a counter to the established school of German and British indology, which was obsessed with scriptures, palm-leaf manuscripts and their translation, and the exact age of Indian civilisation ... [It] sought to fill a gap in European intellectual knowledge of India by documenting living traditions in a serious and accessible manner.
"[18] Chaube, who was an intelligent scholar with a BA from Presidency College in Calcutta,[19] subsequently claimed to have assisted with much information in Popular Religion and he resented that his input was not acknowledged by Crooke.
[1] The four volumes of Tribes and Castes of the North Western Provinces – the area now encompassed by Uttar Pradesh – were produced for the Raj government,[1] as a part of the Ethnographic Survey of India project that had been initiated in 1901.
It has been noted by modern academics, such as Thomas R. Metcalf and Crispin Bates, that Crooke was involved in a contemporary debate regarding the nature of caste.
[24][23] According to 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.
Aside from contributing articles for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics and for journals such as Folk-lore and those of the (Royal) Anthropological Institute, he wrote books including Things Indian, and Northern India (for the Native Races of the British Empire series).
[1] Crooke also had an interest in archaeological matters and produced a paper – The Rude Stone Monuments of India – for the Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club in 1905.
[33] However, in his role as an editor he has been viewed sometimes as adopting an interventionist approach, as with his work on Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India which Norbert Peabody believes under Crooke's hand may have become "a cipher for interpreting the Hindu political order writ large".