Anthropologist and Imperialist: H. H. Risley and British India, 1873–1911 brings out how imperative the role of Sir Herbert Hope Risley was to India’s colonial past. A member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) from 1873 to 1910, Risley served in Bengal and became a senior administrator and policymaker in the colonial government. He was also the pre-eminent anthropologist in British India. An imperialist, Risley was convinced about the rightness of ‘civilising’ British rule and its benefits for both India and Britain. One of this book’s objectives is to render his simultaneous commitment to anthropology and imperialism intelligible to present-day readers. More specifically, Anthropologist and Imperialist draws attention to the two sides of Risley’s career, which is used as a case-study to investigate, first, the production and circulation of colonial knowledge, specifically anthropological knowledge, and secondly, its often loose and inconsistent connection with administration and policymaking, and with the government and state overall.

Risley, like other officials engaged in anthropology in India, as well as the government itself, insisted that ethnography and anthropology had both ‘administrative’ and ‘scientific’ value; unlike previous works on Indian colonial anthropology, this book carefully examines its ‘scientific’ contributions in relation to contemporary metropolitan anthropology.

The book attempts to demonstrate the importance of studying the powerful officials who ruled British India, as well as the minor provincial politicians and subaltern subjects – or the abstract forces, such as colonialism and resistance – that have dominated recent historical scholarship. It does not seek to reinvent ‘great-man’ political or intellectual history. This book also shows that a detailed inquiry into Risley’s career, and his ideas and actions, can open up new perspectives on a variety of continuing debates, including those over the colonial construction of caste and race in ‘traditional’ India, orientalism and forms of colonial knowledge, Victorian anthropology’s close relationship with the British empire, and the modern discipline’s uneasy links with its colonial past.