User:Winged Blades of Godric/People of India (ANSI Publication)
The People of India is a multi-volume series of books published from 1992 under the auspices of the government-run Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) covering the communities, castes and tribes of India. It adopted the title of the colonial works of 1868–1875 and 1908 in the same regard. 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. The AnSI adopted a cut-off point of 200 members and preferred blood groups to be "the crucial indicator of physical difference".[1]
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. The intent was to produce an anthropological study of the differences and linkages between all of the communities in India. The survey involved 470 scholars and identified 4694 communities during its period of fieldwork between October 1985 and 1994. Sinha notes a total of 3000 scholars, which figure appears to include those involved at various seminars and workshops. The full results of the survey comprises 43 published volumes, of which 12 had been produced at the time of Singh's death.[2][3]
The volumes were produced as two collections, with the first eleven comprising the National series and the remainder being known as the State series.
Laura Jenkins has noted that the project has been undertaken
Despite the tainted past of such ethnographies. ... According to its initial circular, "[t]his will be a project on the People of India by the people of India," a phrase ringing with nationalism, yet the goal of this national project is to generate a profile of each community in India, largely defined in terms of caste. Purportedly a work of apolitical anthropology, this endeavor is nevertheless sponsored by the state. ... Although castes are a major unit of analysis for the People of India projects, both past and present, the latest project superimposes the new theme of national unity, a politically useful focus for an ethnography sponsored by the central government of India. ... Although such a study might be used to undermine caste distinctions by providing data to refine reservation policies, the People of India project's conclusions have often been used simply to undermine the policies. The People of India projects, colonial and postcolonial, and the varied identity claims made about them, in them, and through them demonstrate the intertwined nature of social identities and state identifications.[4]
The books use colonial ethnographies extensively and note, for example, that
... in spite of the investigators' best efforts to incorporate firsthand information from the field, by direct investigation, it was not possible to do so with the limited personnel resources made available for such a voluminous project. Nevertheless adequate care has been taken to update the ethnographic details of most of the communities, where published material existed. It was also not possible to incorporate all of the unpublished data ... available with various Anthropology/Sociology departments in the country (despite express instructions to do so under the project, only a few were incorporated)[5]