The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c10.119

c10.119

Upto now our first systematic classification of Indian races was made by Risley who confused race, language and culture and used linguistic and cultural criteria in delineating racial groups. But Guha who succeeded him in the Census Surveys has, on the basis of his investigations into Physical Anthropology, divided the races into Progressive and Aboriginal. Whether this method is justified in view of the pattern of cultural development in India is problematical. The archaeological pattern of cultural survivals in place and time, coinciding with environmental diversity, does not appear to the author to justify such a division (See chapter VIII). Yet, in the absence of a better classification, Guha's is useful as suggesting one more factor in the operation of the centrifugal forces in Indian history and culture. He defined the geographic areas and gave, on the basis of his anthropometric data, the distribution pattern of the main racial groups: Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Palae-Mediterranean, Oriental, Alpo-Dinaric and Nordic (See Fig. 10).