Caste and Race in India c9.3

c9.3

CASTE is such an obtrusive factor of Indian social organization that since the time of Megasthenes it has never failed to attract the attention of the foreigner—be he traveller, administrator, or student of Sanskrit literature. The application of the sociological method to the explanation of caste, i.e. a systematic attempt to elucidate the genesis and growth of the institution of caste, by a comprehensive study of the contemporary castes, however, may be said to begin with the works of Denzil Ibbetson and J. C. Nesfield. Both of them, in general, endorse the view² that caste is mainly occupational in origin, i.e. occupations which were organized into guilds slowly became exclusive and stratified into castes. Nesfield went further and, affirming the essential unity of the Indian race, emphatically denied that racial distinction was the basis of caste.³ This extraordinary statement of Nesfield led Herbert Risley to use anthropometry for a solution of the riddle of caste, for that alone could decide questions of racial affinity.⁴ He carried on extensive measurements on many of the castes of Northern India and published the results of his splendid work in two volumes entitled *Anthropometric Data from Bengal* (1891). The bearing of these data on the theory of caste he discussed in the introduction to his *Tribes and Castes of Bengal*, and later on in *The People of India*. His work further led to a succession of monographs on the anthropometric data from other Indian Provinces as a part of the ethnographic survey of India.