Caste and Race in India c9.7

c9.7

In any anthropometric work the student is, at the very outset, faced by two problems. The first is the question of the unit. What shall we take as a unit on which measurements may be taken and compared? Shall we take a geographical or political area as our unit and compare one with another? Or shall we take a whole people, and take our measurements on them and then analyse them? The solution of this problem is fundamental to anthropometric work. But as our main purpose is to institute comparisons between castes this problem need not engage us here. We may take one caste as a unit and compare it with another. This procedure does not involve the acceptance of Risley's view about the isolation of castes which, as pointed out by his learned annotator, W. Crooke,¹ requires much modification. We may thus take our measurements on Brahmins and compare them with those on Chamars. But the data show us that neither Brahmins nor Chamars among themselves have a uniform physical type. We ask ourselves the reason of this, and we are led to the question of the origins of the different physical types. Thus we have to deal with the general ethnology of India as, indeed, Herbert Risley did. We have to analyse racial mixture as well as compare different castes.