Herbert Hope Risley

Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI FRAI (4 January 1851 – 30 September 1911) was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used the ratio of the width of a nose to its height to divide Indians into Aryan and Dravidian races, as well as seven castes.

Quotes

• The racial theory of Indian civilization alludes to racial attitudes of whites towards blacks, found in the segregated southern United States after the Civil War and in South Africa, as a constant of history, or rather as a transcendent fact immune to historical changes that is as operative in the Vedic period as it is now.
  • Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• No one can have glanced at the literature of the subject and in particular at the Vedic accounts of Aryan advance, without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. So impressed were the Aryans with the shortcomings of their enemies’ noses that they often spoke of them as “the noseless ones” and their keen perception of the importance of this feature seems almost to anticipate the opinion of Dr Collingnon, that the nasal index ranks higher as a distinctive character than stature or even the cephalic index itself. In taking their nose, then, as the starting point of our present analysis we may claim to be following at once the most ancient and the most modern authorities on the subject of racial physiognomy’.
  • (H. H. Risley, 1891, 249-50) quoted in (Trautman, Aryans and British India, 2004, 202). Trautmann responds: ‘In doing so, he has of course greatly overstated the Vedic evidence; Risley’s frequent references to the aboriginal nose which he says the Aryans often spoke of comes down . . . to a single passage. Both Risley and Max Müller show a tendency to exaggerate the significance of noses in the ancient Indian evidence’. (Trautman, Aryans and British India, 2004, 202)
  • Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• This sole possible description of the Dasa nose, however, like Pinocchio's nasal organ, was to have an expanded life of its own. By 1891, H. H. Risley, who was compiling his ethnological material on Indian tribes and castes, was able to say that "no one can have glanced at the Vedic accounts of the Aryan advance without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India [whom] they spoke of as 'the noseless ones'". The solitary nasal reference had suddenly become a frequent one.
  • quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 3

Quotes about Risley

• [Dr Ambedkar (1891–1956),... after studying the voluminous Nasal Index data of various castes across India that had been published by anthropologists, he came to a striking conclusion using Risely's own data to disprove his thesis: ] The measurements establish that the Brahmin and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans, the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians the Untouchables are also Dravidians. If the Brahmins are Nagas, the Untouchables are also Nagas. Such being the facts, the theory . . . must be said to be based on a false foundation. 33
  • B R Ambedkar, Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• [Clare Anderson provides one such instance:] ‘Risley’s ideas met with some opposition at the time, even from those sympathetic to anthropometric methodology. Crooke wrote that when anthropometry was applied to caste, there were only very slight differences between the high and low castes. This did not show that anthropometry was flawed, but that ‘the present races of India are practically one people’. According to Crooke, Risley’s Nasal Index table showed no appreciable differences between Brahmins and the so-called lower castes. Indeed, according to Risley’s own figures, the latter were more nasally refined than Rajputs in the northwest Provinces. Of course, Crooke linked caste to occupational differentiation rather than distinct racial origins. There have been hints that Crooke’s career suffered as a result of his dispute with Risley’.
  • Clare Anderson, 2004, 61, Malhotra. Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• [Peter van der Veer writes:] ‘The huge significance of Risley’s work was duly noted by the doyen of Indian anthropology S. Ghurye, who severely criticized Risley’s correlation between race and caste. In Ghurye’s view a long history of racial mingling made this kind of correlation impossible. Ghurye had a fine eye for the politicization of caste that emerged as a consequence of the census operations: “The total result has been, as we have seen, a livening up of caste-spirit”. His focus and main concern was the rise of anti-Brahmin movements both in his state Maharashtra and also in Tamil Nadu. These movements, were fed by ideological division between Aryans and non-Aryans, a division scientifically supported by Risley’s findings’.
  • van der Veer, 2001, 150, Malhotra. Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• When he [Sir Herbert Risley] became Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, he was determined to carry out within its framework a grand experiment in classifying and ranking castes in the sub-continent as a whole. … Census-taking had often suffered … from the difficulty even of identifying discrete castes and foundered in some census regions over the impossibility of finding any meaningful way of classifying them that did not release a hornets’ nest of contention, as the Commissioner for the 1871 Madras Census put it. Commissioners in their reports often retreated from any greater ambition than providing a list of castes in English alphabetical order. It was clear … uniformity of classification across the country could not be hoped for. Risley’s scheme, therefore, was to send to every Census Commissioner, in each province, presidency, princely state, … a standard scheme, inviting them to set up committees of ‘native gentlemen’ to consider its local applicability and to propose modifications as required.
  • Charsley, Simon. 1996. “‘Untouchable’: What is in a Name?” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) 2 (1): 1-23. quoted from Malhotra, R. & Viswanathan V. (2022). Snakes in the Ganga : Breaking India 2.0.