“A pure labor of love”

In the outgoing president's annual address to members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1900, the civil servant and anthropologist H.H. Risley, ¹ having dealt with the routine financial and administrative concerns of India's longest-established learned society, presented a conspectus of the current state of research into the history and culture of the subcontinent. Much of this talk was naturally taken up with his own specialty, outlining a broad account of the progress of ethnological research in India's vast and varied landmass, many of whose lesser-known tribes were “in danger of being swept away by our advancing civilization,” as the reach of British administration spread outwards to many previously inaccessible parts of the country. ² European control, whose relentless expansion was most potently symbolized by the railway, “that most powerful of all disintegrating social factors”, threatened to obliterate all traces of peoples whose existence until a few years earlier had been barely known, let alone adequately recorded or studied. In discussing the measures which he felt should be adopted “to open up and render accessible to the world the great store of ethnographic facts which India still offers to those who are willing to seek them,” he echoed the sentiments of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had recently memorialized the Secretary of State for India, suggesting that the forthcoming Indian Census offered a rare opportunity for a concurrent and more detailed collection of ethnological data.