ABSTRACT
Risley wrote about the social origins and development of Indian nationalism on several occasions. Writing primarily as an anthropologist, his most detailed discussion was the final chapter on ‘caste and nationality’ in The People of India in 1908, but he also covered some of the same ground in an article in 1890. As a civil servant in the Bengal and Indian governments, he often commented on the nationalist movement and the Congress in one context or another, but he produced his clearest summary of them in two confidential minutes that he wrote in the India Office in 1910. In Risley’s anthropological, academic analysis of Indian nationalism, its relationship with caste was the main theme, whereas its appeal to different classes and religious communities was particularly important in his official, policyoriented discussion. The two perspectives, as we shall see, were never more than superficially integrated.
