| Abstract |
This project traces the development of anthropology as an academic discipline in India and as an instrument of state formation across the transition to independence (1900- 1970). Despite the impact of postcolonial studies worldwide after the 1970s, the history of anthropology in the subcontinent is relatively unexplored. Previous works have focused mainly on the impact of colonial ethnographers and on the writings of Western anthropologists. In contrast, our project examines the discipline itself in terms of ideas, institutions, intellectuals, their subjects, and the interplay between the global production and utilisation of anthropological forms of knowledge. The project connects these themes by examining the power relations between Western anthropologists and their Indian counterpart, and by analysing how these intellectual networks affect the state and its citizenship. We know very little about the institutional, intellectual and personal histories linked to the development of Indian anthropology. In comparison, the history of this discipline in the West is a mature field, with specialised archives dedicated to the growth of the discipline and its notable scholars. To bridge this gap, this project will assemble the scattered and dispersed collections of the founders of Indian anthropology to provide a clear vision of this corpus of work and the communities they studied. Similarly, we will preserve, edit and migrate audio-visual material into a digital format belonging to DNTs organisations such as our partners the Budhan Theatre and the Sansmal Bhantu Samaj. The online resources will be hosted on the project website and on the portal of our partner Sahapedia. This effort will tell us more about the education and influences of Indian scholars; how did they choose their sites of study; and what was their relationship to both their informants and subjects. The project covers three main themes: i) ideologies, ii) institutions and iii) anthropological subjects. First, we will examine the ways in which early twentieth-century global anthropological trends, such as primitivism and scientific racism, posed a significant challenge to Indian anthropologists trying to understand their lives as colonial subjects and the place of their society in the world. In the same way, we will study the influence of notions such as 'cultural relativism', 'functionalism' and 'development'. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Indian anthropologists adopted such concepts to comprehend questions of caste and as a way to modernise Indian villages. Second, we will trace the colonial and postcolonial lives of the various institutions which attempted to classify and structure the heterogeneity of the Indian population under fixed terms such as caste and race. Here we will look at the transition from the projects of colonial censuses to the establishment of the Anthropological Survey of India in 1945. Similarly, we will investigate the anthropological projects of village development created by the Nehru administration as part of their 5 year plans. These endeavours had strong anthropological components and played a key role as tools of state formation. Furthermore, as they were funded by international bodies such as the Ford Foundation, these projects reflected new anthropological trends coming from the US rather than Britain. Finally, we will focus on 'anthropological subjects' by piecing together a history of Indian anthropologists' writings, their experiences in the field and their networks of collaboration (including local guides and 'fixers'). We will trace the afterlives of these anthropological projects for their so-called marginal subjects. Through pre-existing relationships with members of the dalit, adivasi and denotified tribe communities, our research explores the ways these groups understood, negotiated and constructed their history as anthropological subjects, and what this means in terms of contemporary struggles for political recognition. |
