Page "Kurmi" Paragraph 14

The second half of the nineteenth century also largely overlapped with the coming of age of ethnology — interpreted then as the science of race — in the study of societies the world over.

Although later to be discredited, the methods of this discipline were eagerly absorbed and adopted in British India, as were those of the emerging science of anthropology.

Driven in part by the intellectual ferment of the discipline and in part by the political compulsions in both Britain and India, two dominant views of caste emerged among the administrator-scholars of the day.

According to Susan Bayly: Those like ( Sir William ) Hunter, as well as the key figures of H. H. Risley ( 1851 – 1911 ) and his protégé Edgar Thurston, who were disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European followers, subsumed discussions of caste into theories of biologically determined race essences, ... Their great rivals were the material or occupational theorists led by the ethnographer and folklorist William Crooke ( 1848 – 1923 ), author of one of the most widely read provincial Castes and Tribes surveys, and such other influential scholar-officials as Denzil Ibbetson and E. A. H. Blunt.