The People of India

The People of India is a title that has been used for at least three books, all of which focussed primarily on ethnography.

John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye compiled an eight-volume study entitled The People of India between 1868 and 1875. The books contained 468 annotated photographs of the native castes and tribes of India.

The origins of the project lay in the desire of Lord Canning to possess photographs of native Indian people. Photography was then a fairly new process and Canning, who was Governor-General of India, conceived of the collection of images for the private edification of himself and his wife. However, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 caused a shift in mindset of the London-based British government, which saw that events had come close to overturning British influence in the country and countered this by placing India under more direct control than had been the case when it relied on the capabilities of the British East India Company to perform such functions. This was the beginning of the British Raj period.

G. G. Raheja has remarked that "the colonial imagination had seized upon caste identities as a means of understanding and controlling the Indian population after the blow to administrative complacency occasioned in 1857." Initial attempts at ethnographic study by the British in India had concentrated on the issues of female infanticide and sati (widow immolation), which were thought to be prevalent in the northern and western areas of the country – especially among the Rajputs – and which the colonial rulers wished to eradicate by a process of social engineering. Following the rebellion, officers then serving in the Indian Civil Service, such as Richard Carnac Temple, were of the opinion that if future unrest was to be avoided then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of the colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas. Early efforts in the sphere of British ethnography in India were concentrated on obtaining an understanding of Indian folk-lore, but another early consequence was that The People of India became an official British government publication.

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