"The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume I" is a comprehensive ethnographic study of the various tribes and castes living in the Central Provinces of India during the colonial period. The book was written by R.V. Russell, who was a British administrator and scholar with a deep interest in Indian society and culture. The first volume provides an overview of the region's geography, history, and political organization, as well as a discussion of the various theories of race and caste prevalent at the time. Readers can be compelled to know the geography and history related to Central Provinces and Berar. Overall, the book is a valuable resource for scholars of Indian history and anthropology, as well as anyone interested in learning more about the diverse and complex societies that existed in colonial India.
R. V. Russell was a British civil servant who lived from August 8, 1873, to December 30, 1915. He was best known for his job as Superintendent of Ethnography for what was then the Central Provinces of British India, where he oversaw the production of books about the people who lived there. During the 1901 Census of India, Russell was in charge of how the census was done. Charles Robert Tilden Russell, Russell's father, was an officer in the Royal Navy. He went to Winchester College for schooling and then to Trinity College in Cambridge. In 1893, he joined the Indian Civil Service Russell put together The Castes and Tribes of the Central Provinces with the help of an amateur archaeologist named Rai Bahadur Hira Lal. It was similar to his other works of the same type, but it was different in that it relied more on Vedic literature than on the anthropometric methods and theories of Herbert Hope Risley and his supporters to find out where caste comes from in terms of race. Russell died on December 30, 1915, when the SS Persia was hit by a torpedo and sank off the coast of Crete.
