Abstract
THE publication of this work recalls the tragical fate of its author, who soon after the final revision of the proof-sheets sailed for India and lost his life in the s.s. Persia, sunk by a German submarine in the Mediterranean. The book is the result of a long- study of the races of the Province, begun when the author was placed in charge of the census operations in 1901, and since steadily prosecuted, in spite of very indifferent health. He enjoyed opportunities denied to the writers of the volumes on Northern India—Mr. Crooke for the United Provinces and Mr. Rose for the Punjab, who dealt with regions where the all-absorbing Brahmanism and militant Islam had caused much of the more primitive beliefs and usages to disappear. Sir H. Risley, in his account of the tribes of Chota Nagpur, and Mr. Thurston, in those of the Nilgiri Hills, were dealing with people believed to be indigenous, or at least settlers of whose coming no information is now available, and their religion and organisation are of a very primitive type. The people considered by Mr. Russell are perhaps even more interesting—Gonds, Baigas, Korkus, and the like, about whom little has hitherto been known.
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References
œThe Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. By R. V. Russell, assisted by Rai Bahadur Hira Lal . Four volumes. Vol. i., pp. xxv+426 Vol. ii., pp. xi+540. Vol. iii., pp. xi+589. Vol. iv., pp. xi+608. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1916.) Price 42s. net, four vols.
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The Ethnography of Central India 1 . Nature 97, 363–364 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/097363a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/097363a0