Introducing the people of India

KS Singh

Oxford University Press, 2002

ISBN 0 19 564 444 1, 342 pages

In this month of Divali, you will read and hear much about India’s people, culture, and religion. Much of it will be untrue. But this book, the introductory volume in the 43-part series on the people of India, is an excellent corrective.

The People of India Project was launched in 1985 to provide concise anthropological accounts of India’s communities.

Since India has 4,635 communities and 324 languages, this was clearly a monumental undertaking, and it was built on a similar project – the Anthropological Survey of India – started in the 1950s.

It took 500 academics from 26 institutions to carry out the task, as well as 3000 scholars who took part in 100 workshops as part of the discussion phase.

The “key informants” alone – ie the people interviewed by the anthropologists – totalled almost 25,000.

Singh, who was the ASI’s director from 1984 to 1993, has edited the 43 volumes in the series.

This introductory book, first published in 1992 and revised and re-published in 2002, summarises the main findings.

These statistics alone tell you that the simplistic ideas presented by local Hindu activists must be misleading.

For example, Singh notes that the biological part of the survey found that blood groups “showed a great deal of heterogeneity and concluded that the people of India cannot be classified into a fixed set of ethnic categories.

While reviewing genetic polymorphism in Indian populations, a scholar has concluded that there is less gene differentiation among Indian populations than within populations.”

In respect to caste, which is probably the best-known aspect of India’s Hindu social system, Singh records that there was “an asymmetry between self-perception of a community and the perception of a community by others, especially in low and high positions.” So, while 23 percent of a given community see themselves as high-caste, only 13 percent of another community judge them to be so, and while 29 percent see themselves as low-caste, other communities see 43 percent of them in that position.

(It would be interesting to conduct a similar self-perception test on our local Brahmins.)

Local Hindu apologists have always made much of the Indian tradition of tolerance (even while not actually displaying this trait themselves).

But the survey shows that, despite the sectarian violence which plagues that large nation, religious openness is indeed a social reality in India.

“Other forms of traditional linkages are participation in each other’s religious ceremonies and festivals,” writes Singh.

“Sharing includes performing actual roles in religious ceremonies. The proportion of such communities as Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain visiting other religious sites vary from 80-92 percent while 60-75 percent of the communities following Islam, Christianity and other religions (mainly tribal) visit other people’s shrines.

“Similarly, participation in each other’s festivals is common – 81-91 percent for all categories of population.”

For the most part, this book is exactly what it purports to be: a rather dry technical summary of an anthropological survey. If ideology creeps in, it is only in the conclusion when Singh quotes some scholars who argue that, behind all the diversity, “there is a sense of ‘Indianness’, often elusive and indefinable”.

What is indefinable, however, does not exist in scientific terms. But, apart from that, this introduction provides good information for persons interested in fact rather than propaganda.