Robert Vane Russell (8 August 1873 – 30 December 1915) was a British civil servant, known for his role as Superintendent of Ethnography for what was then the

Central Provinces The Central Provinces was a province of British India. It comprised British conquests from the Mughals and Marathas in central India, and covered parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra states. Its capital was Nagpur. ...

of British India, coordinating the production of publications detailing the peoples of the region. Russell served as Superintendent of Census Operations for the

1901 Census of India The Census of India prior to independence was conducted periodically from 1865 to 1941. The censuses were primarily concerned with administration and faced numerous problems in their design and conduct ranging from the absence of house numbering ...

. Russell's father, Charles Robert Tilden Russell, was an officer in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Winchester College before attending Trinity College, Cambridge and then, in 1893, joining the Indian Civil Service. Together with an amateur archaeologist, Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, Russell compiled ''The Castes and Tribes of the Central Provinces'', published in 1916. This work was a product of the Ethnographic Survey of India that had been established in 1901, although it differed somewhat from earlier publications of similar origin because it relied more on Vedic literature than on the anthropometric methods and theories of

Herbert Hope Risley Sir Herbert Hope Risley (4 January 1851 – 30 September 1911) was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. ...

and his sympathisers as a mechanism for investigation of the racial origins of caste. According to Crispin Bates, this "highly anecdotal book" was influenced by

Émile Senart Émile Charles Marie Senart (26 March 1847 – 21 February 1928) was a French Indologist.Buswell, Robert Jr; Lopez, Donald S. Jr., eds. (2013). "Senard, Emile", in: Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN ...

's ''Les Castes dans L'Inde'' and Russell died when the ''

SS Persia SS is an abbreviation for ''Schutzstaffel'', a paramilitary organisation in Nazi Germany. SS, Ss, or similar may also refer to: Places *Guangdong Experimental High School (''Sheng Shi'' or ''Saang Sat''), China *Province of Sassari, Italy (vehi ...

'' was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Crete on 30 December 1915.

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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Russell, Robert Vane Indian Civil Service (British India) officers British demographers People from the Central Provinces 1873 births 1915 deaths British ethnographers British anthropologists 19th-century British scientists Civilians killed in World War I People educated at Winchester College Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge British people in colonial India