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 ...

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...

, coordinating the production of publications detailing the peoples of the region. Russell served as Superintendent of Census Operations for the 1901 Census of India. Russell's father, Charles Robert Tilden Russell, was an officer in the

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against Fr ...

. He was educated at

Winchester College Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of ...

before attending

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

and then, in 1893, joining the

Indian Civil Service The Indian Civil Service (ICS), officially known as the Imperial Civil Service, was the higher civil service of the British Empire in India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947. Its members ruled over more than 300 million p ...

. 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 upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''. The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute th ...

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 Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, ...

on 30 December 1915.

Works

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References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Russell, Robert Vane Indian Civil Service (British India) officers British demographers 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