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About the book:-The People of India is a title that has been used for at least three books, all of which focussed primarily on ethnography. The collection was an attempt at a visual documentation of "typical" physical attributes, dress and other aspects of native life that would complement written studies, although it did itself contain brief notes regarding what were thought to be the "essential characteristics" of each community. As time passed after the 1857 rebellion, British ethnographic studies and their resultant categorisations were embodied in numerous official publications and became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism, and of those categorisations it was caste that was regarded to be, in the words of the author, the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society. He also saw India as an ethnological laboratory, where the continued practice of endogamy had ensured that, in his opinion, there were strict delineations of the various communities by caste and that consequently caste could be viewed as identical to race. Whereas others saw caste as being based on occupation, he believed that changes in occupation within a community led to another instance of endogamy "being held by a sort of unconscious fiction to be equivalent to the difference of race, which is the true basis of the system. An indispensable volume written by the director of Ethnology in India. The book has 35 illustrations and an ethnological map of India. This book is a reprint of the 1915 edition. About the Author:-Sir Herbert Hope Risley KCIE CSI (1851 – 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. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used the ratio of the width