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. Nagpur was the primary ...
of
British India
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance in South Asia. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another ...
, 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 naval warfare force of the United Kingdom. It is a component of His Majesty's Naval Service, and its officers hold their commissions from the King of the United Kingdom, King. Although warships were used by Kingdom ...
. He was educated at
Winchester College
Winchester College is an English Public school (United Kingdom), public school (a long-established fee-charging boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) with some provision for day school, day attendees, in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It wa ...
before attending
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, 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 ...
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 Raj, British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947.
Its members ruled over more than 3 ...
.
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 ( or ; ), sometimes collectively called the Veda, are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed ...
literature than on the
anthropometric
Anthropometry (, ) refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various a ...
methods and theories of
Herbert Hope Risley 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's ''Les Castes dans L'Inde'' and
Russell died when the ''
SS Persia'' was torpedoed and sank off the coast of
Crete
Crete ( ; , Modern Greek, Modern: , Ancient Greek, Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the List of islands by area, 88th largest island in the world and the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, fifth la ...
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