author
1863–1942
A British colonial officer turned ethnographer, he is best remembered for The Khasis, an early 20th-century study of the Khasi people of northeast India. His writing grew out of years in Assam, where administrative work and close local observation shaped his best-known book.
by P. R. T. (Philip Richard Thornhagh) Gurdon
Born in Murree on February 2, 1863, Philip Richard Thornhagh Gurdon was educated at Charterhouse and Sandhurst and entered the army in the 1880s. He later built a career in British India and became closely associated with Assam, serving in administrative posts and eventually working as Superintendent of Ethnography there.
Gurdon is chiefly known as the author of The Khasis (1914), a detailed account of Khasi society, customs, religion, and language. The book drew on his firsthand experience in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills and became part of a wider government-backed series on the peoples of Assam, helping preserve a record of communities that colonial writers were trying to describe and classify.
He was later knighted, and he died in Totnes, Devon, on December 28, 1942. Today he is remembered less as a literary figure in the usual sense than as an administrator-observer whose work remains of historical interest for readers exploring the cultures and writings of northeast India.