author
R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell
1873–1915
Best known for documenting the peoples of central India, this British civil servant left behind a major early ethnographic work that was published just after his death. His writing blends administrative detail with a wide-ranging attempt to record communities, customs, and daily life.
4 Audiobooks
The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 4
by R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell
The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 2
by R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell
The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1
by R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell
The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 3
by R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell
About the author
Born in 1873, Robert Vane Russell was a British civil servant who worked in the Indian Civil Service and became closely associated with the Central Provinces of British India. He is remembered chiefly for his ethnographic and census-related work, especially his role in studying and describing the region’s communities.
Russell served as Superintendent of Census Operations for the 1901 Census in the Central Provinces and later as Superintendent of Ethnography there. His best-known work is The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, a multi-volume study issued in 1916, after his death in 1915. He is also connected with district gazetteer work, including material on Seoni.
Today, he is mainly read as a historical source: useful for the scale of information he gathered, while also reflecting the assumptions and attitudes of the colonial world in which he wrote.