The most subtle‑minded and profoundly devout people in Asia: Alfred Lyall on Hinduism, caste and the state in colonial India

Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (1835-1910) was a member of the Indian Civil Service from 1856 to 1887. He began his official career in north India in 1856-1864; he was then promoted and stationed in the Central Provinces in 1864-1867 and in adjacent West Berar in 1867-1873. In 1874-1878, he was the governor-general’s agent in Rajputana, the western Indian region made up of princely states under indirect rule. He was an official in the government of India’s Foreign department in 1878-1882 and ended his career as lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh in 1882-1887. Lyall’s first work as a colonial, official anthropologist was done in the 1860s; in particular, he wrote the report on the Berar census of 1867 in which he enumerated its castes, tribes and religious groups and discussed how to classify them cogently. In central India and Rajputana, he collected a large amount of ethnographic material, which he used to write a series of perceptive articles in British periodicals that were later collected in two volumes of Asiatic Studies, first published in 1882 and 1899. The essays on clans and castes, Rajput princely states and popular Hinduism, which were widely read, were Lyall’s major contributions to the anthropology of India. He also wrote numerous articles and several books on political topics, most of them concerned with British rule in India. All these publications significantly contributed to Lyall’s reputation as an official anthropologist, an expert on India and, more widely, a distinguished Victorian intellectual and ‘man of letters’. By his contemporaries, he was often compared with Henry Maine, whose work he admired, and even though Lyall had less influence than Maine on the overall development of social anthropology, his effective use of Indian ethnographic data to criticise the work of F. Max Müller and James G. Frazer on myth and religion attracted considerable attention. Later official anthropologists, such as H. H. Risley, were familiar with Lyall’s work, especially his concept of ‘Brahmanising’, whereby tribal communities were raised to low-caste Hindu status by transforming their local deities and rituals into pan-Indian, Brahmanical ones. Compared with these later anthropologists, however, Lyall’s writings look fairly slight, but several of his articles still make impressive reading, especially those on popular polytheistic Hinduism, which he discussed more perceptively, as well as more sympathetically, than most other official anthropologists or Victorian writers in general.