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The People of India project was established in 1901 to document the tribes and castes of India, which at that time was colonised by Britain. Then and still now, India comprises a large number of disparate communities and the governing authorities saw advantages in attempting to document what was to them a confusing system.

Origins
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 came close to overturning British rule in India. The disruption led to the British government assuming control over the country that had previously been vested in the British East India Company, and members of the Indian Civil Service such as Richard Carnac Temple came to believe that if a similar event was to be avoided in the future then it was necessary to obtain a better understanding of their colonial subjects and in particular those from the rural areas. The early efforts were concentrated on obtaining an understanding of the folk-lore, and Sadhana Naithani has noted that almost all of the British in India at that time "related to the society around [them] through three conduits: first, through other English officers and institutions; second, through office clerks, peons, and domestic servants; and third, through the recourse of the intellectual - anthropological and orientalist literature."

An eight-volume series of books under the title of The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations was published by India Office Library in London between 1868 and 1875. The series, which was edited by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, included 480 photographic plates, depicting the various castes and tribes of India. (Vol 8)

Herbert Hope Risley, an administrator in the Indian Civil Service who had an interest in ethnography, had published his Castes and Tribes of Bengal in 1891. The study was well received and in 1901 the British authorities decided to instigate an ethnographic project to document all of the Indian castes and tribes. William Crooke had published his ''The tribes and castes of the North-western Provinces and Oudh in 1896.

J. D. Anderson published a book called The Peoples of India in 1913 (Delhi:

Bimla Publishing House) RISLEY, SIR HERBERT. 1915. The People of India. Calcutta, Simla, and London: Thacker and Spink.

Presidential Address to Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1900: Risley said many lesser-known tribes were "in danger of being swept away by our advancing civilisation."[2] John Falconer has paraphrased him as believing that the expansion of European control "threatened to obliterate all traces of peoples whose existence until a few years earlier had been barely known, let alone adequately recorded or studied." He had similar ideas to those of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), who had been arguing the case for use of the forthcoming 1901 census of India as a means to obtain more ethnological information. It was the contention of BAAS that the operation of the census could be melded to include a systematic collection of three ethnographic lines of enquiry. These were community descriptions, traditions and histories; anthropometric data; and a photographic record both of traditional people and their occupations.
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Where the BAAS and Risley differed was with regard to the practicalities of incorporating such an ethnographic exercise within the census mechanism. He did not think that it was feasible to do so within the census itself, but according to Falconer he did, as with many of his contemporaries, consider "the requirements of science and administration as inextricably intertwined, the former supplying the information necessary for the 'task of governing a great congeries of races, tribes and castes among whom diversity is the rule and uniformity the exception'".

Original project
Works which emerged from the project included:
 * Edgar Thurston and K. Rangichari's Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909)
 * L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer's Cochin Castes and Tribes (1909)
 * Robert Russell and Hira Lal's Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces (1916)
 * Horace Rose's Tribes and Castes of Punjab and N.W.Frontier Provinces (1919)
 * R. E. Enthoven's Tribes and Castes of Bombay (1922)
 * H. V. Nanjunadayya's Mysore Castes and Tribes (1931)

Other people undertook documentation of their own accord. Syed Siraj Ul Hassan published his The Castes and Tribes of H.E.H. The Nezam's Dominions (1922), in part due to the interest of the Nizam of Hyderabad in ethnography.

Laura Dudley Jenkins has remarked that the People of India title has "been used for several rather notorious colonial ethnographic projects" and that the "'ordering of difference' on the basis of caste, ethnicity, region, race, or religion in such earlier studies" as those of Risley, Anderson, and Watson and Kaye have in more modern times been critiqued by scholars such as Metcalf 1995; Pandey 1992; Cohn 1987, 1996; Young 1994a.

Modern project
Kumar Suresh Singh, an anthropologist working in the Indian Administrative Service, headed a similarly titled venture undertaken by the Anthropological Survey of India in more modern times. , this collaborative effort, which studies all 4693 castes then identified, has not been published entirely. The fieldwork involved interviewing 24,951 people and was performed mostly between 1985 and 1994. The series comprises 43 volumes.