Indira Gandhi rashtriya manav sangrahalaya, Bhopal organized a lecture on the occasion of Azadi ka Amrit mahotsav celebrations under the Museum popular Lecture Series. Gautam Kumar bera, Tagore National Fellow, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, addressing a lecture on the topic 'Indian Anthropology and Contribution of Verrier Elwin in Colonial India', online through Google Meet, Facebook Live said that the deliberation attempts to discuss in brief the growth and development of anthropology in India, especially during the colonial period, especially the administrative demand for understanding the population, society and culture of the people of India.
The structural frame on which the edifice of the discipline of anthropology is built is a major concern of the lecture. It is seen that several civil servant colonial administrators turned ethnographers took initiative to study the people of India from variegated angles that later helped in the establishment of the academic discipline in India, which is incidentally only 100 years old. Hence, it is the right time to discuss any anthropologist in the centenary time period of the discipline.
Over the last one hundred years anthropology, as a discipline, has been enriched by the contributions of a host of anthropologists, who are considered as luminaries of the past. I focused on central India because of my long association with the erstwhile central provinces for over 25 long years. The central Indian anthropology has been enriched to the greatest extent by the contribution of the British born anthropologist, Verrier Elwin, who made India his home. Hence, the major concern will be to highlight the contributions of Verrier Elwin who remained as the main architect of anthropological studies in the region, which in his language was referred to as ‘middle India’.
His ethnographic portrayals single-handedly steered the academic discipline of anthropology and the world of larger academia was able to expose itself to the least known undiscovered world of tribal life of India. Elwin’s anthropology had so much impact in human life that the concept of ‘tribe’ as a ‘category of people’ occupied the minds of urban elites and middle-class intellectuals. The gamut of the discourse has been restricted to a certain time frame which will also be restricted to a specific frame of space. Along with this, from the arrival of Verrier Elwin to India, he explained various aspects of his life and work in detail through a slide show.
