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Home/Anthropology/Mains PYQ/2025/Paper II/Indian Society, Caste & Civilization
UPSC MainsAnthropology Optional Paper II 2025 15 Marks Model Answer Available

S. S. Sarkar’s Classification of Indian Populations — 2025 Paper II

Question · 2025 · Paper II · 15 Marks

Delineate the major features of S. S. Sarkar's classification of Indian populations. Was his classification better than Risley? Explain.

Model Answer

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Introduction

  1. S. Sarkar proposed his classification in 1954 as a revision of earlier colonial racial schemes. Unlike H. H. Risley, who correlated caste rank with race and relied heavily on the nasal index, Sarkar treated India as a product of successive population movements and admixture. However, both schemes belong to the now-obsolete typological phase of physical anthropology.

Major features of Sarkar’s classification

Sarkar used the cephalic index as his principal classificatory variable and regarded the Indian population as predominantly long-headed, with later broad-headed and Mongoloid additions. He recognised six major ethnic elements:

  1. Australoid: the earliest substratum, strongly represented among several central and southern Indian populations.
  2. Indo-Aryan: tall, robust, relatively lighter-complexioned and long-headed populations concentrated mainly in north-western and northern India.
  3. Irano-Scythian: broad-headed elements of western India, interpreted as later arrivals from the Iranian plateau and adjoining regions.
  4. Mundari-speaking people: primarily long-headed populations of eastern and central India, distinguished by their linguistic and regional history.
  5. Far Eastern: populations of eastern India showing varying admixture of long-headed and Mongoloid elements.
  6. Mongolian: populations of the Himalayan and north-eastern borderlands with characteristic East Asian affinities.

Sarkar rejected a substantial Negrito element in mainland India and emphasised that actual communities were mixed rather than pure representatives of these types.

Was it better than Risley?

Relative methodological advance: Risley’s The People of India (1915) divided Indians into seven racial types and made the nasal index almost a key to caste rank. Sarkar widened the historical and geographical interpretation, reduced the direct equation of caste with biological race, and gave greater recognition to admixture and regional continuity.

Yet not a modern population classification: Sarkar still treated variable populations as bounded racial types, depended excessively on a single cranial ratio, and inferred migrations from morphology without genetic evidence. Contemporary genomics has replaced such types with ancestry models and population histories. Reich and colleagues (2009) modelled most Indian groups as mixtures of ANI- and ASI-related ancestry; later ancient-DNA work refined this into AASI-, Iranian-related and Steppe-related components, followed by strong endogamy and founder effects. These are statistical ancestry components, not living biological races.

Conclusion

Sarkar’s scheme was therefore better than Risley’s in being less caste-hierarchical and more attentive to historical mixture, but it remained a typological racial classification. Its value today is historiographic, not as a scientifically valid description of Indian biological diversity.

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