Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 2 of 7

by Edgar Thurston

"Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 2 of 7" by Edgar Thurston is a seven-volume encyclopedia published in 1909. This monumental work documents over 300 social groups across southern India, covering approximately 40 million people. Thurston employed controversial anthropometric methods to record physical characteristics, customs, and traditions of castes and tribes in the Madras Presidency and surrounding princely states. Despite methodological limitations and subjects' suspicions about his intentions, the encyclopedia remains a significant, though contested, ethnographic record of early twentieth-century Indian society.