Richard Francis Burton in Sindh: From Orientalism to Ethnology as a Primary Source of Knowledge of India

Training and Fieldwork in India

Richard Francis Burton was born on 19 March 1821 in Torquay, Devon, into an English family living in Ireland for generations. The family belonged to the lower nobility, and some of his ancestors are said to have held the title of baron, a title they later lost and tried in vain to regain. His father was an officer in the British Army, to which several of his ancestors had belonged. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Tours in France. This episode was only the first stage in a wandering family life, no doubt due to health problems that would have forced his parents to move to the continent.

Burton went to French school and quickly mastered the language, probably the first foreign language he had learned. [2] This probably explains why his books contain many French expressions that his compatriots probably did not understand. After about ten years, the family returned to England, which Burton admits he hated, and missed France immensely. He was admitted to Trinity College, Oxford University, when he reached university age. In addition to his general education, he began to learn Arabic. Nevertheless, after barely two years at the venerable institution, he was expelled for leaving the university to attend a horse race without asking permission.

By this time, he had already developed a method of language learning that he claimed to be specific (see below), and after Arabic, he began studying Hindustani. After his expulsion from Oxford, he joined the army of the East India Company. [3] He embarked at Greenwich as an ensign on 18 June 1842, at the age of 21, and during the four months at sea, he devoted all his time to improving his Hindustani and reading all the books on Hinduism he could find on board. On 18 October 1842, he landed in Bombay. Burton was to remain in India from 1842 to 1849.

Once enlisted in the East India Company army, Burton soon had to rejoin his regiment stationed in Baroda, a princely state in Gujarat. He said he spent twelve hours a day learning Hindustani, which enabled him to pass the Hindustani examination in Bombay in April 1843. [4] He then began to learn Gujarati and Sanskrit, but his linguistic abilities were already recognised, and he was appointed interpreter to his regiment on 26 June 1843. On 16 December, he passed the Gujarati examination : it was probably on this occasion that he was given the nickname White Nigger by his fellow students.

On 1 January 1844, his regiment left Bombay for a post in Karachi, in Sindh, which the army of the East India Company had conquered a few months earlier. During the journey, he met an important figure, Captain Walter Scott, the namesake of the famous Scottish writer, who belonged to the Bombay Engineers and whose mission was to survey the canals of Sindh. On his arrival in Karachi, Burton joined the close team of the conqueror, General Napier. By his admission, Burton was fascinated by Napier and went so far as to speak of the conqueror’s ’enlightened despotism’. [5] He claims that the peasants acclaimed Napier and that he had freed all the enslaved Africans in Sindh. In September, Burton found time to sit the Mahrati (or Marathi) examination in Bombay before joining Captain Scott’s team, which Napier had entrusted with guarding the canals of Sindh.

As assistant canal surveyor, Burton travelled the length and breadth of Sindh between 1844 and 1849. He describes his work as a canal surveyor, which left him enough time to gather information about falconry, which he had been interested in as a child in Blois, France. This information was published in his third book on Sindh in 1852. On 1 October 1844, he went to Bombay to take the Mahrati examination, his third in a year and a half. He completed his training in Indian languages by passing the Persian examination in 1847 and the Sindhi and Punjabi examinations in 1848. Then, during a stay in Karachi, he helped found the Scinde Association, of which he was honorary secretary, which published its newspaper, the Karrachee Advertiser, described by Burton as a ’lithographed sheet’. [6] It is regrettable, however, that he did not write more extensively about the association’s activities. During an extended tour of northern Sindh, he collected data on the language of the Jats, which he published in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. [7]

This orientalist activity should not obscure that Burton was a British army officer whose greatest desire was to fight. Unfortunately for him, he arrived in India after the Afghanistan campaign, too late to take part in the Sindh campaign and left before the Punjab campaign. He was disappointed to miss these opportunities to fight to distinguish himself, if not to cover himself with glory, in combat. This dream became even more distant when he fell ill in July 1846, for which he was given two years’ leave. He suffered from rheumatic ophthalmia and was recommended to go to a sanatorium in the Nilgiris. [8]

He stayed there for a year, travelling to Goa and Calicut, learning Telugu and Toda languages and improving his knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He published his first book in 1851, titled Goa, and the Blue Mountains ; or Six Months of Sick Leave. After passing the Persian examination in Bombay, he returned to Sindh in October 1847, where he resumed his post as assistant surveyor. Nevertheless, another attack of rheumatic ophthalmia forced him to leave India and return to England in March 1849. He arrived in Bombay in 1842 at age 21, and left India seven years later, in 1849, after spending just over four full years in Sindh.

He then became a professional explorer, usually financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London. In 1853, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and between 1854 and 1856, he explored East Africa, from Somalia to the Great Lakes. He was seriously injured when a spear was thrust into his cheek. He then redirected his investigations towards the United States, Salt Lake City, where he began to study the Mormons. In 1861, he got married and decided to become a diplomat and British consul, holding successive posts on the island of Fernando Po in Equatorial Guinea, Santos in Brazil and Damascus in Syria, where he stayed for three years and became friends with the Emir Abd al-Qadir (Abdel Kader). [9] In 1872, he was reassigned to Trieste, then to Austria-Hungary, where he died in 1890. [10]

From Orientalist Knowledge to an Ethnographic Approach

In the preface to his Sindh, Burton warns the reader : ’The learned Orientalist will find little that merits his attention in the following pages’, before saying that his ’intention is to write a study of interest to the linguist and the ethnographer’. Two elements have particularly struck Burton’s contemporaries and biographers : his ability to learn languages and the ease with which he slipped into an Oriental persona. These were the two pillars of the method he used to study and maybe spy on local populations. His deception consisted of posing as a half-Arab, half-Persian trader from the Persian Gulf port of Bushir. Under the name Mullah Abdullah, he passed himself off as a seller of women’s lingerie, which gave him access to the inside of homes. However, he had to flee a location several times because he had been discovered. So, disguise alone does not explain how Burton obtained all the information he reports in his books. Another explanation concerns his exceptional ability to learn languages.

Clearly, Burton’s sojourns abroad, particularly in France and Italy, exposed him early on to the need to speak several languages. This “training”, therefore, played a fundamental role in the matter, to which must be added the classical training in Greek and Latin that he received at school. For oriental languages, Burton went to university, but he admits : ’(...) there was no one to teach me, so I started to teach myself, and to write the Arabic letters from left to right, instead of right to left, in other words the wrong way round. Gayangos, who witnessed this, burst out laughing and showed me how to copy the alphabet. At that time, learning Arabic at Oxford was not easy”. [11]

As soon as he learned Arabic, he developed his method : ’My system of learning a language in two months was purely my invention and suited me perfectly. I got myself a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked the forms and words I knew to be necessary, and learnt them by heart by keeping them in my pocket and looking at them at free times of the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an hour at a time because after that, the brain lost its freshness. When I had learned some three hundred words, which is easily done in a week, I went through an easy book (one of the Gospels is the easiest to read) and underlined every word I wanted to remember so as to read over my pencils at least once a day’. [12]

In India, he learned most of the vernacular languages with the help of a munshi, an administrative officer working for the British. This old Parsi priest taught him Gujarati, his mother tongue, Persian, and Hindustani. Burton devoted twelve hours a day to the latter.

Burton published four books on Sindh, two of which were published in the same year as his book on Goa, 1851, on an apparently identical subject, the first entitled Scinde or the Unhappy Valley (hereafter Scinde), [13] and the second Sindh and the races that inhabited the Valley of the Indus (hereafter Sindh). [14] In the preface of the latter, he explains that he discusses “the manners and customs of a barbarous or semi-civilized race”. The other two works are different : one is strictly devoted to falconry in Sindh, [15] but includes a postscript in which he explains his approach techniques for integrating himself into local society, and the second, Sindh Revisited, is a sort of update of his two 1851 works on the occasion of a brief stay in Sindh after nearly thirty years. [16] Nevertheless, some authors, such as Ben Grant, consider Sindh Revisited to be the edited version of Scinde. However, it is much more than that, although its structure is inspired by it, as it is more akin to a travelogue than an ethnographic study, as his Sindh was.

There are, of course, repetitions from one to the other, but Burton himself makes the distinction when he writes in the first about the population : ’(...) I have given a minute description in an ethnological book on Scinde’. [17] The original intention of these two works is different. The narrative framework of the first is a travelogue based on geography, supplemented by historical accounts, anecdotes and descriptions of places, sites and people, sometimes including relatively long digressions. The non-academic nature of The Unhappy Valley is further underlined by the fact that Burton’s many quotations are not referenced, regardless of the language in which they are given.

Burton never completed his university studies. He mainly learnt Oriental languages in private lessons. However, the training he received was indeed that of an Orientalist, in which language learning and the study of literature played a key role. But given his background, he is an Orientalist of a special kind. In fact, he was highly critical of ‘institutional’ Orientalists. In this respect, one of his favourite targets is a category of Orientalists, those who have never left the confort of their study and who, as a result, argue using only second-hand sources. Nevertheless, they like to tell the truth. In a posthumously published book, Burton devotes an entire chapter to refuting a French Orientalist who claimed to have been the first to establish a link between the Gypsies [18] and the Jats of the Indus Valley. His words were harsh enough, describing him as “a cabinet litterateur, who borrows laboriously from others, and who evidently expects his second-hand works to be epoch-making”. [19]

Although Burton was a non-conformist Orientalist, he remained an Orientalist. It is likely that the official Orientalists much more influenced Burton than he himself realised. This is obvious as he, like William Jones before him, saw Persian as the final paradigm of Oriental literature. Consequently, all other Oriental literatures, especially those in vernacular languages such as Sindhi, had to be assessed against the Persian paradigm. And like official Orientalists, Burton believed that vernacular languages were corrupted versions of a pure original language, like French or Spanish, about Latin.

Language was essential for the British and Europeans to assess the society whose members used it. The first step was to determine whether it really was a language, i.e. whether it was a distinct language or a dialectal form of another language. Pre-Burtonian orientalists thought Sindhi was a Punjabi, Hindustani or even Marwari dialect. In 1812, MacMurdo observed that it was close to Sanskrit and contained more words derived from Sanskrit than Gujarati. [20] He added that Sindhi contained a large proportion of Punjabi and that ’many consider it a dialect of that language’. [21] In 1829 Delhoste claimed that Sindhi was ’a mixture of Hindee, Pushtoo and Punjabi’. [22] However, another question concerned the determination of its boundaries. Several orientalists raised the question of where it began geographically and ended. They often noted that it was not easy, for example, to identify the boundaries between Siraiki and Sindhi.

However, despite the sometimes contemptuous vocabulary he used, he could not hide his admiration for literature. After dealing with language and dialects, Burton addressed the question of Sindhi literature in the third chapter of his Sindh. He is rather complimentary : ’... it may be safely asserted that no vernacular dialect of India, at the time we took possession of the country, possessed more original compositions, and few possessed as many’. [23] According to him, between 200 and 300 manuscripts have been collected. He adds that there should be a great deal of poetry throughout the country that has not been collected and probably never will be. However, in the 19th century, manuscripts were considered books, and for Burton, so many manuscripts were clear evidence of the idea that the Sindhis had a body of literature.

When the commissioner of Sindh, Sir Bartle Frere, decided to replace Persian as the official language alongside English with Sindhi, it became urgent to select an official alphabet. In the early 1850s, two British officers were considered the best specialists in Sindhi : Captain George Stack (d. 1853) and Burton. Stack was also the author of three important works that made him a great authority on the subject : an English–Sindhi dictionary and grammar in 1849 and a posthumous Sindhi–English dictionary published in 1855. In his grammar, Stack provided a table showing the 17 scripts used to write Sindhi. Given the multiplicity of scripts in use, one had to be chosen. George Stack advocated using Khudawadi, although he had printed his three books in Devanagari. [24]

Burton, for his part, advocated the Naskh script for writing the Sindhi language. In passing, he criticised the transliteration of oriental languages proposed by William Jones and John Gilchrist. [25] Burton was convinced that Khudawadi was a kind of corrupted Gurmukhi, and that while this alphabet was perfect for Punjabi, it was imperfect for Sindhi. In addition, contrary to Stack’s assertion, he was convinced that this alphabet was little known to the people. Moreover, Khudawadi was confined to ’a peculiar, though influential, caste of Hindus, and even among them, it is known only to traders, and generally neglected by Moonshees and Amils’. [26] In the end, Burton’s arguments were the most convincing, and Sir Bartle Frere decided that Naskh would be the official alphabet for writing Sindhi.

Terminology and Classification

For Burton, mastery of the language and knowledge of literature were a prerequisite for understanding the people of a region and their social organisation. The period during which he wrote about Sindh was one of transition in knowledge and colonisation. Orientalism, to give a symbolic date, was born with the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by William Jones in 1784. Orientalism was an intellectual project based on a systematic study of languages, literature, laws, and religious beliefs. It was the period of translations of the sacred books, which, according to the British of the time, constituted a privileged means of gaining access to knowledge of the Indians. Burton refers to Jones a number of times in his writings which shows the influence he had on him, but which in no way prevented Burton from criticising him from time to time.

After Burton, and especially after the censuses of 1871–1872, a new phase began in which the Orientalist approach was combined with ethnological considerations. The work of British officers placed caste at the centre of their interest because, for them, it was the best way of knowing and understanding the Indians. Chris Fuller stated that scientific knowledge could ostensibly legitimate imperial rule. [27] In any case, Burton was chronologically at the crossroads of these two phases : perhaps he could even be considered a precursor in this field.

His ethnographic approach flourished particularly in the third work he published on Sindh in 1851, Sindh or the Inhabitants of the Indus Valley, with the relatively inadequate subtitle ’Notes on the Topography and History of the Province’. Burton confesses elsewhere that he wrote this work between 1845 and 1849. [28] It should be noted from the outset that this publication was entirely part of the British imperial project since it was financed by and dedicated to the court of directors of the East India Company. Burton was also a lieutenant in the 18th Bombay Infantry Regiment of the East India Company army. As mentioned above, he presented his work as an ethnographic survey rather than an orientalist or travelogue. This study followed on a report he published in 1847, only three years after the conquest, on the customs, language and literature of the population of Sindh.

This article sets out the broad divisions he drew among the population, between Sindhis proper and ’naturalised’ Sindhis, while pointing out that the Sindhi is generally taller and more robust than other Indians, dark-skinned, solid and muscular. [29] This report, which the British government of India probably commissioned, is purely descriptive and follows on from other reports written by other British officers, such as Del Hoste, Postans and MacMurdo. However, it is more detailed and precise. To some extent, Burton’s ethnographic descriptions indicate the state of ethnographic knowledge at his time, in the mid-19th century, and what Indian colonial ethnography had contributed to it. Nevertheless, before going into detail, it should be noted that he makes minimal reference to his predecessors, except on specific points such as their observations of the Indus River. The quality of his descriptions, their thoroughness and precision, are certainly innovative, but so too is the importance he gives to minorities and marginalised populations, be they outcaste groups, those he calls half-Muslim and half-Hindu, such as the Khojas, or the descendants of slaves, the Shidis.

Edward Said was quick to point out Burton’s rare ability to analyse human societies. He wrote that Burton ’had an instinctive knowledge of the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes. His vast knowledge of the East, which pervades every page he wrote, indicates that he knew that the East in general and Islam in particular were systems of information, behaviour and belief and that to be Oriental or Muslim was to know things in a certain way, and that these were of course subject to history, geography and the evolution of society in its own circumstances’. [30]

By the time Burton arrived in India, two books on the Muslims of the empire had been published in the same year, 1832. [31] Burton mentions both, but it is clear that the work composed in Urdu by Jafar Sharif, and translated into English by G. A. Herklots, played an essential role as a kind of model in the organisation of his study. In his Sindh Revisited, published in 1877, Burton wrote that, despite its errors, he ’knew of no other book on the Muslims of South India more deserving of reprinting, with notes and corrections’, which William Crooke did in 1921. [32] Crooke did not fail to reproduce Burton’s quotation in his introduction for the reprint, presenting him as ’an eminent authority on these matters’. [33]

As with Jafar Sharif, Burton’s ethnography is still based on observing customs, habits, traditions, and ceremonies. He mainly uses these terms, in fact especially the latter, to describe rites, a term he rarely uses. In contrast, Jafar Sharif’s book uses it in the subtitle : ’a complete and detailed description of their various rites and ceremonies from the moment of birth to the hour of death’. As Jafar Sharif had done, Burton also devotes a large part of his book to the rituals of marriage and death, in roughly equal measure for Muslims and Hindus.

The ethnographic data he gathers are precious, not only because they provide vital information for historical anthropology but also because, to date, no such detailed ethnographic study has been carried out, apart from academic work in Sindhi. Burton observes that many of the rituals performed by Muslims were borrowed from Hindus, such as the drop of water that the dying man must swallow before giving up the ghost. He also devotes much attention to distributing ritual roles without attempting to develop theories or even ask simple questions. For example, he does not ask why, in specific ritual roles, Brahmans can be seconded, or even replaced, by young virgin girls. To better understand the limitations of Burton’s ethnography, we need to return to the vocabulary he uses, which is imprecise, if not confusing. It is important to remember here that these terms were far from being precisely defined at the time Burton wrote. In his writings, four terms are redundant : class, tribe, race and caste. Nonetheless for him, the term race was the all-encompassing term, and we know that Burton was a polygenist, which means that he believed in a plurality of human races, and not, as the monogenists claim, that all humans came from the same origin. This said, he claims that the Muslims and the Hindus of Sindh belonged to two different races, the term of “race” in 19th-century India being commonly used to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims. [34]

But according to him, the races were to be classified in a triptych chart : civilised, a term used only for Europeans ; barbaric, which he uses for the dominant groups in India, sometimes with nuances such as semi-barbaric ; and savage, which he uses to describe the rest of the population. Another redundant term he uses to describe the lowest status groups, such as the untouchables, is vile, meaning worthy of contempt. Burton illustrates the place of the Sindhis in the hierarchy of races by repeatedly comparing them to the Saxons just after William the Conqueror’s Norman invasion (1066). He sometimes compares the Talpurs, who ruled the independent state of Sindh from 1783 until the British conquest in 1843, to the Normans and the rest of the Sindhis to the Saxons. He also compares the Baloch to the Welsh, both of whom are “semi-Barbarian races”. [35]

In his book Scinde, Burton explains what a caste is while recalling the Portuguese origin of the term casta : ’Caste, in this part of the Eastern world, unites the population of a territory into a large number of distinct bodies, each of which presents a particular resemblance to the other, and generally a resemblance of face and form characteristic of the race’. [36] Although his definition of caste is not very precise, we can see the cleavage between varna (caste) and jati (distinct body). Burton, like his predecessors and successors, tries to fit the subdivisions of the Hindus into the varna system. The varna is the foundation of the Brahmanic organisation of society. For Burton, this society is made up of four varnas placed in a hierarchical situation, with priests (Brahmans) at the top, followed by warriors (Kshatriyas), merchants (Vaishyas) and craftsmen (Shudras). Each varna comprises an infinite number of castes known as jatis. In the fourth group, some jatis are pure, but others are impure. A fifth group is rejected from the system : the outcastes or untouchables called Achuts in Sindh and Chandalas in some parts of north-west India.

Burton attaches importance to the Jats and Jatki in his work because this is the group he most closely associated with during his professional visits to northern Sindh. Another reason for his interest in the Jats was that he saw them as the origin of the European Gypsies. [37] As we have seen, he published a study of Jatki grammar as early as 1849. Indeed, in his posthumous work published in 1893, he devoted over 150 pages to the Gypsies and the Jats. This is probably why he attributes one of the only technical ethnological terms he uses to the language of the Jats : the word ‘kaum’ (qawm), which he translates as clan. [38] This polysemous term of Arabic origin is used in all the region’s languages to designate a social unit within Muslim populations. Its meaning varies widely according to territory and context, ranging from clan to nation (in its modern acceptance). [39] However, Burton is convinced that the Jats were originally outcastes but says that they were ’not Hindu Pariahs’ without giving any further explanation. However, the term pariah should not be taken as a technical term because, by Burton’s time, it had already become part of everyday language, in English and in French, from the beginning of the 17th century via Portuguese.

As far as Burton’s classifications and terminology are concerned, there is one last term he uses : aboriginal. [40] For example, he considers the Jats to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the Indus Valley. [41] Furthermore, Burton makes rare references to the aborigines of America ; [42] it should be noted that he published his works on Sindh in the same year 1851 as Lewis Morgan (1818–1881) published his famous The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. Nevertheless, we do not know whether he was aware of it, although he did make a quick reference to North American Indians in Sindh Revisited. [43] The first occurrence of the word aborigine in his Grammar of Jatki Language is dated 1849. For him, the term “aborigine” does not refer to a category to classify the population. In his posthumous work, he explains the problem about the Jats : “These tribes are looked upon as aborigines, which simply means that their predecessors are unknown”. [44] In Sindh Revisited (1877), he reiterated : “Our authors are probably right when they supposed the Jat to be the aboriginal Hindu of Sind converted to Islam”. [45] This is a very pragmatic explanation, which finally implies they are the original, meaning the first, inhabitants of the Indus Valley.

The Question of Purity as a Pillar of Burtonian Ethnography

It must be remembered that Burton was writing at a time when caste had not yet been considered the fundamental unit of Indian society, nor indeed the famous opposition between castes and tribes, which would flourish at the end of the century in the form of the publication of Tribes and Castes of various provinces of the empire. [46] It was not until some twenty years later that ’official anthropologists’, to paraphrase Chris Fuller, such as Denzil Ibbetson (1847–1908), the 1881 Punjab superintendent who would end his career as lieutenant-governor of the Punjab were able to benefit from the extensive data collected during the first census of 1871–72. [47]

In Burtonian ethnography, the organisation of Sindhi society, whether for Muslims or Hindus, is based mainly on the division between the pure and the impure. He observed that a Muslim tribe may be outcasted after its members have been banished from society because of its activity, which is considered impure. Nevertheless, Burton sees no contradiction between his assertion that there is no caste in Islam and what he writes about these outcaste Muslim “tribes”. This quasi-functional approach, in which activity confers status rather than the structure of social organisation, contradicts him. Burton does not pursue his observations, which, had they been pursued, might have led him to reflect further. His descriptions provide proof that despite conversion to Islam, the groups that were impure in the Hindu system remained so since they did not change their activity when they converted.

Their impurity, from which comes their inferior, even outcaste status, was not obliterated by their conversion to Islam. For the Bale Shahis, this goes as far as preventing them from entering a mosque, even though they are circumcised, married by the mollas, the Muslim religious specialists, and therefore recognised as Muslims. This status derives above all from their activity since they are professional sweepers. Burton understands one of the sources of impurity of status in the Hindu caste system is professional activity, but he does not realise that these activities are always either in contact with dirt or with death. However, Burton adds another explanation for this outcast status : they eat carrion, i.e. dead animals that they have not killed themselves, let alone ritually (halal) according to Islamic law. For this reason, no Muslim or Hindu will ever share a meal with them. In addition to the degrading, and therefore impure, activity, this is a second strong marker of status in the caste system : commensality. No one eats with an outcaste, otherwise he or she could be contaminated and lose their status.

The second group of Muslim outcastes are the Shikaris or Daphers. Burton states that they are ’if possible, an even more degraded race than the Bale Shahis’ and that there is something wild and savage about their appearance. [48] However, as their name, Shikaris, indicates, they are professional hunters, many of whom have become farmers. So there is no question here of any degrading activity, except that as hunters of jackals, lynxes, wild pigs and giant lizards, they work with dead animals. They, too, eat carrion and are forbidden to enter mosques, although they are married and buried by mollas. Burton mentions, however, that they can be good Muslims by undergoing a ritual. A fire is lit, and the Shikari must stand in the centre of it to purify himself. Then the qadi (Muslim judge) bathes him, gives him new clothes and instructs him in the rudiments of Islam. The Shikari was then integrated into the group of Machis, fishermen on the Indus whose status was not vile but low, and who were very poor. [49]

The majority of Hindu Sindhis, whom Burton describes in the same sentence as forming a tribe and then a caste, belong to the category of Vaishyas. Of the seven groups he enumerates, only one belongs to the Shudras : the goldsmiths (Sonaros). He adds that in Sindh, the Sonaros constitute a ’servile tribe’. There are also Brahmans, but no Kshatriya. This last assertion is both surprising and false. Surprising, given Burton’s acuity when it comes to gathering information, and false because the Rajputs of the eastern part of the province fall into this category.

In the Brahmanic system, the only people allowed to wear the cord (janeo) are theoretically Brahmans. However, Burton observes that in Sindh, the Shudras have adopted the janeo, and that they “imitate” the sectarian mark, and all the manners, diet and clothing of the Baniyas, the generic term for Hindu traders. Here again, Burton does not make a system of it ; he merely notes that this phenomenon can be compared with that of the Nairs of Malabar and other similar castes of India, who ’with functions and employment, have taken to themselves the rights of a family of higher status’. [50] In the case of Sindh, this phenomenon of imitating the higher castes to improve one’s status concerns castes considered low status but which are not untouchable. This is the case, for example, of dyers (Khattis), but tanners (Mochis), who are untouchable because they work with the skins of dead animals, are excluded.

Burton is also interested in the question of purity and its pollution through inter-caste marriages. In collecting accounts of the formation of castes, he noted that not only status but also the place occupied in the Brahmanic system is often explained by marriage between people belonging to castes of different status. Such mismatches can also lead to splits within a caste and the formation of a new caste, which, even if it belongs to the same varna, is of lower status than the one from which it came. Burton cites the case of the Brahmans. An important Brahman jati in Sindh is that of the Pokarnas, but its status is inferior to that of another Brahman caste, the Sarsudhs. This is because a Pokarna Brahman married a Mohana woman belonging to a group of fishermen of relatively low status, he qualified as “semi-savage” in Sindhi Revisited. [51] As a result, the Pokarnas are inferior to the Sarsudhs and are less subject to Brahmanical rules, although they are recognised as Brahmans. [52]

Another characteristic feature of Burtonian ethnography is his interest in marginal groups insofar as they reveal the social order and its hierarchies. He devoted several pages to Hindu outcasts such as the Kohlis, Bhils and Menghwars. He mocks the latter for trying to imitate the upper castes and does not mince words when describing them as ’one of the most savage classes’. Always concerned with marginal situations, he was interested in the conversion of Hindus to Islam and, above all, in their return to Hinduism. Burton studied the conditions under which this return is sometimes possible. He notes that when Hindus are in the majority in a city, as in Karachi, this return is impossible. He wrote that in Karachi, a convert was not readmitted to his caste because he was circumcised and had eaten impure food. [53] On the other hand, when Hindus were in the minority, as in Shikarpur, return was possible after following a ritual protocol.

The impetrant must first seek permission from the caste council and, if it agrees, go to a Brahman. The Brahman shears his hair, and the newcomer spends a week in the jungle feeding cows. His house is then smeared with cow dung to purify it. He must also make offerings to the Brahmans, go on a pilgrimage, and finally make donations to the members of the caste into which he has been reintegrated. Burton rightly considers that, here again, it is questions of purity that are at stake and that prevail in these choices, but they can be put into perspective depending on the importance of the group in a given place. If it is in the minority, it must accept a new member who can only strengthen it.

Richard F. Burton, a “Missing Ancestor” ?

One of the arguments developed above is that Burton has facilitated and acted as a precursor in the gradual transition that has taken place from an Orientalist approach to India to an ethnological approach. To take this analysis further, we now need to ask ourselves two questions : on the one hand, how did Burton position himself about the debates on ethnology and anthropology that were developing in London ? And secondly, how was his work received, or not, by theorists such as Ibbetson, who wrote the first significant syntheses after the appearance of censuses ?

Regarding the first point, we must go back to the state of ethnographic knowledge of India before Burton arrived there. The term was used for the first time by a German scholar, August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809), with the form ethnographisch, in the 1771–72 at the University of Göttingen. [54] Still, Rohan-Csermak claims that Ampère invented the word “ethnologie” in 1830, and included this new science in his chart of the classification of the sciences. According to him, ethnologie focuses on “l’organisation des sociétés humaines” and is a branch of the “sciences anthropologiques”. [55] When Burton arrived in India in 1844, several ethnographic works on India had already been published. For example, John Malcolm published his Essay on the Bhils in 1827, and in 1828 G. W. Traill published his personal observations on the aborigines of India. [56] In 1847, Burton was still in India when Brian H. Hodgson (1800–1894) published his work On the Kocch, Bódo and Dhimál tribes, coined by Pels as “a model of ethnological research among both ethnologists and orientalists”. [57]

The first works of ethnology appeared when Burton was already in India. He does not mention them, but it should be noted that historians of British Indian ethnology do not include Jafar Sharif’s book, that which Burton refers to most, in their work. It is true that, at the beginning of the 19th century, ethnology had not yet been defined, but the work published by Jafar Sharif contains a great deal of data, in particular the famous ’mores and customs’, which would later be incorporated into the field of this new science.

It has already been pointed out that a turning point in our knowledge of Indian society came with the introduction of the census. When Burton returned to Sindh in the 1870s, the first census had been taken in 1871–1872. He refers to the Gazetteer on Sindh that A. W. Hughes drew from the information collected in this census. Hughes’ Gazetteer was devoted to the population and is mainly borrowed from Burton. When Hughes came to the language issue, he again abundantly referenced Burton, and he mimicked Burton’s distinction about the people, but he used a renovated vocabulary. He differentiates the Sindhis “properly so-called” and the “naturalised” Sindis. [58]In his Sindh Revisited, Burton quoted Hughes’s Gazetteer about twelve times, calling it “a mine of information”, but also pointing out an error on one occasion. [59] Burton was to be widely reproduced, often verbatim, by the other two gazetteers, the last of which was published in 1968, more than a century after Burton’s works on Sindh. [60]

But Burton’s recognition did not go beyond the limits of British officials working in Sindh. None of those who published extensively from the 1870s onwards, whose works were studied by Fuller, mentioned him. This surprising situation led Andrew Lyons to write an article on Burton titled “Missing Ancestors and Missing Narratives”, in which he asks why Burton, along with others, does not appear in the histories of anthropology. In his view, there are several possible explanations. One of them was that he was excessive. [61] For example, although it was a widely shared ideology, his racism was particularly virulent against black Africans. [62] His anti-Semitism is also evident due to a dispute he had with Jews in Damascus, the consequence of which was that he was recalled from his position as British consul in Damascus. Burton even went so far as to subscribe to wild rumours that Jews practised human sacrifice and the ritual slaughter of Christian children. [63] Another point was Burton’s interest in sexuality, which made him a sulphurous figure in Victorian England. [64]

Another explanation is that Burton’s “ethnographic” work varies significantly in quality due to his time in the field. Last, Burton was a touche à tout, whose interests varied widely, so much so that they took him to three continents. When he returned to Sindh in the 1870s, he had lost interest in India and, therefore, in the works devoted to it. Notwithstanding his tumultuous life, Burton participated in debates on the emerging sciences of ethnology and anthropology.

Shortly after the publication of his ethnographic books on Sindh, when he had become a diplomat, Burton helped to found the Anthropological Society of London (ASL). Founded in 1863 with James Hunt, it was a spin-off from the Ethnographical Society of London, itself a spin-off from the Aborigines’ Protection Society. [65] This society, founded in 1837 by British Quakers, campaigned for respect for the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly within the British Empire, while simultaneously working for the abolition of slavery. Then, in 1842, it redefined its objective : to record the history and promote the advancement of uncivilised tribes. In 1843, the Ethnological Society of London was founded by members who felt that the Aborigines’ Protection Society’s humanist aims were too far removed from the scientific approach.

Burton is generally presented as the co-founder of the ASL, but the real leader was James Hunt. James Hunt (1833–1869) had been a member of the Ethnological Society of London, and its secretary for some years. The founders of the ASL were against the admission of women, and they argued for a physiological approach to race instead of the ESL’s philological view. [66] Furthermore, Hunt was an outspoken slaveholder and opposed the idea that Christian missions could ever convert Africans. His lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on ’Negro’s Place in Nature’ earned him boos and hisses. [67] The ASL was also anti-Darwinian, [68] but, above all, Hunt wanted to combine politics and religion with anthropology. In 1869, the ASL went bankrupt, and after Hunt’s death, Burton and a few others tried to revive it, but to no avail. It was absorbed in 1875 by the new Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, founded in 1871. The contents of the Memoirs published by the ASL for 1865–1866, which are transcripts of lectures, indicate that cranial anthropometry was the foundation of the society, as most of the publications are devoted to it. It is true that, as Rainger points out, Burton was the only prominent figure in the ASL who was not a specialist in physical anthropology, [69] especially since, as we have already seen, he presented himself as an ethnographer, not an anthropologist.

However, while including political and social issues may have initially attracted British intellectuals, it caused many to leave the ASL. Along with Hunt, Burton is said to have lobbied the British government to cut funding for missions in West Africa. These issues were discussed directly within the ASL itself. [70] In the same issue of Memoirs, we find a publication by Paul Broca, who was then a foreign member of the ASL, devoted to the new instrument for measuring skulls that he had just invented, the goniometer. [71] There was also a very brief paper by Burton, then one of the four vice presidents of the ASL, entitled ’Notes on a Hermaphrodite’. According to what he writes, he was asked to make this communication. [72] While working as a consul in Santos, Brazil, he explains on two pages that during a visit to Saint Vincent, in the Azores, he was allowed to observe a hermaphrodite resulting from a marriage between first cousins, whose sister was albino. He gave a detailed description of the genitals without any comment or reflection.

It does not remain easy to establish whether there is a clear difference between the assertions made by Hunt, and therefore the ASL, and the assertions made by Burton, which are based on his ethnographic observation in his works on the populations of Sindh, bearing in mind that they are separated by some fifteen years. Burton is not without his contradictions ; far from it. However, while the ASL’s credo was to assert that physical character took precedence over linguistic characteristics in defining and classifying populations, [73] we have seen the extent to which language and especially literature were decisive criteria for him. Given Hunt’s views, the ASL defended unorthodox positions, and this “anti-institutional” feature of the ASL may have attracted Burton.

In any case, Burton joined the ASL, not the Ethnological Society, even though he presented himself as an ethnologist rather than an anthropologist. This discrepancy can be put down to ideology. Burton did not adhere to the approach of the Ethnological Society, but rather to that of the Anthropological Society. However, the term referred almost exclusively to physical anthropology at that time. This type of contradiction had no consequences for Burton at a time when these terms were far from fixed. For example, in their speeches at Burton’s farewell dinner, Lord Stanley described him as a geographer, while Hunt called him an anthropologist. [74]

Conclusion

Burton’s main contribution to the humanities and social sciences, at the risk of anachronism, is to have linked the interest his Orientalist predecessors took in languages and literature with knowledge of the field. Therefore, he was an Orientalist in the sense that he considered language the starting point for understanding a people. However, he was also convinced that a society could not be known or understood solely based on its literature. This is where Burton is most innovative and more than just an Orientalist. Indeed, something fundamental distinguishes him from his predecessors : the ethnographic project.

Richard Burton arrived in India when ethnology had not yet been established as a scientific discipline, despite the existence of the Ethnological Society of London, which he had not joined. He challenged the standards of official orientalism, particularly those that imposed a hierarchy between superior and inferior languages. Admittedly, Burton is not always consistent in this respect since he may describe Sindhi as a barbaric dialect while also mentioning the beauty of its poetry, as in the case of Shah Abd al-Latif, whom he places on the same level as Hafez (1325–1390), the great poet of Persia.

His ethnographic approach is evident in his descriptions of the social organisation of the Sindhis. However, Burton was initially trained as an Orientalist, albeit briefly at Oxford and then in the Indian field. As far as ethnology was concerned, he was more of a self-taught man since his references to any debates on these new sciences in his time are always fleeting. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that Burton shared the racist prejudices of his time, often with excess. He was a founder member of the ASL, which was much more conservative than the ESL : he was, therefore, racist and anti-abolitionist. The vocabulary he used to refer to the group to which the Sindhis belonged was unclear, although this was not unusual in his day. For example, he pays little attention to possible distinctions between caste and race.

However, he refers to the clan, citing the vernacular term kaum (qawm), as the determining element in the structuring of the group. Moreover, he identifies rituals as ensuring their reproduction and cohesion. Although he does not elaborate or theorise on what he observes, he does note that purity plays a decisive role in the organisation of society, a principle that concerns Hindus and Muslims alike. For him, the social status of the groups that make up Indian society depends on their degree of purity : it is through purity that status groups are determined and delimited. It is, therefore, impurity that excludes some from normative sociability, that marginalises or excludes them. Nevertheless, by focusing on minorities such as Muslim outcasts and Hindus who have converted to Islam and who want to become Hindus again, Burton informs us that despite these ideological restrictions, there are ways of reintegrating individuals through purification rituals.

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