O’Malley, Lewis Sydney Steward (1874-1941)
L. S. S. O’Malley, one of the most scholarly colonial anthropologists in British India, was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who spent his career in Bengal. He edited the revised Bengal District Gazetteers and wrote 30 of the 38 volumes himself, which were mostly published in 1906-11; he then became the superintendent of the 1911 census of Bengal and completed his report in 1913. O’Malley wrote four books in retirement in England. The most significant and original were Indian Caste Customs (1932), the first work to describe and explain caste as a pan-Indian hierarchical system similarly to a modern, synchronic structural approach, and Popular Hinduism: The Religion of the Masses (1935), which made the unity and diversity of ordinary people’s Hinduism throughout the subcontinent more intelligible than any other work on the topic published until many years later. O’Malley also edited a multidisciplinary volume, Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interactions of their Civilizations (1941), and wrote a large part of it with a wide-ranging combination of historical and anthropological material. Even in the 2020s, these three works in particular still look uncommonly modern compared with other colonial anthropological literature on India.
Keywords: Social anthropology | History | British colonialism | First half of the 20th century | Last quarter of the 19th century | United Kingdom | India | Caste | Folk religion | Hinduism
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