The Anthropologist Kerala Forgot
By: Devaki Vadakepat Menon
On Feb 25 this year, the academic world quietly marked the 89th death anniversary of a man whose name is recognized in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, yet remains largely unknown in his home state of Kerala. Diwan Bahadur L K Ananthakrishna Iyer was a pioneering anthropologist who reshaped the discipline in India at the height of British imperial rule. In an era when ethnographic scholarship was exclusive to Europeans, his work fundamentally altered how Western institutions perceived south Indian populations.
Today, anthropologists study societies on the principle that no culture is superior to another. A century ago, this was a controversial position. Dominant anthropological frameworks of the time included unilineal evolution, which proposed that all societies progress from barbarism to civilization, with Europeans at the apex; and primitivism, the belief that non-Western peoples were intellectually and biologically inferior. Anthropology had race scholars and phrenologists who indexed the facial features of African and Asian peoples to “prove” lesser intelligence. By classifying non-Western societies as primitive and incapable of self-governance, anthropologists helped reframe oppression as civilizing. Racist, prejudiced observations were weaponized by the empire to justify colonialism.
In 19th and early 20th century India, colonial anthropology became a vital instrument of governance. The empire’s largest and most diverse colony, exceeding 200 million people, posed its greatest administrative challenge. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, a mass uprising that destabilised the Crown's establishment, brought on an epiphany. British administrators realized that controlling a population required understanding it first. Anthropologists were appointed alongside administrators and tasked with producing ethnographic censuses that catalogued, classified, and systematically infantilized Indian communities, reinforcing caste hierarchies in the process.
One such initiative was announced in 1901 by Herbert Risley, British India's census commissioner. His project sought to document India's tribes and castes through physical measurement, classifying Indian castes as racial types, a task crucial to the academic and administrative aims of the Raj. Superintendents of ethnography were appointed across provinces and princely states. In Cochin, the Maharaja chose Lakshminarayanapuram Krishna Ananthakrishna Iyer, a distinguished professor at Ernakulam College with no formal anthropological training, to represent the state in Risley's survey.
What followed was a decade of groundbreaking fieldwork. Between 1902 and 1912, Iyer documented 50 Malayali communities and produced over a hundred photographs, now archived at the University of Cambridge. His two-part ethnography, “The Cochin Tribes and Castes” (1908 and 1912), detailed the origins, social organization and customs of Cochin's hill and jungle-dwelling communities. Unlike his contemporaries, Iyer used his nativeness to gain insider access to each group. He documented what mattered to his subjects, not merely what the Crown's ethnographic brief required. His monographs introduced realities of social injustice, embedding accounts of power disparities and the hardships faced by Malayalis under caste and colonial rule.
The Cochin series marked a clear departure from prevailing ethnographic practice. Iyer rejected armchair cultural imperialism in favour of emic fieldwork, the process of integrating into a community to understand its customs, mythologies and struggles from within. He challenged established figures like Risley, who viewed Indians as living fossils in human evolution, and debunked the colonial portrayal of Indian society’s social divisions as stagnant. “Cochin Tribes and Castes” argued that Malayali lives were rapidly transforming, and that anthropology's task was to document cultural practices before they became obsolete.
Following his unexpected international recognition, Iyer established India's first department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta in 1921. He had earlier helped establish the Thrissur Zoo and State Museum between 1913 and 1914. Mysore govt later commissioned a four-volume ethnography of Mysorean tribes, completed between 1928 and 1931. In the 1930s, Iyer presented his findings at Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum and at anthropological institutions across Europe. On his return, the Govt of India awarded him the title of Dewan Bahadur, recognizing his contributions to the development of Indian anthropology and the international visibility he brought to Malabar.
Iyer’s legacy seems largely invisible today. The Thrissur State Museum’s exhibits likely harbour his handwriting, yet the institution is oblivious to his foundational contributions; Iyer’s home in Lakshminarayanapuram lies in ruins; and despite his efforts, anthropology remains alien to Kerala’s academic landscape.
Iyer died on February 25, 1937, leaving behind 12 publications, four decades of fieldwork, a museum and a methodology that modern anthropology now considers foundational. The anthropologist P R G Mathur carried his work forward, founding the Ananthakrishna Iyer International Centre for Anthropological Studies in 1971. His rare photographs, one of the most dignified visual records of early 20th century Kerala in existence, remain digitally accessible through the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The task of bringing Iyer, and anthropology’s relevance, back to public attention in India is still ongoing.
(The writer is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford)
On Feb 25 this year, the academic world quietly marked the 89th death anniversary of a man whose name is recognized in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, yet remains largely unknown in his home state of Kerala. Diwan Bahadur L K Ananthakrishna Iyer was a pioneering anthropologist who reshaped the discipline in India at the height of British imperial rule. In an era when ethnographic scholarship was exclusive to Europeans, his work fundamentally altered how Western institutions perceived south Indian populations.
Today, anthropologists study societies on the principle that no culture is superior to another. A century ago, this was a controversial position. Dominant anthropological frameworks of the time included unilineal evolution, which proposed that all societies progress from barbarism to civilization, with Europeans at the apex; and primitivism, the belief that non-Western peoples were intellectually and biologically inferior. Anthropology had race scholars and phrenologists who indexed the facial features of African and Asian peoples to “prove” lesser intelligence. By classifying non-Western societies as primitive and incapable of self-governance, anthropologists helped reframe oppression as civilizing. Racist, prejudiced observations were weaponized by the empire to justify colonialism.
In 19th and early 20th century India, colonial anthropology became a vital instrument of governance. The empire’s largest and most diverse colony, exceeding 200 million people, posed its greatest administrative challenge. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, a mass uprising that destabilised the Crown's establishment, brought on an epiphany. British administrators realized that controlling a population required understanding it first. Anthropologists were appointed alongside administrators and tasked with producing ethnographic censuses that catalogued, classified, and systematically infantilized Indian communities, reinforcing caste hierarchies in the process.
One such initiative was announced in 1901 by Herbert Risley, British India's census commissioner. His project sought to document India's tribes and castes through physical measurement, classifying Indian castes as racial types, a task crucial to the academic and administrative aims of the Raj. Superintendents of ethnography were appointed across provinces and princely states. In Cochin, the Maharaja chose Lakshminarayanapuram Krishna Ananthakrishna Iyer, a distinguished professor at Ernakulam College with no formal anthropological training, to represent the state in Risley's survey.
What followed was a decade of groundbreaking fieldwork. Between 1902 and 1912, Iyer documented 50 Malayali communities and produced over a hundred photographs, now archived at the University of Cambridge. His two-part ethnography, “The Cochin Tribes and Castes” (1908 and 1912), detailed the origins, social organization and customs of Cochin's hill and jungle-dwelling communities. Unlike his contemporaries, Iyer used his nativeness to gain insider access to each group. He documented what mattered to his subjects, not merely what the Crown's ethnographic brief required. His monographs introduced realities of social injustice, embedding accounts of power disparities and the hardships faced by Malayalis under caste and colonial rule.
The Cochin series marked a clear departure from prevailing ethnographic practice. Iyer rejected armchair cultural imperialism in favour of emic fieldwork, the process of integrating into a community to understand its customs, mythologies and struggles from within. He challenged established figures like Risley, who viewed Indians as living fossils in human evolution, and debunked the colonial portrayal of Indian society’s social divisions as stagnant. “Cochin Tribes and Castes” argued that Malayali lives were rapidly transforming, and that anthropology's task was to document cultural practices before they became obsolete.
Following his unexpected international recognition, Iyer established India's first department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta in 1921. He had earlier helped establish the Thrissur Zoo and State Museum between 1913 and 1914. Mysore govt later commissioned a four-volume ethnography of Mysorean tribes, completed between 1928 and 1931. In the 1930s, Iyer presented his findings at Oxford's Pitt-Rivers Museum and at anthropological institutions across Europe. On his return, the Govt of India awarded him the title of Dewan Bahadur, recognizing his contributions to the development of Indian anthropology and the international visibility he brought to Malabar.
Iyer’s legacy seems largely invisible today. The Thrissur State Museum’s exhibits likely harbour his handwriting, yet the institution is oblivious to his foundational contributions; Iyer’s home in Lakshminarayanapuram lies in ruins; and despite his efforts, anthropology remains alien to Kerala’s academic landscape.
Iyer died on February 25, 1937, leaving behind 12 publications, four decades of fieldwork, a museum and a methodology that modern anthropology now considers foundational. The anthropologist P R G Mathur carried his work forward, founding the Ananthakrishna Iyer International Centre for Anthropological Studies in 1971. His rare photographs, one of the most dignified visual records of early 20th century Kerala in existence, remain digitally accessible through the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The task of bringing Iyer, and anthropology’s relevance, back to public attention in India is still ongoing.
(The writer is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford)
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