Culture and development

First, there was the ethnographic tradition, of recording the customs and beliefs of tribes and castes, which had been initiat ed by the colonial government and cultivated by scholarly civil. servants. In fact this tradition had had its beginnings in Bengal itself when, in 1807, Francis Buchanon was appointed by the Governor-General to undertake an ethnographic survey of 'the conditions of the inhabitants of Bengal and their religion' (Majumdar 1947, p. 40f.). People outside the government, in cluding the intelligentsia, had also contributed to this stream of scholarly work of a descriptive, factual nature.

Second, with the introduction of anthropology in the curricula of Calcutta University in 1920, a formal theoretical underpinning for ethnographic work had come to be provided by its being linked to theories of culture and social organization then prevalent in academic circles in the West, particularly in Britain. The concept of culture that appears to have been dominant was that of Tylor's celebrated formulation of it as 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society'