The Anthropologist Kerala Forgot

By: Devaki Vadakepat Menon
In 1901, a science professor in Cochin was tasked with documenting the tribes and castes of Malayalam-speaking South India for the British Empire. Diwan Bahadur L K Ananthakrishna Iyer, a native of Palakkad with no background in anthropology, would not only complete that assignment but reshape the discipline entirely, fundamentally altering how Western institutions perceived South Indian populations. On Feb 25, the academic world quietly marked the 89th death anniversary of this pioneering anthropologist, whose name is recognised in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge yet remains largely unknown in his home state of Kerala.

Iyer’s legacy begins within Britain’s expanding colonial endeavour. Between the 19th and 20th centuries, the Crown employed ethnographers to study colonized peoples, producing knowledge essential for governing unfamiliar territories and populations. However, anthropology in its nascence favoured the hegemony of the European civilisation, infusing colonial scholarship with racially prejudiced theories like evolutionism, which ranked ethnicities on a ladder from barbaric to civilised with Europeans at the apex; and primitivism, which posited that non-Western peoples were intellectually, biologically, and technologically inferior. By portraying non-Europeans as unintelligent and incapable of self-governance, anthropologists became instrumental in justifying colonization.

In India, Britain’s largest colony, censuses with the physical measurements of Indians were issued to scientifically assert the nation’s backwardness. In 1901, Herbert Risley, then census-commissioner of British India, announced the Raj’s most ambitious anthropological survey yet: A decade-long nationwide initiative, for which superintendents of Ethnography were appointed in each province and princely state. In Cochin, the Maharaja employed Lakshminarayanapuram Ananthakrishna Iyer, a distinguished professor at Ernakulam college, to represent the kingdom in Risley’s project. What followed was a decade of rebellious, groundbreaking fieldwork.

Between 1902 and 1912, Iyer documented 50 Malayali communities, producing over 100 photographs now archived at the University of Cambridge. His innovative two-part ethnography, “Cochin Tribes and Castes” (1908-1912), presented the lives of Cochin’s populace unlike any before. Rejecting the armchair orthodoxy of his time, Iyer instrumentalized his nativeness to live alongside his subjects, reporting what mattered to each community rather than what the Crown expected of him. Dedicating his volumes to raising alarms about the disappearance of customs, mythologies, material culture, and lifestyles of his fellow Malayalis, Iyer challenged the findings of established anthropologists like Risley, who insisted Indians were fossils stuck within the evolutionary process.

As a Tamil Brahmin in the 20th century, Iyer’s European contemporaries expected him to adhere to reservations about inter-caste interactions. However, his photographs of relaxed subjects of various social standing, taken inside homes, workplaces, and restricted religious sites, reflect an intimacy that those norms should have prevented. “Cochin Tribes” introduced realities of social injustice, into which Iyer embedded power disparities and plights endured by Malayalis under caste and colonial rule. By rejecting hierarchical imperialism in his own fieldwork, he debunked the established colonial portrayal of Indian society’s social divisions as stagnant. “Cochin Tribes” argued that Malayali societies, including his own, were rapidly transforming. Anthropology, then, was not to reify prejudice; but to understand what cultural practices were changing and why.

After his abrupt international success, Iyer established India’s first department of Anthropology in 1921, at the University of Calcutta. Prior to this, he had helped establish the Thrissur Zoo and State Museum (1913). The Govt of Mysore later tasked him with producing a four-volume ethnography of Mysorean tribes (1928-1931). In the 1930s, Iyer was invited to present his findings on South Indian ethnology at Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, and anthropological institutions across Europe. Upon his return, the Govt of India awarded him the title of Dewan Bahadur for the development and international recognition of Indian anthropology.

Iyer’s contributions to anthropology, a discipline that holds a mirror to colonial pasts and us, are essential to Indian history. As he had predicted, the ways of life documented in “Cochin Tribes” faded shortly after his death. His rare photographs, which capture a world preserved largely in memory, can be accessed through a digital exhibition on the MAA Digital Lab platform at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These images remain some of the most dignified visual records of early 20th century Kerala and anthropology in existence.

Iyer died on Feb 25, 1937. He left behind twelve publications, four decades of fieldwork, a museum, and a methodology that modern anthropology now considers foundational. His research was carried forward by his son; and then the late anthropologist P R G Mathur, who founded the Ananthakrishna Iyer International Centre for Anthropological Studies (AICAS) in 1971. However, Iyer’s legacy is largely invisible today. AICAS has since become defunct; the Thrissur State Museum, where exhibits may still harbour Iyer’s handwriting, is oblivious to his foundational contributions; Iyer’s home-turned-library in Lakshminarayanapuram lies in ruins; and despite his efforts, anthropology remains alien to India’s academic and sociocultural landscapes.

Further traces of Iyer may be found in Kerala’s libraries, foreign institutions that honoured him, and in the journals of his European colleagues. The process of bringing Iyer, and anthropology’s relevance, back into Indian attention is ongoing.

(The writer is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford)