"Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 3 of 7" by Edgar Thurston is a seven-volume encyclopedia published in 1909. Part of the British Ethnographic Survey of India, this monumental work documents over 300 castes and tribes across Madras Presidency and surrounding princely states. Thurston investigated social customs, physical characteristics, and traditions of over 40 million people, employing anthropometric methods despite local suspicions and resistance. The work reflects both ambitious ethnographic documentation and the controversial racial theories of its era. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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