Indid race

The Indid race is an obsolete term for the physical type most common among populations native to the Indian subcontinent.[1][2] The Indid type was classified as belonging to the greater Caucasoid race in 19th and 20th century anthropological literature.[1][3]

A Khatri man from the city of Lahore in colonial India (1859)

Physiognomy

American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon described the Indid race as occupying the Indian subcontinent, beginning from the Khyber Pass.[4] Coon wrote that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region."[5] Indologists, such as those in the All-India Oriental Conference, described in 1941 the Indid type to constitute a standard set of features:[6]

Indid: Consisting of the main body of the people of India: slim, graceful body, thin bones, medium height, long head, long face, brown skin, black wavy hair, protruding narrow forehead, triangular nose, weak chin.[6]

The Royal Society of Letters at Lund likewise stated in 1946 that the Indid type possessed a narrow forehead and large eye sockets.[7] John Montgomery Cooper, an American ethnologist and Roman Catholic priest, on 26 April 1945 in a hearing before the United States Senate "To Permit all people from India residing in the United States to be Naturalized" recorded:[8]

The people of India are predominantly Caucasoid. Their features, hair texture, hairiness, the shape of the nose, mouth, and so on, are all distinctly Caucasoid. It is only in some of the far, out-of-the-way places of India, as in this country, that you find certain traces of other races.[8]

German physical anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (1892–1965) made two subdivisions of the Indid race: (1) the North Indid type, which he stated was typified by people such as the Todas of the Nilgiri Mountains and Rajputs from Rajasthan; and (2) the Gracile Indid type, which he stated was represented by people such as the Bengalis.[9][10] The Romani people, being among the oldest members of the Indian diaspora, were classified as being of the Indid type.[11]

The theory propounded by German comparative philologists in the 1840s and 1850s "maintained that the speakers of Indo-European languages in India, Persia, and Europe were of the same culture and race."[12] This led to a distinction between the majority Indo-Aryan peoples of northern India and the less populous speakers of Dravidian languages, located mostly in southern India with pockets in the Baluchistan Province in the northwest and in the eastern corner of the Bihar Province.[12][13] Notwithstanding, Dravidians came to be classified as belonging to the Caucasian race by 19th and 20th-century anthropologists.[14]

In 1929, the editor of Vreme in discussing the Miss Yugoslavia Competition wrote that the Yugoslavs were a heterogeneous group, "defined by blond hair and blue eyes, with admixtures of northern Asian and Indid races, Slav tribes, and old Balkan races such as the Thracians."[3]

See also

References
  1. Man in India, Volumes 87-88. Serials Publications. 2007. p. 401. The Indid group mostly comprises the Hindu castes and the Muslims, who may be considered as Caucasoid in origin.
  2. Iyer, L. A. Krishna (1995). Man in Kerala: Twelve Anthropological Essays Selected from Writings of (Padma Bushan) L.A. Krishna Iyer (also Incorporating Five Appendices). Centre for Training and Research in Anthropology & Management. p. 136. By number and expansion, the most important race of the population of the Indian sub-continent is the Indid race.
  3. McMahon, Richard (2019). National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945. University of Nebraska Press. p. 315. ISBN 978-1-4962-0582-7.
  4. Carleton S. Coon (1939). The Races of Europe. Dalcassian Publishing Company. p. 287.
  5. Coon, Carleton Stevens; Hunt, Edward E. (1966). The Living Races of Man. Cape. p. 207.
  6. Proceedings and Transactions of the All-India Oriental Conference, Volume 10. All-India Oriental Conference. 1941. p. 485.
  7. Årsberättelse - Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund: Bulletin de la Société Royale Des Lettres de Lund. CWK Gleerup. 1946. p. 47.
  8. To Permit All People from India Residing in the United States to be Naturalized: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, Seventy-ninth Congress, First Session, on S. 236. April 26, 1945. United States Senate Committee on Immigration. 26 April 1945. pp. 5–6.
  9. Malhotra, K.C.; Vasulu, T.C. (2019). "Development of typological classification and its relationship to microdifferentiation in ethnic India". Journal of Biosciences. 44 (64): 64.
  10. Sharma, Ram Nath; Sharma, Rajendra K. (1997). Anthropology. Atlantic Publishers. p. 122. ISBN 978-81-7156-673-0.
  11. Wolf, Josef (1971). Integral Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man, Culture and Society. Statni Pedagogicke Nakladatelstvi. p. 200. The gypsies, who are actually of Indian origin and come from the North-West India region, are also akin to this Indid type.
  12. Veer, Peter van der (14 January 2014). Conversion to Modernities. Routledge. p. 130. ISBN 978-1-136-66183-9. Caldwell's articulation of the racial and historical basis of the Aryan-Dravidian divide was, in fact, perhaps the first European valorization of the Dravidian category cast specifically in racial terms, though he admitted the likelihood of considerable racial intermixture. At the same time, Caldwell was merely modifying conventional wisdom in his uncritical acceptance of an Aryan theory of race, in which Dravidians were seen as pre-Aryan inhabitants of India. The Aryan theory of race, based as it was on William Jones's well-known "discovery" of the Indo-Aryan family of languages, had been developed by German comparative philologists in the 1840s and 1850s. It maintained that the speakers of Indo-European languages in India, Persia, and Europe were of the same culture and race.
  13. Kuiper, Kathleen (15 August 2010). The Culture of India. Rosen Publishing. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-61530-149-2. Dravidian languages are spoken by about one-fourth of all Indians, overwhelmingly in southern India. Dravidian speakers among tribal people (e.g., Gonds) in central India, in eastern Bihar, and in the Brahui-speaking region of the distant Pakistani province of Balochistan suggest a much wider distribution in ancient times.
  14. Playne, Somerset; Wright, Arnold (1915). Southern India, Its History, People, Commerce, and Industrial Resources. Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Company. p. 69.
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