Background

Harry Verrier Holman Elwin was born on the 29 th of August, 1902 in Dover. He was the son of Edmund Henry Elwin, Bishop of Sierra Leone.

Education

Verrier Elwin was educated at Dean Close School and Merton College, Oxford, where in 1943 he received his degrees of Bachelor of Arts First Class in English Language and Literature, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Science. He also remained the President of Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU) in 1925.

Career

In 1926 Verrier Elwin was appointed Vice-Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and in the following year he became a lecturer at Merton College, Oxford.

He went to India in 1927 as a missionary. He first joined Christian Service Society in Pune. The first time he visited the central India, now the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and parts of eastern Maharashtra, was with an Indian from Pune, Shamrao Hivale. Their studies are on the tribes are some of the earliest anthropological studies in the country. In 1931 Elwin was sent by Mahatma Gandhi to work in Tribal Areas. In 1954 he became an Indian citizen. He served as the Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India upon its formation in 1945. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appointed him as an adviser on tribal affairs for north-eastern India, and later he was Anthropological Adviser to the Government of NEFA, Shillong.

Elwin died in Delhi on 22 February 1964 after a heart attack.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Myths of the North East Frontier of India: 380 Stories

    (This book contains some 380 stories collected in the remo...)

  • The Oxford India Elwin

    (The Oxford India Elwin looks beyond the general and the o...)

  • The Muria and Their Ghotul

    (This work, Elwin's magnum opus, focuses on the Muria ghot...)

  • The Baiga

    (The Baiga tribe is one of the important tribes in Central...)

  • The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: an Autobiography
  • The Tribal Art of Middle India: A Personal Record
  • Tribal Myths of Orissa

Membership

• Chairman

  Multipurpose Tribal Blocks Committee

• Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission

Connections

Elwin married a Raj Gond tribal girl called Kosi who was a student at his school at Raythwar (Raithwar) in Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh on 4 April 1940. They had one son, Jawaharlal (Kumar), born in 1941. Elwin had an ex-parte divorce in 1949, at the Calcutta High Court.

In 2006 Kosi was still living in a hut in Raythwar, their son Kumar having died. Elwin remarried a woman called Lila, belonging to the Pardhan Gond tribe in nearby Patangarh, moving with her to Shillong in the early 1950s. They had three sons, Wasant, Nakul and Ashok.

His widow Lila died in Mumbai in 2013, aged about 80, shortly after the demise of their eldest son, Wasant.

Father:

Edmund Elwin

References

• Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India This book by Ramachandra Guha is both biography and history, an exploration through Elwin's life of some of the great debates of the twentieth century: the future of development, cultural assimilation versus cultural difference, the political practice of postcolonial as opposed to colonial governments, and the moral practice of writers and intellectuals.
  1999
• Against Ecological Romanticism: Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-Modern Tribal Identity Archana Prasad has examined genesis of certain vision found in the work of Verrier Elwin, the grand old man of Indian anthropology and tribal policy, and has shown how it links up with the contemporary realities of ethnicity, caste and community in India and a hegemonic Hindutva politics.
  2003