Career
Russell served as Superintendent of Census Operations for the 1901 census of India. Together with an amateur archaeologist, Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, Russell compiled The Castes and Tribes of the Central Provinces, published in 1916. This work was a product of the Ethnographic Survey of India that had been established in 1901, although it differed somewhat from earlier publications of similar origin because it relied more on Vedic literature than on the anthropometric methods and theories of Herbert Hope Risley and his sympathisers as a mechanism for investigation of the racial origins of caste.
According to Crispin Bates, this "highly anecdotal book was influenced by Emile Senart"s Les Castes dans L"Inde and
Thus although occupational descriptions were used, particularly in distinguishing the different ranks of Aryans, the hierarchy remained extreme (and definitively racial) in a form that was still probably unrecognisable to most participants in the social system itself at this time.
In this way, although Risley"s anthropometry had become unfashionable his views
persisted. Russell died when the Steamship Persia was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Crete on 30 December 1915.
