R. V. Russell

Robert Vane Russell (1873–1915) was a British official of the Indian Civil Service. Posted to the Central Provinces, he was placed in charge of the ethnographic survey of the province and spent over a decade gathering material on its castes and tribes with the help of Rai Bahadur Hira Lal and a network of local correspondents. The result, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (1916), in four volumes, remains the fullest ethnographic survey of the region. Russell did not live to see it published: he died in December 1915 when the liner Persia, on which he was returning to India, was torpedoed in the Mediterranean.