In 1825, Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner (1778–1841) compiled a Persian manuscript on the customs, culture, and castes of India, illustrated with 120 paintings. The Public Domain Review’s collection presents it as one of the strangest artefacts of the early British Raj — and as a case study in how empire recruited the very people it racialised.

Skinner’s position was contradictory at every joint:

  • Son of a Scottish East India Company officer and (he claimed) a kidnapped Bhojpuri noblewoman.
  • Initially excluded from Company service on account of his race; brought back in after his irregular cavalry — Skinner’s Horse — distinguished itself in the service of the Mughal Empire.
  • Later decorated by the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II as Nasir al-dawlah, Kirnil Jams Iskinar, Bahadur, Ghalib Jang.
  • Spoke Persian better than he spoke English, and participated enthusiastically in late Mughal intellectual and artistic culture.

The only English text in the book is a pencil gift inscription: “History of the origin and distinguishing marks of the different Castes of India, compiled by Lt. Col. J. Skinner, CB, whose gift it is to the present possessor, JW.”

The classificatory ambition is the point. The English title given in that inscription reflects growing British interest in the Vedic caste system — but al-aqvām, in classical Persian, refers more broadly to “ethnicity”. The Oxford English title narrows what the Persian leaves open.

The paintings themselves are among the most famous expressions of the “Company Style”, invented by Mughal court painters Ghulam Murtaza Khan (1760–1840) and his nephew ʿAlī Khan (fl. 1817–1852) under East India Company patronage — probably the work of ʿAlī, in watercolour rather than traditional gouache, with figures looser in pose and outline than his uncle’s. Bear hunters, dyers over their pits, ear cleaners, ploughmen, a kalavānt musician rendered down to the tiny duck at the base of his instrument. Everyone, it seems, loves hookah.

Two details in the text do the heaviest lifting:

  • Skinner was routinely leaned on as a “native informer” by arriving British commanders — precisely because his race kept him from full belonging despite his British education and loyalties.
  • His mother killed herself when he was twelve, after her daughters were sent away to English-style boarding school.

And the ending: on Skinner’s death, his son Hercules was admitted to the elite Nizam’s Contingent — whose officers were required to be British — via an exception applied for by Lord William Bentinck, on the grounds that Hercules had spent seven or eight years “receiving the education of an English gentleman.” Skinner earned his son’s promotion. Hercules would never be one of the figures in the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām.

This is what ethnographic classification looked like from inside: an apparatus of rule assembled by a man whose usefulness to empire depended on his exclusion from it. Worth reading as a companion to the PDR’s other South Asian and Islamic manuscript collections — and as a reminder that “customs and culture” documentation was rarely a neutral act.