"Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7" by Edgar Thurston is a seven-volume encyclopedia published in 1909. Part of the Ethnographic Survey of India project, this ambitious work documents the manners, customs, and physical characteristics of over 300 castes and tribes across southern India, covering more than 40 million people. Using controversial anthropometric methods, Thurston faced significant resistance from suspicious subjects who feared his true intentions, resulting in a complex record of tribal life that remains both historically valuable and methodologically contested. (This is an automatically generated summary.)