B. S. Guha was born in 1894 and began by being a student of philosophy, obtaining his Masters degree from Calcutta University. He then became a student of Anthropology. He was also interested in natural history, antiquarianism and primitive tribes. He had been interested by the work of Prof. Dixon, and having obtained the Hemenway Fellowship, went to Harvard University, and did his Masters and Ph.D. in Anthropology on ‘The Racial Basis of the Caste System’ from there in 1924. He studied all the branches of Anthropology, and worked under the famous Anthropologist Ernest A. Hooton, R. B. Dixon and A. M. Tozzer. By the time he came back to India after four years, Anthropology had begun in India at Calcutta University. He joined the Department, but later went on to join a post as an Anthropologist in the Zoological Survey of India from 1927. This became the central point of growth for the subject here, and in 1931 was responsible for the Census Operations work. In 1936 he found the Indian Anthropological Institute in Calcutta using amateur ethnographers.
He became a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal and then became its Honorary Secretary. His efforts ensured the creation of an Anthropological Survey of India from its parent Zoological Survey of India in 1946, whose first director was B. S. Guha. He went on to create several training and extension programmes for social workers and social scientists. In 1955-56 he was invited to organize a training centre for Social Education Organisers (Extension Officer for India’s Community Development Programme) working in tribal areas. He also contributed to the founding of the Indian Museum, Calcutta and the Bihar Tribal Research Institute, Ranchi (which became a centre for tribal researches from 1956-59). The Ranchi Institute was reorganized into six sections – Cultural Anthropology, Physical Anthropology and Human Biology, Linguistics, History, Social Psychology, Biometrics and Statistics. Each had a head and several research assistants. A good library and a rich museum came up under him. There was a division on Primitive Art and Photography.
He had visited several tribes in Assam and Bengal before he went to Harvard. In the United States he worked among the Utes and the Navajos of Colorado and New Mexico in 1921 as a Special Research Officer of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He was in the expedition to the Naga Hills for abolishing human sacrifices near the Burmese border between 1926-27. He went to Chittral in north-west Baluchistan (now in Pakistan) to solve the problem of the linguistic affinity of the tribes of Central India and the Brahuis of the NorthWest Frontier. He had also worked for some years on the Khasas. He believed strongly in fieldwork and would advocate it strongly. He disliked theoretical work done with insufficient field data. He created a field station of the Anthropological Survey in the Andaman Islands in 1952.
His researches in the Anthropological Survey of India seemed to be based on the osteological studies of historic and prehistoric human remains from materials excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India and a continuation of the study of anthropometry of the Indian population that was started at the request of the 1931 Census operations.
He wrote the Report on the Human Remains Excavated at Nal in 1929, at Mohenjodaro in 1931 and 1937, Racial Affinities of the Peoples of India in the Census of India for 1931, Vol. I, Part III in 1935 and Racial Elements in the Population in 1944. He contributed to the creation of a racial map of India. In order to do this, he collected anthropometric measurements of 2511 subjects from various parts of India (in its undivided form) representing 34 population groups. He then discovered in 1937 the racial elements which seem to have entered the population of India.
- Negritos
- Proto-Australoid
- Mongoloids
- Mediterranean
- Western Brachycephaly
- Nordics
He published only fifteen papers and books in all but he ensured that Anthropology survived and grew in India as a holistic discipline integrating all the various sub-disciplines and linking them to the various other scientific and social science fields. At the time of his death he had been working for the Ministry of Education, Government of India, reconstructing prehistoric skulls from North Western India. He died in 1961.