Who among the following British ethnographers launched the Survey of India project in the 1860ӳ ?

The project to systematically survey and document the people of India in the 1860s was launched by William Wilson Hunter. In 1869, the Government of India appointed Hunter to organize a comprehensive statistical survey of the Indian Empire, which eventually led to the publication of 'The Imperial Gazetteer of India'. While Herbert Hope Risley was a prominent ethnographer and served as the Director of Ethnography for India, his major survey work and the formal Ethnographic Survey of India project commenced later, around 1901. The 1860s timeline specifically aligns with Hunter's initiative to compile statistical and ethnographic data across various provinces to aid British administration. Other figures like Thurston and Risley were instrumental in later anthropometric and ethnographic documentation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [1].

Sources

1. [1] https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/2673943/1995_Bates.pdf