Robert Vane Russell was a British officer of the Indian Civil Service in the Central Provinces and the principal compiler of *The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India* (four volumes, 1916), one of the great Edwardian ethnographic encyclopaedias of colonial India. Volume 1 contains the general descriptive matter and the longer articles on the major castes and tribes of the region.

This edition reproduces the standard public-domain text in full.