Reverend John Takle – a New Zealander working as a missionary in Bengal – used the most recent "scientific" evidence that tracked intermarriage between Muslim and native races to supposedly prove a long-standing conclusion. In 1911 he stated, "The anthropometric survey made by government proves conclusively that the vast majority of the Mohammedans in India are converts from among the depressed Hindu communities."

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of scientific racism from the era — colonial anthropometry used to legitimize social hierarchies in other colonial contexts (e.g., phrenology, cranial measurement). QUESTION: What was the actual quality and methodology of this 1911 anthropometric survey? Worth chasing how flimsy the underlying data was.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 89