In nineteenth-century European ethnological scholarship, the concept of race rested on the identification of essential human characteristics of a social group that were transmitted from one generation to the other on a biological or quasibiological basis. Rigorous empirical methods of human sciences were used to define the racial features of all human races and ordered them on a progressive scale of evolutionary human progress. In the new racial ethnology, only certain races—those with more “voluminous brains” and highly evolved “mental faculties”—were thought to be capable of achieving the state of moral and political order that constituted “civilization.” In the theory of ontogenesis, propounded by Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the “primitive” or “savage” races were cited as examples of the embryonic form of societies, thereby demonstrating the stages of progress that Western societies had achieved. The colonizing intent of evolutionary biology was rooted in the very logic of the argument of stages of progress, as Colin Rhodes argues: “It was, of course, only a short step for European science to arrive at the racist assumptions that different groups progress at different speeds, that the West had produced the highest example of mankind and had proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually gaining control of the earth through colonial enterprise.”

In the scientific enterprises of evolutionary racial ethnology, nineteenthcentury India was turned into an important source of empirical data for the demonstration of the stages of progress that mankind was able to achieve in the transition from “primitive” to “advanced” societies. As an “endowment of physiological and moral proclivities,” Indian races were put on a comparative taxonomic index of humankind as a “primitive” stock of the Aryan population, which ranked lower in the evolutionary scale of human progress to that of European societies.