in a game of chess. He has a greater and deeper commitment, namely, that in India he has to draw a lesson from what he observes, so that he can utilize his knowledge in the attainment of the egalitarian ideal which our nation has set before itself as its goal. If he also accepts this ideal, then, with his superior analytical apparatus, and the use of comparisons and synthetic thinking, he can suggest many modifications in the ways in which the government or leaders of society are trying to bring about justice where injustice prevails today. And this is where anthropology has a very significant role to play and a heavy responsibility to bear (Bose 1974: iv). The empirical tradition of Indian anthropology was continued by the People of India project launched by the Anthropological Survey of India by its Director General Dr.K.S.Singh. The People of India project started in October 1985 and its objectives were to (i) generate a brief, descriptive anthropological profile of all the communities of India and (ii) the impact on them of change and development processes and the links that bring them together.From 1985-1992 as many as 4635 communities in all the states and union territories of India were identified and described out of the 6748 listed initially. As many as 600 scholars participated in this project, including 19 from 26 institutions. About 100 workshops and rounds of discussions were held in all the states and union territories, and in these about 3000 scholars participated. The outputs of this project have already been published under several volumes. In the post-independence period the Indian anthropologists also became interested in the task of nation building, which was evident in the notable works done by T.C. Das on Bengal famine and B.S.Guha, the founder director of the Anthropological Survey of India on the social tensions among the Bengali refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan in an UNESCO project. The work of T.C.Das who was a teacher at the Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University on the Great Bengal Famine was published in 1949. This was a unique study which depicted the misery of the famine affected people of Bengal through the anthropological method of fieldwork and was published by the University of Calcutta in 1949. Much later, T.C.Das's firsthand empirical information on Bengal famine was profusely used by the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen and the American historian Mark Tauger