Delineate the major features of S. S. Sarkar’s classification of Indian populations. Was his classification better than Risley? Explain. (Answer in 250 words)

- Delineate the major features of S. S. Sarkar’s classification of Indian populations. Was his classification better than Risley? Explain. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
S. S. Sarkar's classification, set out in The Aboriginal Races of India (1954), was built on skeletal series and blood-group frequencies. Risley's, framed for the 1901 Census, rested on the nasal index and on caste.

Body
1. Sarkar's scheme: he retained a small number of racial elements — Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean, a brachycephalic Alpine-Dinaric element and Nordic — but treated them as successive migrational strata rather than as a ranked order. His evidence was wider: living anthropometry, ancient crania from Baluchistan, Sind and the Punjab, and pioneering serological work on ABO and other blood-group frequencies, which he argued were genetic and therefore more reliable than plastic external features.
2. Risley's scheme: seven types — Turko-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid and Dravidian — derived chiefly from the nasal index, with the celebrated claim that social precedence varies inversely with the width of the nose.
3. The comparison: Risley made race the explanation of caste, so the classification confirmed the hierarchy it was measuring, and it rested on one index taken by untrained enumerators. Sarkar used multiple characters, added a genetic marker independent of environment, drew on excavated skeletal populations, and did not tie racial element to ritual rank.
4. The verdict: Sarkar's was clearly the better classification, on evidence and on logic.

Conclusion
Both remain typological, and neither survives modern genetics, which finds no discrete races and describes Indian ancestry as admixture of Ancestral North and South Indian components. Sarkar is superseded; Risley was wrong in principle.