Adrian Mayer obituary

My friend and former work colleague Adrian Mayer, who has died aged 102, was a social anthropologist renowned for a 1950s study of an Indian village that showed how the caste system, while based on ancient religious beliefs and linked to the system of kinship, was quite separate from divisions based on wealth or class.

Adrian carried out his research in the village of Jamgod, Madhya Pradesh, in 1954 and 1955, while he was a research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). His fieldwork there allowed him to participate in the daily life of villagers over an extended period and so to form fine-grained observations about how the caste system was integrated into people’s daily lives.

He set out his conclusions in a book, Caste and Kinship in Central India (1960), which shone a light on areas that had hitherto been hidden to most western eyes.

Later he studied Indian populations overseas, and in particular how the caste system fared when taken abroad. He spent most of his career in the anthropology department at Soas University of London, where he taught me and where we eventually became colleagues when I joined Soas as a lecturer.

Adrian was born in London to Dorothy Piper, a writer and soloist with the Carl Rosa Opera Company of Liverpool, and Sir Robert Mayer, a musician who sponsored the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Educated at Bryanston school in Dorset, he did a liberal arts degree in the US at St John’s College in Annapolis and on his return to the UK joined the Friends Ambulance Unit during the second world war, spending 1944 to 1946 in India distributing food and milk across the country. During this time, on separate occasions, he met and spoke to Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and years later could remember the exact details of those conversations.

Having developed a fascination with India, Adrian studied Hindi at Soas in 1947 and afterwards earned a postgraduate diploma in anthropology at the LSE, followed by a PhD at the same institution.

He then spent nearly six years as a research fellow at the ANU, which funded his fieldwork in Jamgod, before returning to Soas to become a lecturer in 1956. Over the next 29 years he was to enjoy a distinguished career there, and for the last eight years of his employment he was head of department, retiring in 1985 as professor of Asian anthropology.

Adrian also served the wider community of British anthropologists as editor of its premier journal, Man (1964-69), president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1983-85) and chair of the social anthropology committee of the Social Science Research Council (1973-79). Aside from his 1960 study on caste, he wrote four other books, plus many journal articles – the last in 2012, when he was 90.

His wife, Kaia (nee Suhr), an artist, whom he married in 1949, died in 2006. He is survived by their daughters, Claudia and Camilla, and grandchildren, Zoe and Georgina.