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ramAprasAd chanda (1873-1942)

from RC Majumdar: The History of Bengal vol.1

ch. XV: Society in early Bengal p. 560

Sir Herbert Risley, to whom belongs the credit for the first scientific investigation of the origin of the Indian peoples, traced the round-headed element among the Bengalis to Dravidian and Mongoloid admixture.

The late rai bahadur R. P. Chanda, who was the first to oppose Risley's theory of the mongolo-dravidian origin of the bengalis, derived them from the homo alpinus type, a very brachy-cephalic population of aryan or indo-european speech living in the pre-historic period in the pamirs and the taklamakan desert. Mr. chanda was of opinion that when immigrants of the homo alpinus type entered india, they found the middle portion of the gangetic plain in possession of the vedic aryans, and therefore found their way to the lower gangetic plain across the tableland of central India.

from Kenneth Kennedy, Aryans in the prehistoric skeletal record S Asia?

		in Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia_ (1995), ed. George Erdosy 
    
Anthropometric data collected from castes and tribes in India were analyzed
by Herbert Risley, Commissioner of the Census of India for 1901.  [The
People Of India, 1908].  Anthropometric data was an integral part of of
the census report and in 1905, when appointed director of the Ethnographic
Survey of India, Risley was able to expand his study of anthropometry.  It
soon became apparent that dolichocephaly [longer ratio of length to width
of head] prevailed in highest frequencies in all ranks of society in the
provinces representing Vedic Aryandom and among many living brahmans.  But
the assumption that dolichocephaly and Aryanism were inseparable was
threatened by Risley's observations that longheadedness was also very
frequent among Dravidian speaking populations of South India.  Furthermore,
not all brahmans of N India were dolichocephalic, some having
embarrassingly broad heads! p.47

Risley's solution to this dilemma was to derive the broadheaded populations
of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Coorg to post-Vedic Scythian admixture, while the 
broadheaded Bengalis and Oriyas were the consequences of Mongolian
intermixture.  

But this was an intolerable thesis to Ramaprasad Chanda whose book 
The Indo-Aryan Races (1916) was the first book in English by an Indian
scholar on this subject.  In order to retain the pure lines of descent of
modern brahmans to Vedic Aryans, Chanda took refuge in the Hoernle-Grierson
linguistic thesis of two waves of Aryan migrations.  He decided that the home
of the brachycephalic Aryans lay beyond the Indus in Baluchistan and
Afghanistan, where living Baluch and Pathan people sport meso- and
brachycephalic heads whence issues Aryan (Iranian) speech.  These outlandic
Indo-Aryans made up the latest wave of invation of Vedic people into regions
where broad-headedness is predominant today. 48