 As time went on, the ethnographic studies and their resultant categorisations were embodied in numerous official publications and became an essential part of the British administrative mechanism; of those categorisations it was caste that was regarded to be, in Risley's words, "the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society".The desire for ethnographic studies was expressed by another Raj administrator, Denzil Ibbetson, in his 1883 report on the 1881 census of Punjab