Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66
by Projit Bihari Mukharji
University of Chicago Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-226-82300-3 | Cloth: 978-0-226-82299-0 | Paper: 978-0-226-82301-0 Library of Congress Classification DS430.M79 2022 Dewey Decimal Classification 305.800954
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK A unique narrative structure brings the history of race science in mid-twentieth-century India to vivid life.
There has been a recent explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but most have focused either on Europe or on North America and Australia. In this stirring history, Projit Bihari Mukharji illustrates how India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making—not merely as footnotes to a Western history of “normal science.”
The book comprises seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels—conceptual, practical, and cosmological—and eight fictive interchapters, a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Ray (1888–1963) and the protagonist of his dystopian science fiction novel about race, race science, racial improvement, and dehumanization. In this way, Mukharji fills out the historical moment in which the factual narrative unfolded, vividly revealing its moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Projit Bihari Mukharji is professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of several books, most recently Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
REVIEWS
“Race science enjoyed a prestigious place in Indian academic life in the twentieth century. Mukharji’s book is a startling revelation of how leading Indian anthropologists and statisticians used serological techniques to study caste. This is the forgotten story of Indian eugenics in the service of national development.”
— Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
“Brown Skins, White Coats is the most innovative and engaging book I have read on the fraught relationship between race and genetics. Combining rigorous historical research with compelling fictional interludes, Mukharji recalls India’s forgotten history of seroanthropology, a form of race science that links colonial anthropometry to contemporary genomics. A must-read for area studies and history of science alike, Mukharji’s book skillfully shows how the underappreciated contributions of Indian scientists to global human genetics also reinforced essentialist and often discriminatory narratives of racial difference within South Asia.”
— Elise K. Burton, University of Toronto
“Mukharji’s Brown Skins, White Coats is a brilliant book, absorbing to read and brimming with lyrical insight about the vexed history of global racial science, identity, nationalism, and alienation. The book offers a masterful, often poetic journey into the ever-shifting practices of racial scientists striving relentlessly to weave notions of skin, blood, caste, tissues, disease, and belief into a potent yet illusory science of Indian identity, whiteness, and biologized difference. A captivating, pathbreaking new work in race studies and science studies.”
— Keith Wailoo, Princeton University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Parable of Brownness
An Advertisement for White Coats
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Interchapter: Letter 1
1: Seroanthropological Races
Interchapter: Letter 2
2: Mendelizing Religion
Interchapter: Letter 3
3: A Taste for Race
Interchapter: Letter 4
4: Medicalizing Race
Interchapter: Letter 5
5: Blood Multiple
Interchapter: Letter 6
6: Refusing Race
Interchapter: Letter 7
7: Racing the Future
Interchapter: Letter 8
Conclusion
Notes
Sources for Interchapters
Bibliography
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
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Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66
by Projit Bihari Mukharji
University of Chicago Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-226-82300-3 Cloth: 978-0-226-82299-0 Paper: 978-0-226-82301-0
A unique narrative structure brings the history of race science in mid-twentieth-century India to vivid life.
There has been a recent explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but most have focused either on Europe or on North America and Australia. In this stirring history, Projit Bihari Mukharji illustrates how India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making—not merely as footnotes to a Western history of “normal science.”
The book comprises seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels—conceptual, practical, and cosmological—and eight fictive interchapters, a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Ray (1888–1963) and the protagonist of his dystopian science fiction novel about race, race science, racial improvement, and dehumanization. In this way, Mukharji fills out the historical moment in which the factual narrative unfolded, vividly revealing its moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Projit Bihari Mukharji is professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of several books, most recently Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
REVIEWS
“Race science enjoyed a prestigious place in Indian academic life in the twentieth century. Mukharji’s book is a startling revelation of how leading Indian anthropologists and statisticians used serological techniques to study caste. This is the forgotten story of Indian eugenics in the service of national development.”
— Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
“Brown Skins, White Coats is the most innovative and engaging book I have read on the fraught relationship between race and genetics. Combining rigorous historical research with compelling fictional interludes, Mukharji recalls India’s forgotten history of seroanthropology, a form of race science that links colonial anthropometry to contemporary genomics. A must-read for area studies and history of science alike, Mukharji’s book skillfully shows how the underappreciated contributions of Indian scientists to global human genetics also reinforced essentialist and often discriminatory narratives of racial difference within South Asia.”
— Elise K. Burton, University of Toronto
“Mukharji’s Brown Skins, White Coats is a brilliant book, absorbing to read and brimming with lyrical insight about the vexed history of global racial science, identity, nationalism, and alienation. The book offers a masterful, often poetic journey into the ever-shifting practices of racial scientists striving relentlessly to weave notions of skin, blood, caste, tissues, disease, and belief into a potent yet illusory science of Indian identity, whiteness, and biologized difference. A captivating, pathbreaking new work in race studies and science studies.”
— Keith Wailoo, Princeton University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Parable of Brownness
An Advertisement for White Coats
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Interchapter: Letter 1
1: Seroanthropological Races
Interchapter: Letter 2
2: Mendelizing Religion
Interchapter: Letter 3
3: A Taste for Race
Interchapter: Letter 4
4: Medicalizing Race
Interchapter: Letter 5
5: Blood Multiple
Interchapter: Letter 6
6: Refusing Race
Interchapter: Letter 7
7: Racing the Future
Interchapter: Letter 8
Conclusion
Notes
Sources for Interchapters
Bibliography
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE