Brown Skins, White Coats

"In recent years, there has been an explosion in studies of race science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the vast majority has remained focused either on Europe or North America and Australia. Projit Mukharji shows not only that India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends, he also argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making and not merely as footnotes to a European or Australo-American history of normal science. Previous work on the history of race in India has overwhelmingly focused on the pre-WWI era when most of the scientist-bureaucrats engaged in race science were British. This changed dramatically after WWI, when the scientific establishment was rapidly Indianized and science itself became more professionalized and technical. All this transformed the nature, focus, politics, and practice of race science in India and ensured that race science survived the end of formal empire in 1947. This book is uniquely constructed, with seven factual chapters operating at distinct levels--the conceptual, practical, and cosmological--and eight fictive interchapters. Drawing principally on one work of fiction published in 1935 and supplemented by other fictional works written by the same author, the interchapters tease out the full implications of racial research in India with fiction. The narrative interchapters develop as a series of epistolary exchanges between the Bengali author Hemendrakumar Roy (1888-1963) and the main 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 the moral, affective, political, and intellectual fissures of the moment"--