Brown Skins, White Coats - by Projit Bihari Mukharji (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"... this exquisitely researched book installs Mukharji as an invigorating scholar and marks his contribution to South Asian history, science and technology studies and critical caste studies."-- "Contributions to Indian Sociology"

"Mukharji's objective in writing [the book] was to 'recall the forgotten history of Indian seroanthropology to attest to India's important place in the emergent networks of human biological research in the twentieth century, as well as to bear witness to the troubling political imaginaries and unequal social relations that enabled such scientific participation.' He has succeeded brilliantly in achieving both these aims."-- "Dialogue"

"Mukharji's magisterial account of seroanthropology in mid-twentieth-century India, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66, interlinks the identitarian pol­itics of the fledgling postcolonial nation with notions of inherited differences between blood groups. . . . The book is not only deeply ambitious in terms of its historiographic methodology, but it also illustrates lyrical creativity in undercutting the notion of historical objectivity itself."-- "Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences"

"Brown Skins, White Coats is an important intervention in U.S.-published literature on race science history"-- "Technology and Culture"

"Fruitfully achieving the difficult balance between a high level of historical detail, a synoptic overview, and theoretical advancements, the book takes the reader on an analytical journey that follows key science-actors and their racializing practices . . . One of the key contributions of Brown Skins, White Coats, both to postco­lonial studies and to studies of science, lies in how it further pushes the debate on race beyond the hegemonic binaries white/Black and colonizer/colonized, by diving into the muddy, brown, and at times turbulent waters of Indian scientists' engagements with racialization also in post-independence times."-- "Journal of the History of Biology"

"Brown Skins, White Coats offers a richly detailed, gripping, and largely overlooked history of the mobilization of racial thinking and of race science in anticolonial movements and postcolonial nationalisms. . . . The thrill of this magnificent book rests in details that are impossible to replicate here. I invite historians of the human sciences to enjoy firsthand this most recent work of one of the most imaginative historians of medicine of South Asia. Besides reminding us of the continued investment in race science in the present, in India, and elsewhere, this book paves the way for scholarly inquiries into non-European histories of whiteness, South Asian contributions to the universe of twentieth-century race science, and the multiple roots of South Asian racism. A stern reminder of the racial thinking that pervaded scientific and social scientific disciplines in India in the twentieth century, this work is essential reading for scholars of colonial and postcolonial South Asia across the disciplines."-- "Social History of Medicine"

"A remarkable methodological novelty of this book are the two sets of narratives: besides the historical chapters, Mukharji inserts 'interchapters' that constitute literary reflections on human morality, ethical limits of scientific progress and the boundaries between the rational and the supernatural. In crafting the interchapters, Mukharji draws from Bengali writer Hemendrakumar Ray's literary oeuvre who was contemporaneous with Indian seroanthropologists. The interchapters substantiate Mukharji's commendable attempt to expand what social context of historical actors entail, in this case, of the seroanthropologists. . . . Overall, this book is a formidable analysis of the practice of race science as a modern and 'normal' science in India. It offers important insights into the tension between science's reliance on social ideas and practices, and its increasing alienation from the social, cultural layered narratives of identities, community relations and life-worlds."-- "H-Soz-Kult"

"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

"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

"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

About the Author

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.