Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66

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.

ISBN-13: 9780226823010

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 02-17-2023

Pages: 368

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.82d

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.