Abstract
Projit Bihari Mukharji. 2022. Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. x + 336 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. $35 (paperback—ISBN: 0226823016 348).
Since the turn of the millennium, the expansion of genetic technologies for detecting health risks or tracing ancestry has reinvigorated questions of race and racialisation in the domains of research, healthcare delivery and claims of belonging (Epstein 2007; Fujimura and Rajagopal 2011; Suzuki and Vacano 2018). Astute as their contributions are, sociologists and anthropologists of science and medicine are yet to fully explore how the study of human variation operated in and was reconfigured in the afterlives of empire. Brown Skins, White Coats is a remarkably robust contribution that addresses this gap and presents critical openings to explore entanglements of racial histories, politics of difference and genres of emancipatory humanism.
The central aim of the book is to recover the history of race science in India through a loosely defined set of techniques the author labels ‘seroanthropology’, a field studying human variation on the basis of blood. Being a historian of South Asian science and medicine, Mukharji presents this history in a ‘double gesture’ (pp. 21–23) that both acknowledges the labour and contribution of Indian practitioners to global race science and critiques their role in furthering caste and ethnic othering, exclusionary nationalism(s) and eugenic policies. Pursuing this aim, the book offers seven historical chapters alongside eight interchapters that, following Saidiya Hartman’s project of ‘critical fabulations’, aim to capture as fully ‘the objects of racial discourse and archival erasure as possible’ (p. 24) in the South Asian vernacular.
Chapter 1 situates the emergence and growth of seroanthropology in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods. Mukharji argues that rather than becoming redundant in the Indian subcontinent due to the prominence of caste, race was actively reconfigured and reproduced to meet the demands of science and statecraft. While colonial administrator H.H. Risley’s racial theories of castes and tribes are widely critiqued by South Asian studies scholarship (see Fuller 2017: 604), Mukharji excavates the critical role of Indian anthropologists like B.S. Guha, S.S. Sarkar, Iravati Karwe and L.D. Sanghvi in inaugurating a period of ‘biometric nationalism’ that ‘sought to provide technocratic and ideological answers to difficult questions of political belonging’ (p. 50) in newly independent India. A shift from anthropometric methods to blood typing powered such strategies of statecraft at a time when seroanthropologists aspired to contain the ‘diverse races’ (p. 62) into a united nation.
Chapter 2 explores how in response to mid-20th-century genetics that attempted to move away from ‘race’ to a more neutral category of ‘population’, studies on minority religious groups proliferated to study biological differences. Tracing a genealogy of the ‘religious isolate’ as a small endogamous group (p. 70), it demonstrates how ‘caste and religion could become geneticised allegories of each other’ (p. 72). Mukharji argues that by using the case of minority religions such as the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel of Konkan and Muslims in different regions of India, these studies proliferated an image of exogeneity, marking them as ‘outsider’ communities within the nation (p. 93).
Throughout the book, the author reiterates how race science in India buys into the fiction of absolute endogamy, even though it has long been contested by Dalit feminist scholars studying ritualised forms of sexual labour and its caste transgressions (pp. 82, 113). Building onto this critique, the following two chapters present case studies of how research protocols and technical rationalities were carefully calibrated in the service of race thinking. Chapter 3 situates studies on taste in the broader landscape of South Asia where dietary habits, a social aesthetics (rasa) of taste, and the ‘multisensorial nature of caste’ (p. 125) are constantly flowing into each other. Mukharji shows how turning sensory perception into a genetic trait involved a series of translations and boundary-making between ‘genetic’ causes and ‘non-genetic’ ones such as betel chewing, smoking or non-vegetarianism (pp. 121–22). Chapter 4 dives into the medicalisation of race that grew with the discovery of abnormal haemoglobin traits within Indian groups. Despite their belief in endogamy or because of it, race scientists distinguished tribal groups of African descent from lower castes who carried the abnormal mutation, while unifying them through risk.
The next two chapters move away from the writings of seroanthropologists to bring other actors, techniques and worldviews into light. Chapter 5 attends to material assemblages of blood that sustained seroanthropology. Among others, the archival image of the captured Jarava child whose blood was researched on for decades (p. 167) exposes the extractivist nature of the postcolonial state that (race) scientists benefitted from. Chapter 6 continues this thread by situating the refusal of communities to give their blood into cosmological worlds that stand outside of modern science. Mukharji insists on using refusal as an analytic rather than ‘resistance’ or ‘superstition’ and pushes ‘our notions of who challenged scientific claims of authority’ (p. 214).
The last chapter reiterates Mukharji’s starting claim that rather than departing from scientific research, the study of race was intensified in the postwar world. Yet, as opposed to colonial raciologies that looked backwards in time, Mukharji argues that stalwarts of 20th-century Indian race science were thinking with their ‘commitment to building a future nation’ (p. 219) which was at once technocratic and archaic, admixed and exclusionary and a rich source of ‘racial diversity’ for creating professional opportunities at home.
With an extensive ode to scholars of race and colonialism, Mukharji concludes by asking ‘what happens when the White man leaves? Does he take his masks with him?’ (p. 255). What the reader takes with them are the many masks (or coats) that the Brown researcher had to don, and the many axes of alienation that emerged with it. The multitude of intentions, effects and practices that Mukharji clusters under the label of ‘seroanthropology’, may not always make a chapter’s argument immediately clear. The reader would benefit from a prior awareness of debates on genetics, race and epistemology. Regardless, in joining scholars of race-making elsewhere (Anderson 2002; Burton 2020), 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.