Remember when we talked about race science and caste in India last summer? Here, we return to that thread with historian of science Projit Mukharji, whose work traces the ways scientific racism has persisted in India since the end of the colonial period and right up into the present. Once again, we find that scientific racism is not just a Euro-American phenomenon! And (spoiler alert) it hasn’t gone away!
Some sources (unfortunately, these are all behind pay-walls, but you can see the abstracts of the articles):
Mukharji, Projit. 2014. From Serosocial to Sanguinary Identities: Caste, Transnational Race Science and the shifting metonymies of Blood Group B, India c. 1918–1960. The Indian Economic & Social History Review. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0019464614525711
—2015. Profiling the Profiloscope: Facialization of Race Technologies and the Rise of Biometric Nationalism in Inter-War British India. History and Technology 31(4): 376-96. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2015.1127459
—2017. Vernacularizing the Body: Informational Egalitarianism, Hindu Divine Design, and Race in Physiology Schoolbooks, Bengal 1859–1877. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91(3): 554-85. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29081433
—2017. The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(2): 446-76. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/bengali-pharaoh-uppercaste-aryanism-panegyptianism-and-the-contested-history-of-biometric-nationalism-in-twentiethcentury-bengal/37417F64E39C96FED199F428E3EEF870
