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

Mukharji, Projit Bihari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226823016 ISBN 13: 9780226823010

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2023

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.

About this title

About the Author

Projit Bihari Mukharji is professor in the Department of History and Sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226823016
• ISBN 13: 9780226823010
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 366