Sayori Ghoshal (Columbia University), "Experts of Identities: Race, Religion and Caste in Nationalist Science, India 1920-50"
Discussant: Sandra Widmer (York University)
Abstract
How did the fluid, local and contingent identities in precolonial India become fixed, naturalized and pan-Indian in colonial India? What was the role of colonial knowledge and anticolonial nationalism in this history of identities? How did the religious, caste-based and ethnic identities become the site for decolonising scientific knowledge? Introducing anthropometry and race science in late 19th century India, the British colonial state mapped India’s various caste and religious communities as disparate races, civilizationally inferior to Europeans. As an anticolonial response, Indian scientists rejected the claim that Europeans were racially superior to Indians. However, they did not dismiss race itself as a scientific object. In this paper, I demonstrate how, in reconfiguring physical anthropology, serology and statistics as nationalist sciences, Indian intellectuals produced biological histories of religious and ethnic identities. They measured physical features and blood composition of Indian Muslims, to determine their religious and racial origin. The question of origin was as useful in developing the sciences as for evaluating claims and self- identities of Indian Muslims and Christians. The racial and religious pasts of communities were fundamental to building the nation and determining which communities would be included in the nation. Since these studies involved scientific measurements of anthropometric features and statistical calculations, the truth of the racial, religious identity came to be the domain of trained experts. This implied that self-identity of people as Hindus or Muslims were construed as only a part of one’s identity. The truth of the entire identity – whether Muslims and ‘low-castes’ had the same racial origin or whether Muslims originated outside the subcontinent – would be henceforth accessible only to trained experts. I argue that race, caste and religion, thus, contributed to the production of nationalist scientific expertise in India.
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