Summary: My project ‘Science of Difference: Producing Racial and Religious Identities Through Nationalist Science, India 1920-2020’ interrogates the role of physical anthropology, serology, genetic anthropology and statistics, in naturalizing religious and caste hierarchies. Under colonial rule, Indian scientists rejected the claim that Europeans were racially superior to Indians. However, they did not dismiss race as a scientific object. Instead, from the 1920s, Indian scientists sought to measure the extent of racial mixing between castes and religious groups. Asking where Indian Muslims had come from and whether Christians were indigenous, they calculated physical features, blood-group distribution, and genetic variations to produce a map of the nation’s racial and religious past. My project contributes to the aim of the grant scheme by analyzing how science and religion were co-constituted. That is, how scientific objectivity was built through measuring religious differences, while religious hierarchy came to be constituted as natural through its uncritical conversion into scientific data.
With the support of the grant, I will prepare a book proposal and sample chapter based on my doctoral dissertation. After sharing these for feedback at a history of science colloquium, I will submit them to university presses for review. I will also conduct new archival research which will focus on the postcolonial period (1950-2020) to analyze how anthropology, genetics and statistics challenged and/or uncritically adopted notions of racial origin, caste hierarchy and religious difference in building a national genome. Based on this research, I will prepare a journal article and present this draft in a separate workshop. I will then finalize and submit my article to an international journal.
Given the rise in Hindu right-wing politics in India today, this project investigates how such politics around racial, religious and caste differences, derives its legitimacy. The findings of the research will contribute to scholarship by critically rethinking the separation between secular science and religious nationalism. To a non-academic audience, it will offer avenues to challenge the idea that racial, territorial origin can alone determine the national position of religious minorities in the present.
With this grant, I will be affiliated with the Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto, and work with my faculty sponsor, a historian of science, Dr Elise Burton. This grant and affiliation will provide an excellent opportunity for me to develop international research collaborations and develop my independent research goals.
