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.

"“Brown Skins, White Coats offers a richly detailed, gripping, and largely overlooked history of the mobilization of racial thinking and of race science in anticolonial movements and postcolonial nationalisms. . . . The thrill of this magnificent book rests in details that are impossible to replicate here. I invite historians of the human sciences to enjoy firsthand this most recent work of one of the most imaginative historians of medicine of South Asia. Besides reminding us of the continued investment in race science in the present, in India, and elsewhere, this book paves the way for scholarly inquiries into non-European histories of whiteness, South Asian contributions to the universe of twentieth-century race science, and the multiple roots of South Asian racism. A stern reminder of the racial thinking that pervaded scientific and social scientific disciplines in India in the twentieth century, this work is essential reading for scholars of colonial and postcolonial South Asia across the disciplines.”" - Social History of Medicine

"“Fruitfully achieving the difficult balance between a high level of historical detail, a synoptic overview, and theoretical advancements, the book takes the reader on an analytical journey that follows key science-actors and their racializing practices . . . One of the key contributions of Brown Skins, White Coats, both to postco­lonial studies and to studies of science, lies in how it further pushes the debate on race beyond the hegemonic binaries white/Black and colonizer/colonized, by diving into the muddy, brown, and at times turbulent waters of Indian scientists’ engagements with racialization also in post-independence times.”" - Journal of the History of Biology

"Brown Skins, White Coats is an important intervention in U.S.-published literature on race science history" - Technology and Culture

"“Mukharji’s magisterial account of seroanthropology in mid-twentieth-century India, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66, interlinks the identitarian pol­itics of the fledgling postcolonial nation with notions of inherited differences between blood groups. . . . The book is not only deeply ambitious in terms of its historiographic methodology, but it also illustrates lyrical creativity in undercutting the notion of historical objectivity itself.”" - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

"“Mukharji’s objective in writing [the book] was to ‘recall the forgotten history of Indian seroanthropology to attest to India’s important place in the emergent networks of human biological research in the twentieth century, as well as to bear witness to the troubling political imaginaries and unequal social relations that enabled such scientific participation.’ He has succeeded brilliantly in achieving both these aims.”" - Dialogue

"“A remarkable methodological novelty of this book are the two sets of narratives: besides the historical chapters, Mukharji inserts ‘interchapters’ that constitute literary reflections on human morality, ethical limits of scientific progress and the boundaries between the rational and the supernatural. In crafting the interchapters, Mukharji draws from Bengali writer Hemendrakumar Ray’s literary oeuvre who was contemporaneous with Indian seroanthropologists. The interchapters substantiate Mukharji’s commendable attempt to expand what social context of historical actors entail, in this case, of the seroanthropologists. . . . Overall, this book is a formidable analysis of the practice of race science as a modern and ‘normal’ science in India. It offers important insights into the tension between science’s reliance on social ideas and practices, and its increasing alienation from the social, cultural layered narratives of identities, community relations and life-worlds.”" - H-Soz-Kult