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Paper short abstract

The paper will explore how twentieth century Indian elite intellectuals relocated ideas of racial inferiority within gender hierarchies and tribal identities even as they sought to challenge European claims about Indian racial inferiority and resist the pitfalls of race science.

Paper long abstract

In 20th century British India, despite rejecting some of the colonial theories of race science, Indian anthropologists and statisticians strove to develop it as a modern Indian and anticolonial practice. Their aim was to use certain theories and methods of European race science to ultimately challenge the racial epistemology of the colonial state, especially the European claim about Indian racial inferiority. By analyzing some primary studies on reproductive and biological features and practices of ethnic communities, this paper shows how those attempts unfolded. In particular, it shows how Indian intellectuals resisted the pitfalls of that European race science had failed to avoid, foregrounding in some cases more progressive ideas about race and the purpose of race science. The paper however also shows how even as Indian elites managed to carve out a different space for race science and forged a place for themselves as scientific experts at par with their global counterparts in Anglo-America, Indian elites also naturalized ideas and presumptions about social hierarchy, gender inequality and Adivasi “primitivity” in the way they deployed categories and measures of biological practices, reproductive trends and physical features. The paper aims to show how racial inferiority came to be challenged in an anticolonial context but only at the expense of entrenching hierarchies of gender and indigeneity.