Projit Bihari Mukharji

From serosocial to sanguinary identities: Caste, transnational race science and the shifting metonymies of blood group B, India c. 1918–1960

A serendipitous encounter during the Great War left a brilliant Polish–Jewish scientist and his wife stranded at a Greek outpost with a small contingent of British and French Imperial troops. This chance encounter led to the birth not only of a new branch of science, that is, sero-anthropology, but also a novel theory about the origin of the blood group ‘B’ in India. In the following decades, this theory evolved and metamorphosed within British India through transnational scientific conversations as well as its resonances with South Asian identity politics. As the meanings of the isohaemagglutinin B morphed, the transnational meanings of race were repeatedly tripped up. In due course vernacularized Indian sero-anthropology produced a range of serosocial identities located as much in blood sera as in embedded socialities. After 1960, however, these serosocial identities were gradually overcome by purely sanguinary identities whose truth was located exclusively in the blood devoid of any sociality.

The "Cholera Cloud" in the Nineteenth-Century "British World": History of an Object-Without-an-Essence

The “cholera cloud” is one of the most persistent presences in the archives of nineteenth-century cholera in the “British World.” Yet it has seldom received anything more than a passing acknowledgment from historians of cholera. Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on “thing theory.” By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizability and an utterly context-specific set of meanings, visions, and realities could ironically cohabit.

Parachemistries: Colonial chemopolitics in a zone of contest

The globalization of modern chemistry through European colonialism resulted, by the end of the nineteenth century, in the emergence of a number of parachemical knowledges. Parachemistries were bodies of non-European knowledge which came to be related to modern chemistry within particular historical milieux. Their relationship with modern chemistry was not necessarily epistemic and structural, but historical and performative. Actual historically located intellectuals posited their relationship. Such relationships were not merely abstract intellectual exercises; at a time when the practical uses of modern chemistry in statecraft were growing, the existence of these rival, competing parachemical knowledges challenged modern chemistry’s regulatory deployments. Colonial locations emerged then not as mere ‘contact zones’, but as ‘zones of conflict’ where colonial chemopolitics was interrupted by the continued legitimacy and practice of parachemistries such as rasayana, kimiya, and neidan.

Profiling the profiloscope: facialization of race technologies and the rise of biometric nationalism in inter-war British India

Abstract The history of race and technology in British India has avoided engaging with the way in which this played out amongst nationalists. The history of biometrics too has similarly overlooked the role of anti-colonial nationalists. The history of the now-forgotten profiloscope allows us to address both oversights. But the history of the profiloscope is more than just a history of a technological apparatus. It is also the trace of a forgotten political imaginary, viz. biometric nationalism. Biometric nationalism sought to deploy biometrics in developing a dynamically anti-essentialist and non-individualistic conception of nationhood at a time when the nation-form had come to largely monopolize mainstream of anti-colonial political discourse.

In-Disciplining Jwarasur: The Folk/Classical Divide and Transmateriality of Fevers in Colonial Bengal

Extant scholarship on Jwarasur [the Fever-Demon] sees him as a colonial-era invention tied to the exigencies of colonial rule. Jwarasur is held to belong exclusively to the domain of Bengali ‘folk medicine’ rather than ‘classical Ayurveda’. We challenge both these contentions and draw four inter-related inferences. First, we posit that Jwarasur was not alien to classical Ayurvedic medicine. Second, we claim that Jwarasur was significant to the way Ayurvedic physicians negotiated fever. Third, we trace the invention of the folk/classical divide under colonial modernity. Finally, we posit that the divide inspired new reading strategies through which modernising Ayurvedists sought to expunge the transmateriality of Jwarasur. Jwarasur, we find, was constantly re-embedded into multiple heterogeneous traditions of medical and religio-moral practice. These diverse embeddings actively militate against the existence of any corpuscular ‘systems’ called ‘folk’ or ‘classical’ medicine. Rather Jwarasur is a common figure that networks a number of heterogeneous, amorphous domains. The extant disciplinary protocols of History, Anthropology, etc., however, are blind to this networked past and hence keep alive the colonial distinctions of ‘folk’ and ‘classical’. Our critical history contrapuntally, seeks to restore the promiscuity of these corpuscular fields and historicise the divisions that distinguish them.

Cultures of Fear: Technonationalism and the Postcolonial Responsibilities of STS

This paper is a slightly spruced-up version of a talk delivered at a roundtable cosponsored by the Society for the History of Technology and the History of Science Society at their annual conference in Cleveland. Asked to speak about the responsibilities and opportunities for historians of technology and science working on Asia, I tried to situate the question within contemporary South Asian realities. In the broadest terms, I lay out the widespread conflicts and displacements that had been engendered by the megatech projects undertaken in the name of development and mobilized through the apparatus of the special economic zones (SEZs). Within this context, I suggest that fear had become a valuable political resource through which opposition to the projects was crystallized. Often irrational and frequently obscurantist, these fears nonetheless managed to trip up the iniquitous developmental juggernaut. As local fears hybridized, borrowed from, and traveled beyond their initial spheres of articulation, they created an intricate ecology of fear within which postcolonial megatech projects had to survive. Actor network theory, I argue, is insufficiently sensitive to these lurking irrationalities that haunt postcolonial technonational developmentalism, and if scholars want to understand the history and sociology of these projects, they have to take these fears and their politics mobilization seriously.

Babon Gaji's many pasts: the adventures of a historian in a counter-archive

Babon Gaji is a curious god. He is avowedly a Muslim, and the icons that represent him seek to capture his ‘Muslim-ness’ conspicuously in their attire, not to mention the name itself (Gaji = Ghazi = Muslim warrior-monk) and local lore. Yet he is worshipped by Brahmin Hindu priests who are equally conspicuous in flaunting their Hindu-Brahmin identity. There are no stories about the Gaji ever having been a Hindu or having had anything more than an intellectual interest in Hinduism. He remains, thus, in his afterlife a Muslim; yet, he receives worship through Brahmin priests. Both Hindus and Muslims come to him in large numbers today, in search of a cure for their afflictions. Local accounts place the origins of his shrine at Tajpur, South 24 Parganahs a little over 100 years ago, yet, no account of either the cult or the shrine – to the best of my knowledge – exists in the colonial archive. Neither are there any known written accounts outside the colonial archive that are more than a couple of decades old. For the historian of colonial medicine in the region, therefore, the Gaji presents a difficult challenge.

Swapnaushadhi: The Embedded Logic of Dreams and Medical Innovation in Bengal

Numerous medicines in South Asia have their origins in dreams. Deities, saints and other supernatural beings frequently appear in dreams to instruct dreamers about specific remedies, therapeutic techniques, modes of care etc. These therapies challenge available models of historicising dreams. Once we overcome these challenges and unearth the embedded logic of these dreams, we begin to discern in them a dynamic institution that enabled and sustained therapeutic change within a ‘traditional’ medical milieu.

Embracing academic elitism

ABSTRACT This note began as a conversation at the South Asian History and Culture Roundtable of 2016. The conversation had started out as an attempt to explore ways of being ‘differently academic’, but soon became one about ‘academic elitism’ and the role the double-bind peer review. Was the peer review merely a way of social exclusion engineered to keep out those who do not conform to a narrow set of ideological positions? Or was it a genuinely valuable vetting mechanism that ensures the integrity and quality of research? These questions cannot be considered without taking account of the ways in which anti-elitism has itself become a political issue mobilized by new forms of populist politics. Not just in South Asia, but across the world, we see populist politicians casting any kind of intellectual activity, particularly those devoted to humanist inquiry, as elitism. Such anti-intellectualism by masquerading as a form of anti-elitism has often paralyzed left-liberal opinion. Confronting this right-wing, populist anti-intellectualism is particularly important for disciplines like History and to do so we must embrace a certain kind of ‘academic elitism’. At the same time, academic elitism cannot be allowed to legitimize or enable social elitism nor be confused with a meritocracy.

The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal

Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century.