The Human Body and the National Body in Post-Independence Twentieth Century India: A Brief History of the All-India Anthropometric Survey (AIAS)

Anusmita Mukherjee, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of History and Sociology

Postcolonial analyses have largely imagined the embodiments of modernity in cultural terms such as language, clothing and caste-class-racial performances. But strands of scholarship have also shown the visceral physicality of this embodiment, such as through the bodily task of pronunciation in the colonizer’s language while reshaping that language. I will further the idea of the embodiment of a western conception of modernity by showing how anthropometric datafication of the body in twentieth century Indian anthropology embedded civilization in individual identities. Through a close reading of three archival sources related to the All-India Anthropometric Survey (AIAS), I will trace the racialized caste science of late-twentieth century Indian Anthropology. Although AIAS report states that the survey did not use caste as an analytical entry-point in designing the research methods, I will show that the study defined population groups along marriage lines with the support of migration theories, and thus reinscribed social boundaries, primarily caste, in the vocabulary of biological and cultural inheritance. AIAS placed population groups along a linear line of movement towards a shared imagination of civilizational modernity that became central to the postcolonial nation-making project. In untangling the defining features of this civilizational modernity, I will show how Indian Anthropology bore the burdens of the disciplinary training of its practitioners in the British colonial apparatus and in World War II Germany. My presentation will thus follow the pervasiveness of race into late twentieth century, establishing a longer and wider history of race science beyond its immediate vocabulary.

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 Presented in Session 153. Colonialism, Decolonization, and Racial Capitalism