Session 105: Purity and Degeneration: Exploring the Science of Race in Colonial India

Organizer: Ishita Pande, Princeton University

Chair: Thomas R. Trautmann, University of Michigan

Discussant: Sameetah Agha, Pratt Institute

Keywords: race theory, Aryanism, colonial medicine, Ayurveda, ethnography.

The scientific study of race was inspired by colonial encounters, just as the collection of information on ‘racial variety’ was facilitated by colonial networks. India played an important role in the imagination of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the idea of race informed national identities of the colonizers and the colonized. This panel explores the link between race theory and colonial power, the place of India in the imagination of race, and the subsequent reconfiguration of racial ideas in colonial India.

The panel analyzes the Aryan idea, and the associated theories of purity and degeneration, from different scientific perspectives. Mohan looks at the Aryan idea in French anthropological writing about India, to demonstrate how colonial power derived from and contributed to this image. Piotter explores the theme of racial purity through its entwinement with the idea of purity of air in the medicalized discourse on climates, and explores the association of malaria (or bad air) with ‘infectious Indianness.’ Pande explores the way in which Aryanism became a way of attaching indigenous systems of medicine to the history of the western corpus, and of representing colonialism and its systems of knowledge as the reinfusion of fresh blood and ideas into a degenerated civilization. Berger turns to the circulation of scientific ideas of race in the Ayurvedic corpus, and its recasting in the quest for ‘pure bodies,’ and finally, for the building of a ‘national body’ in India.

Suddh Kul aur Suddh Viry (Pure Blood and Pure Semen): Radicalizing the National Body in North India, 1900–1942

Rachel Berger, University of Cambridge

Race has been a major organizing principle in the study of science and medicine in colonial India, but has not been considered a factor in the development of indigenous medicine in modern India. My research explores the Hindi-language writings of both male and female Vaids and other medical experts publishing and practicing in the United Provinces and Delhi, and examines the larger social and cultural implications of their knowledge systems.

In this paper, I explore the construction of categories of kul (blood) and viry (semen) in Hindi medical writing in the early twentieth century. This constituted a parallel discourse to that of race in European medical writing. During the early twentieth century, the medicalised usage of these "traditional" concepts became key to Ayurvedic socio-medical classification. This was part of a wider move by practitioners and institutions to co-opt the legitimation of the rhetoric of Western medicine in addition to those based on Vedic and religious authority.

From the 1920s on, Ayurvedic medicine became increasingly concerned with the creation of suddh (pure) bodies. This explicitly connected the physical body with the process of building the national body in India. In the process, it focused attention on gender and the act of sexual reproduction, thus giving reproductive health unprecedented importance in the Ayurvedic lexicon. A shift of emphasis from shuddh viry to shuddh kul constituted a discursive shift from stressing individual relations to emphasizing social responsibility, mirroring larger social and political movements to unite Indian society and formulate a strong, healthy, and pure nation.

The Role of Malaria in the Scientification of Race in British India

Monica Poole Piotter, Harvard University; Eric Strahorn Florida Gulf Coast University

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a fetishization of the scientific characterized British intellectual culture. Endowing ideology or knowledge with "science" rendered it more credible and legitimized it by the mere presence of scientific trappings; we call this practice "sciencifying." As a result, attempts to lend legitimacy to statements of Indian inferiority rested on racial and medical classifications, as these classifications utilized a veneer of science. The sciencified understandings of health and disease in British India supported a construct of civilization as dependent upon the ability of Englishmen to live comfortably in the climate.

This was not a benign identification of racial variance as defined by susceptibility to disease, but suggested that Europeans were uncomfortable in the Indian climate because they were used to greater purity of air. This assumption was based on monogenism (racial division based on deviation from one specific proto-race) and implied that the English were superior because of their climatological purity, and that the impure air had modified the Indians and contaminated them—yet, if the English were not careful, they could just as easily become members of a "puny race" to use one author’s verbiage. When attempting to legitimize empire, the English identified a people by their diseases, and utilized susceptibility and endemicity as criteria for a sciencified racialization. Concentrating on North India, we examine imperial writing on malaria as it developed the notion of infectious Indianness within the evolution of sciencified race.

Gustave le Bon and India’s Aryan Greatness

Jyoti Mohan, University of Maryland

In this paper I focus on the construction of a French anthropological image of India in the nineteenth century as ‘Aryan’ and the connotations thereof. I look specifically at an influential text, Gustave le Bon’s Les Civilizations de l’Inde, which was published in the late nineteenth century and echoed countless academic views of India as an Aryan nation that once had great promise but had degenerated over the centuries due to racial intermixture.

The Aryan theory as explained in the Indian context was to have far-reaching and tragic consequences in the twentieth century for Germany, and served as a model for Gallicism in France. In my paper I look specifically for the motives behind this carefully created image of India and the rubrics of colonial power, which both dictated and was molded by this image.

"Aryan" Medicine and the Colonial Encounter: The Idea of Race in Colonial Histories of Indian Medicine, Bengal, 1830s

Ishita Pande, Princeton University

In the early nineteenth century, ‘western’ style medical schools were introduced into Bengal by the colonial state. Initial attempts at incorporating indigenous medical knowledge into the curriculum had less to do with a general mood of syncretism than an attempt to attach the Ayurvedic (and Unani) corpus to a history of medicine in the West. The organizing theme for such a connected history of eastern and western medicine came in the form of the idea of Aryanism. The introduction of Western medicine to India was at times explicitly depicted as a vigorous infusion of fresh ideas into a system of knowledge that had degenerated over time.

The Aryan idea, derived from a comparative study of languages, circulated through colonial scientific networks, was established as a key element in understanding the origins and variations of mankind in Victorian anthropology. This paper argues that colonial medical knowledge served to reconfigure the Aryan idea in a manner that allowed for an overlap between the philological and physiological ideas of race.

Colonial medical writing on India’s medical systems, Indian bodies, and Indian pathologies all engaged with ideas of similarity and difference. Languages and bodies were described in terms of purity, degeneration, hybridity, or a descent from common roots. To these, the idea of Aryanism provided a frame of reference. This paper also analyzes how, in the late nineteenth century, these ideas returned as demands for a national medicine for India.