“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

“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

“Race science enjoyed a prestigious place in Indian academic life in the twentieth century. Mukharji’s book is a startling revelation of how leading Indian anthropologists and statisticians used serological techniques to study caste. This is the forgotten story of Indian eugenics in the service of national development.”

Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

“Mukharji’s Brown Skins, White Coats is a brilliant book, absorbing to read and brimming with lyrical insight about the vexed history of global racial science, identity, nationalism, and alienation. The book offers a masterful, often poetic journey into the ever-shifting practices of racial scientists striving relentlessly to weave notions of skin, blood, caste, tissues, disease, and belief into a potent yet illusory science of Indian identity, whiteness, and biologized difference. A captivating, pathbreaking new work in race studies and science studies.”

Keith Wailoo, Princeton University

“Brown Skins, White Coats is the most innovative and engaging book I have read on the fraught relationship between race and genetics. Combining rigorous historical research with compelling fictional interludes, Mukharji recalls India’s forgotten history of seroanthropology, a form of race science that links colonial anthropometry to contemporary genomics. A must-read for area studies and history of science alike, Mukharji’s book skillfully shows how the underappreciated contributions of Indian scientists to global human genetics also reinforced essentialist and often discriminatory narratives of racial difference within South Asia.”

Elise K. Burton, University of Toronto