History of Science Lecture: Projit Bihari Mukharji

Following the end of World War I, several new areas of study in the racial sciences emerged in British India. The expansion coincided with the rapid process of “lndianization” of scientific institutions previously represented exclusively by Europeans. Prominent amongst these new raciologists were S. S. Sarkar, D. N. Majumdar, B. S. Guha, and P. C. Mahalanobis, who would go on to be dubbed the “Father of Indian Statistics” and found the flagship Indian Statistical Institute, which played a key part in developing the discipline on the subcontinent as well as abroad. This talk will explore the entangled inter-war history of race, science, and statistics, exploring the way numbers were produced and statistical tools were used by South Asian scientists at the time.