![Sample our Engineering & Technology journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5933/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Engineering-Tech.jpg"})
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.
Acknowledgements
John Tresch read and commented on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Discussions with Sekhar Bandopadhyay were also most helpful. I am deeply indebted to both of them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For Mahalanobis’ biographies, see Rudra, Mahalanobis; Rao, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis; Anikendra Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. For the more popular government-funded books on the history of Indian science, see Singh, Some Eminent Indian Scientists; Lal, Bharat Ki Vaigyanik.
2. See for instance, Kumar, Science and the Raj; Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine; Lourdusamy, Science and National Consciousness; and Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India.
3. Sinclair, Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology.
4. Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S.; Hammonds and Herzig eds. The Nature of Difference; Thomas de la Pena, Bleaching the Ethiopians.
5. One brilliant exception to this general trend is Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men.
6. Anderson, Legible Bodies; Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Poole, An Excess of Description; Medina-Doménech, Scientific Technologies of National Identity.
7. Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics.
8. Robb ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia; Bates, Race, Caste and Tribe; Chowdhury, The Frail Hero; Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria; and Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
9. Pinney, Photography and Anthropology; Hodges, “South Asia's Eugenic Pasts”.
10. Arnold, Everyday Technologies.
11. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 198.
12. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 1.
13. Carson, “Craniometer”.
14. Carson, “Craniometer”.
15. Starr, Anthropology at the World’s Fair, 613.
16. Garson, Anthropography, 8–11.
17. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 7
18. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 200.
19. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 5.
20. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 3.
21. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 6.
22. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 9.
23. Mahalanobis, On the Accuracy.
24. Rudra, Mahalanobis.
25. Nelson Annandale, Introductory Note. Records of the Indian Museum, XXIII, 1922, 4.
26. Mahalanobis, On the Accuracy, 65.
27. Stoichita, Johann Caspar Lavater’s, 135.
28. Pearson, The Life, 304.
29. Pearson discusses Edouard’s influence on Galton and suggests an explicit admittance of such influence in a letter by Galton. Pearson, The Life, 309. Galton’s relationship to the Wedgewoods was through his mother’s brother, Robert Darwin – the father of Charles Darwin – whose wife, Susannah, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood.
30. Risley, Anthropometric Instructions, 18–19.
31. Gates, The Past Perfect, 2.
32. Gates, The Past Perfect, 5.
33. In fact, Bertillon’s system had included even more sites of measurement and classifications besides those used by Risley, including for instance ear shapes.
34. Breckenridge, Towards a Theory, 3.
35. Breckenridge, Towards a Theory, 4.
36. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj.
37. For instance, Maguire, The Birth of Biometric Security.
38. Rabinow, “Galton’s Regret:”.
39. Cole, Twins, Twain, Galton and Gilman.
40. Maguire, The Birth of Biometric Security, 11.
41. Sekula, The Body and the Archive, 50–52.
42. For discussions of colonial anthropological photography in India, see Pinney, “Parallel Histories”; Chaudhury, Afterimage of Empire.
43. See McLearn et al., On the Importance. This study is one of only three secondary sources cited in Mahalanobis’ first publication on the profiloscope. Mahalanobis, On the Accuracy, 72.
44. Anonymous, The Statistical Laboratory Calcutta.
45. Mahalanobis and Roy. Subhendu Sekhar Bose.
46. Fontana and Bertani, “Situating the Lectures”, 278.
47. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 167–69.
48. Gates, Our Biometric Future, 23–4.
49. Mahalanobis, A Revision of Risley’s.
50. For a fuller discussion of the various debates over caste amongst colonial ethnologist-administrators, see Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj.
51. See for instance, Rudra, Mahalanobis; Rao, Prasantha Chandra Mahalanobis; and Anikendra Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
52. Zachariah, The Development, 473.
53. Mahalanobis, Analysis of Race, 324.
54. Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation”, 2.
55. Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation”, 10.
56. Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation”, 12.
57. Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation”, 12–13.
58. Seal, “Meanings of Race, Tribe, Nation”, 11.
59. Mahalanobis, A New Photographic Apparatus; Mahalanobis, Studies with the Photographic Profiloscope; Mahalanobis, On the Accuracy; and Mahalanobis, On an Improved Model.
60. Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition, 323.
61. Bandyopadhyay, Plassey to Partition, 324.
62. Bandyopadhyay, Plassey to Partition, 324.
63. For a detailed discussion of the caste politics in Bengal from the mid-1920s to independence, see Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony, 70–6 & 218–221.
64. Arnold, Everyday Technologies, 15.