Measuring Race, Space and the Citizen: Anthropology and Statistics in Early Post-Independence India

Abstract

This article explores how Indian anthropologists employed abstract concepts of ‘space’ and ‘distance’ in the mid twentieth century to reconfigure the racial scientific approaches to caste and community. Looking at the relationship between statistics and physical anthropology via the work of P.C. Mahalanobis and D.N. Majumdar in the United Provinces in the mid to late 1940s, the article explores how conceptual (or Euclidian) space interacted with geopolitical space (lived distances) in definitions of caste. The combination of anthropology and statistics produced new measurements of difference and distance that, in turn, privileged Brahmanical conceptions of hierarchy, reinforced the idea of spatial homogeneity and contributed to new ethnic definitions of the citizen.