‘The Bad Stock’: Nazi Eugenics and the Growth of Anthropology in Delhi

Abstract

This article examines connections between biological anthropology in India and Nazi German anthropology, particularly through Profulla Chandra Biswas (1904–84), a Nazi sympathiser and founding head of the University of Delhi’s Department of Anthropology. Influenced by his PhD supervisor, Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer, Biswas propagated eugenics ideologies and used them to advance his academic career and determine foundational priorities for one of the largest anthropology departments in the Indian subcontinent. Ethnographic fieldwork from a kinship perspective demonstrates that although they are often forgotten by present-day anthropologists, efforts to ‘cut off’ these intellectual genealogies merely allow their intellectual and ethical legacies to continue without critical reflection.

Keywords:

• Eugenics
• history of anthropology
• India
• Nazi Germany
• race
• research ethics

Acknowledgements

This article would not exist without nearly a decade of unwavering support from Andrew Amstutz and Isabel Huacuja Alonso, who pushed me to develop it and read multiple drafts. I presented the first version at their ‘Rethinking World War II in South Asia’ symposium at the 2018 Madison Annual Conference on South Asia. Gillian Feeley-Harnik and Thomas Trautmann encouraged me to delve deeper into the topic earlier on, connecting me to Projit Mukharji, who recommended reading Chandak Sengoopta, who (much later) kindly helped me access part of his work for reference during the COVID-19 lockdown. The staff and other scholars, especially Dean Falk, at the School for Advanced Research made helpful suggestions as I developed some of these ideas in Summer 2016. I am grateful to David Akin, Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi, Andrew Shryock, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg and Kritika Pandey for reading drafts; to friends for encouragement and assistance accessing library materials; and to the Writing Wizards group at the University of Michigan. I would also like to thank the organisers and participants of the 2022 ‘The Other from Within’ conference, as well as the two anonymous readers for their thoughtful comments. I am especially indebted to the DU Anthropology Department for its generosity and willingness to share and reflect on its own culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lalita Prasad Vidyarthi, Rise of Anthropology in India: A Social Science Orientation (Delhi: Concept Publishing Co., 1978).

2. Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande, Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007).

3. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

4. Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi, ‘Insiders, Outsiders, and Intellectual Kinship’, Allegra Lab, December 2016, accessed February 7, 2024, https://allegralaboratory.net/insiders-outsiders-and-intellectual-kinship-universitycrisis/.

5. Profulla Chandra Biswas, ‘Über Hand- und Fingerleisten von Indern’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Berlin, 1936). Biswas’ birth year is sometimes listed as 1903; I took 1904 from his dissertation’s autobiographical outline.

6. I use ‘Nazi eugenicist’ and ‘Nazi anthropologist’ throughout to refer to those who actively contributed to and supported the eugenics efforts of the Nazi German state regardless of whether or not they were Nazi Party members, though Fischer and many were.

7. The documented instances of plagiarism appear to have had no effect on Biswas’ career; he was promoted to full professor about two years after Reddy’s review was published.

8. Profulla Chandra Biswas, Santals of the Santal Parganas (Delhi: Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh, 1956).

9. N.S. Reddy, ‘Review of Santals of Santal Parganas’, Eastern Anthropologist 10, no. 1 (1956): 77–82; 81–82.

10. Biswas, ‘Über Hand-’, 577, all translations from Biswas’ German are my own.

11. ‘Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung’, Deutsche Hochschulstatistik 14, Winterhalbjahr 1934/35 (Berlin: Verlag von Struppe & Winckler, 1935): 68.

12. Irina Nastasă-Matei, ‘Transnational Far Right and Nazi Soft Power in Eastern Europe: The Humboldt Fellowships for Romanians’, East European Politics and Societies 35, no. 4 (2021): 899–923; 917.

13. Profulla Chandra Biswas, ‘Eugenics: Its Scope and Importance’, Calcutta Review 59, no. 3 (1936): 275–83; 282.

14. Ibid., 280.

15. Ibid., 276.

16. Profulla Chandra Biswas, ‘Eugenics and Population Problem’, Journal of the Science Club [Calcutta] 3, no. 1 (1949): 9–14; 10. Italics in original.

17. Profulla Chandra Biswas, ‘Eugenics Researches in Germany’, Science and Culture 2, no. 11 (1937): 547–50; 550.

18. According to one of Biswas’ students and colleagues, the late Indera Pal Singh (1928–2016), he was private about his home life. Singh attributed this, in part, to his impression that Biswas’ wife may have suffered some mental illness. Singh’s account raises many questions about how Biswas’ personal experience related to his beliefs that the mentally ill were defective and unworthy of reproduction.

19. Biswas, ‘Eugenics Researches’, 547.

20. Biswas, ‘Eugenics and Population’, 12–13.

21. Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Berlin: JF Lehmann Verlag, 1927).

22. Gretchen Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 61–62.

23. Ibid., 73–78, 130, 155–58, 171, 183, 237.

24. Ibid., 3, 243, 255.

25. George Steinmetz, ‘The Imperial Entanglements of Sociology and the Problem of Scientific Autonomy in Germany, France, and the United States’, in Transnationale Vergesellschaftungen. Verhandlungen Des 35: Kongresses Der Deutschen Gesellschaft Für Soziologie in Frankfurt Am Main 2010, Vol. 2, ed. Hans-Georg Soeffner (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2012).

26. Biswas, ‘Eugenics: Its Scope’, 277.

27. Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 80.

28. Schafft, Racism to Genocide, 171.

29. Biswas, ‘Eugenics: Its Scope’, 281.

30. Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (London: Macmillan, 2003).

31. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries (Boston, MA: Springer Science + Business Media, 2008): 177.

32. Gerri Ondrizek, ‘The Origins of Bio Metric Data’, accessed January 17, 2024, https://www.reed.edu/art/ondrizek/exhibitions/origins-of-biometric-data-seattle/.

33. Biswas, ‘Über Hand-’, 547–48.

34. Profulla Chandra Biswas, ‘Studies of the Whorl on Head-Hair in Tehri Rajputs’, Eastern Anthropologist 51 (December–February 1950): 104–06.

35. Lucia Staiano-Daniels, ‘The Melancholy of Thinking Racist: India and the Ambiguities of Race in the Work of Hans F.K. Günther’, in Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (London: Routledge, 2014): 170–85; 171.

36. Trautmann, Aryans.

37. Clarence C. Gravlee, ‘How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 1 (2009): 47–57; 48.

38. Staiano-Daniels, ‘Melancholy’, 173.

39. Eric Kurlander, ‘The Orientalist Roots of National Socialism? Nazism, Occultism, and South Asian Spirituality, 1919–1945’, in Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (London: Routledge, 2014): 155–69; 156.

40. Romila Thapar, ‘The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics’, Social Scientist 24, no. 1/3 (1996): 3–29; 8.

41. Ibid.

42. Dhirendra K. Jha, ‘The RSS and MS Golwalkar’s Undeniable Links to Nazism’, Caravan, July 31, 2021, accessed February 4, 2024, https://caravanmagazine.in/history/rss-golwalkar-links-nazism.

43. Mihir Bose, Raj, Secrets, Revolution: A Life of Subhas Chandra Bose (London: Grace Chapman, 2004): 206.

44. Ibid., 212.

45. Isabel Huacuja Alonso, personal communication, November 27, 2014.

46. P.C. Joshi, ‘Advent of Anthropology and Birth of Social Anthropology in Delhi University’, Eastern Anthropologist 68, no. 1 (2015): 35–41; 37.

47. Nandini Sundar, ‘In the Cause of Anthropology: The Life and Work of Irawati Karve’, in Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology, ed. Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007): 360–416; 380.

48. Thiago Barbosa, ‘Racializing a New Nation: German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India’, Perspectives on Science 30, no. 1 (2022): 137–66.

49. Projit B. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022): 198–200, 226–34.

50. Biswas, ‘Eugenics and Population’, 12.

51. Biswas, ‘Eugenics: Its Scope’, 278.

52. Stefan Kühl, ‘The Cooperation of German Racial Hygienists and American Eugenicists before and after 1933’, in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 134–52; 139.

53. Ibid.

54. Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 166.

55. Ibid., 167.

56. Ibid., 168.

57. P.C. Biswas, ‘Dr B. S. Guha’, Mankind Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1961): 120–21.

58. David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 293.

59. Nurolhoda Bandeh-Ahmadi, ‘Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2018): 62–63, accessed February 29, 2024, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/145949.

60. Schafft, Racism to Genocide, 241.

61. Ilse Schwidetzky, ‘Short History of Indian-German Relations in Physical Anthropology’, Anthropologischer Anzeiger 41, no. 2 (1983): 85–92.

62. Thiago Barbosa et al., ‘Remembering the Anthropological Making of Race in Today’s University: An Analysis of a Students’ Memorial Project in Berlin’, Etnofoor 30, no. 2 (2018): 29–48.

63. Other factors may also be at play here, especially that dermatoglyphic studies can be conducted without expensive equipment.

64. I.P. Singh and M.K. Bhasin, Anthropometry (Delhi: Bharati Bhawan, 1968).

65. Edward Hunt, ‘Review (Practical Anthropology by Georges Olivier and M.A. MacConaill; Anthropometry by Indera P. Singh and M.K. Bhasin)’, American Anthropologist 72, no. 3 (1970): 713–14; 714.

66. Sarah Hodges, ‘Indian Eugenics in an Age of Reform’, in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006): 115–38.

67. Schafft, Racism to Genocide, 153–54.

68. Ibid., 47, 54, 56, 78–80.

69. Ibid., 187–91, 223–25, 240–41, 251.

70. Ibid., ix.

71. Hunt, ‘Review’, 713.

72. Schafft, Racism to Genocide, 219.

73. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats, 38.

74. Ibid., 4, 7–10, 59–61, 80.

75. Crispin Bates, ‘Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter G. Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995): 219–59.

76. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats, 109–12.

77. Projit Mukharji, ‘From Serosocial to Sanguinary Identities: Caste, Transnational Race Science and the Shifting Metonymies of Blood Group B, India c. 1918–1960’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 2 (2014): 143–76.

78. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats, 61.

79. Ibid., 78–91.

80. Ibid., 100, 104, 121.

81. Ibid., 102–3.

82. Bhattacharya told me of an additional connection to Biswas that led to his admission to the DU anthropology programme. His father was a Sanskrit teacher and priest from whom Biswas sought horoscopes as he searched for husbands for his three daughters.

83. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats, 166–68.

84. Ibid., 198–200.

85. Ibid., 190.

86. Ibid., 162–63.

87. Ibid., 164.

88. Subhadeepta Ray, ‘Studying Laboratories: A Sociological Inquiry of Research Practices in Genetics’, in Towards a New Sociology in India, ed. Mahuya Bandyopadhyay and Ritambhara Hebbar (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2016): 141–76.

89. A.K. Kalla and D.K. Bhattacharya, Understanding People of India: Anthropological Insight: Proceedings of the P.C. Biswas Centenary National Seminar, March 29–31, 2003 (Delhi: Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, 2003): v.

90. Ibid., 1.

91. Bandeh-Ahmadi, ‘Anthropological Generations’.

92. Abhik Ghosh, ‘Professor Dibyendu Kanti Bhattacharya (June 28, 1938–December 25, 2017)’, Indian Anthropologist 48, no. 1 (2018): 93–97.

93. Vinay Kumar Srivastava, ‘Professor D.K. Bhattacharya’, Oriental Anthropologist 19, no. 2 (2019): 338–42.

94. Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats, 244.

95. Laura Nader, ‘Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power’, Current Anthropology 38, no. 5 (1997): 711–23.