“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.”
