Forward to the Past: Counting Indians in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

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Indian social and cultural history have, for a couple of centuries, turned on events in the history of science and technology. But because science and technology — from race-science to reproduction, from colonial improvement to population demography, and from craniometry to computation have, by definition, appeared to stand outside of politics, South Asian policy-makers and activists have too often taken this construction literally, leaving the internal practices of science and technology outside the ambit of political agitation. This paper explores how we might investigate the ways in which notions of science, race, and data constitute each other, invisibly shaping debates about South Asian social justice.

Kavita Philip is the President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures, Department of English, University of British Columbia, Canada