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Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste

This blog post marks the launch of the latest monograph in our series, Publications of the German Historical Institute London:

Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970)

by Thiago P. Barbosa, winner of the 2023 Prize of the German Historical Institute London and the Frobenius Research Promotion Award 2023

The idea of ‘race’ has shaped our understanding of human diversity. As an idea that became a key concept in different sciences dealing with the variation of human form and life, race has been part of the discourse since the nineteenth century. Following the movements of scientists, books, and technologies, the idea of race travelled around the globe. As Germany intensified its racial frameworks in science and politics, several students from different nations, including India, trained within the German school of racial anthropology, a tradition of anthropology that reached its political apex at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin. One of these international students was Irawati Karve (1905–70), a prominent Indian anthropologist who trained in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the infamous KWI-A.

If caste, as a social category, has emerged as India’s most prevailing and persistent marker of difference, this was also due to the racially essentializing reinforcement of caste in scientific endeavours. To understand the essentialization and rigidization of caste in India, a large body of scholarship has focused on the role of British colonialism in shaping the idea of caste, shedding light on how colonial scientists applied racial frameworks with the goal of explaining (and ordering) the incredible human diversity of the Indian subcontinent.1 However, the role of national scientists and other scientists beyond the colonizer–colonized divide has been largely overlooked in attempts to understand the racialization of human difference in India. This lack of attention is significant, not only because essentialized ideas of ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ persevered, or even intensified, after colonialism but also because of the profuse transnational connections in racial sciences, which extended far beyond Britain.

Joining other recent efforts to bridge this gap in scholarship,2 the book Racializing Caste explores the transnational entanglements between Germany and India in the sciences of race. By focusing on Irawati Karve, from her training in Germany to her work and current legacy in India, the book examines how racial theories and methods have been adapted to study the diversity of Indian castes and ethnicities. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, it discusses the transnational impact of German racial sciences and, particularly, the lasting and ongoing effects of racial knowledge on both anthropology and population genetics in India.

From 1927 to 1931, Karve undertook her PhD in Berlin under the supervision of Eugen Fischer, a German anthropology professor who had built a career on his Mendelian research among colonial subjects in German South West Africa. In Berlin, Fischer was the founding director of the KWI-A and supervised several young researchers, at least two of them from India. At the KWI-A, Karve was trained in the anthropometric methods of physical anthropology and in the theories of race. Although her craniometric research in Berlin contradicted a racist theory that came out of that time and place (the theory that Europeans had a more protuberant right side of the brain due to their so-called advanced civilization), Karve continued to apply anthropometric and other racial frameworks to study religion, caste, and ethnicity in India. By doing so, she contributed to key political debates in India, from the question of partition to the demarcation of regional state boundaries. Although (especially in the years following the Second World War) Karve strove to move away from certain racial theories and worried about physical anthropology’s racist implications, her continuous use of technologies and methods from that racial tradition up to the 1960s cemented her legacy of racialization of human difference in India.3

Irawati Karve’s Humboldt Foundation scholarship card. Source: family archive (courtesy of Urmilla Deshpande).

Beyond a historical analysis of Karve’s practices and writing, the book Racializing Caste also delves into her current legacy, drawing on primary ethnographic research into the commemoration of her memory, as well as into spaces of scientific training and academic exchange. In Indian anthropology, especially in her home state of Maharashtra, Karve is commemorated in particular for the cultural, social, and feminist accents in her vast scholarship. Nevertheless, she is still a reference point in the field of physical and biological anthropology, which features significantly in anthropology curricula in Maharashtra today. The same body measurement instruments used by Karve (many of them with Swiss and German origins) are seen and used in anthropology classrooms in different universities in Pune, Karve’s hometown. Although these anthropometric methods are taught today mainly for their application in forensics and human growth and nutrition research, racial anthropology is a haunting presence in these spaces of physical/biological anthropology training. Racializing Caste sheds lights on these affects of discomfort to bring to the fore the subtle ways in which discredited racial and even racist ideas make themselves present through the use of anthropometric instruments or books. Furthermore, it discusses how anthropometry-based human nutrition research promotes a biologically essentializing view of the problem of hunger, thereby depoliticizing this social issue. Drawing from these observations, the book also advances a theoretical elaboration on the role of materiality and technology in the perseverance of the racializing potential in anthropological approaches to bodily variation.

Besides anthropology, population genetics is an important scientific field in which Karve’s racial theories about caste have taken root. In conversation with the large body of scholarship that has examined the racial continuities in genetics research,4 this book analyses the racial legacies in the population genetics of caste. The origins of caste have long been an object of discussion in scholarship, a debate to which other German scholars—most notably Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) with his view of the so-called Aryan migration—have contributed in racializing ways. More recently, internationally leading population geneticists have drawn on Karve’s racially informed theorization about the differences between subcastes (or jatis) as a principal source in justifying their sampling decisions and building their genetic model of caste differentiations. In this sense, examining the racial continuities in the writings and practices of geneticists who conduct research in/on India is key to tackling the continuing biologization and racialization of caste. Furthermore, the analysis of the population genetics of India—a field that is heavily dependent on expensive scientific technology that is often only available in the Global North—provides important insights into questions of post-colonial sovereignty in science.

Anthropologists in a molecular laboratory doing research on the DNA of ethnic and caste groups, Pune, 2019. Photo by the author.

The history of scientific racism still haunts present-day science. A transnational and transcolonial approach can provide deep novel insights into the formation and long-lasting effects of racial and eugenicist knowledge. While that tradition of thinking reached a scientific and political apex in Nazi Germany, it has circulated to different parts of the globe, where its effects are still perceptible and demand careful scholarly attention. By looking at this India–Germany line of scientific knowledge entanglement, Racializing Caste aims to tackle the legacies of racism by highlighting less obvious genealogies of racial knowledge and its global circulations. Written from a critical anthropological and STS perspective, the book also offers insights into the question of how the sciences of human diversity could be otherwise, in India and elsewhere. Discussing how both biological anthropology and population genetics can pay closer attention to social inequalities (and to how social inequalities shape bodies) is an important step in efforts to depart from the legacies of racism and colonialism in the sciences that deal with human life.

Feature Image: Irawati Karve in the KWI-A building. Source: family archive (courtesy of Chanda Nimbkar, Nandini Nimbkar-Rajvanshi, and Urmilla Deshpande).

  1. See e.g. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001). []
  2. See e.g. Projit Bihari Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 (Chicago, 2023). []
  3. For a deeper biographical exploration of Karve, see Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago P. Barbosa, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve ( New Delhi, 2024). []
  4. See e.g. Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge, 2005); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Oxford and Princeton, 2005); Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee (eds.), Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (New Brunswick, 2012); Katharina Schramm, ‘Neue Technologien—alte Kategorien? Die Problematisierung von Rasse an der Schnittstelle von Wissenschaft und Politik’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 139/2 (2014), 233–52. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Thiago P. Barbosa (May 9, 2025). Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved May 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13wcr


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Thiago P. Barbosa

Dr. Thiago Pinto Barbosa is a postdoctoral staff member of the Institute of Anthropology at Leipzig University. Thiago researches the interplay of power, politics, and science, especially in relation to racism, imperialism, and the environment. Thiago studied social sciences in Brazil and Germany, and obtained a PhD in anthropology at the University of Bayreuth.

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