ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the extant historiography on race, with a particular focus on science and law. For science, it focuses mainly on medicine, anthropology, and vernacular sciences, such as santati-sastra. For law, the chapter explores the ways in which myriad forensic disciplines, including toxicology, serology, and graphology, produced multivalent racialisations. Through these surveys, the chapter advances four arguments: first, that race was a widespread facet of the British Raj; second, that race science continued to flourish in the interwar period; third, that race was a mutable and heterographic set of practices of hierarchisation, rather than a regime of stable dichotomies; and, finally, that race was continually appropriated, subverted, and transformed through its unexpected performance by a variety of subaltern groups.
