Historian Projit Bihari Mukharji, who teaches at Ashoka University, has won the 2024 Pfizer Award for his book, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66. This award is presented by the History of Science Society, and it recognises Mukharji’s research that uncovers the complex intersections of race, science, colonialism and nationalism in India. The book provides critical insights into how scientific practices were entangled with racial ideologies, reshaping our understanding of race science within a colonial context.
He also illustrates how India appropriated and repurposed race science to its own ends and argues that these appropriations need to be understood within the national and regional contexts of postcolonial nation-making – not merely as footnotes to a Western history of “normal science.”
Mukharji’s research largely focuses on the histories of science and medicine in modern South Asia. He is also the author of Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London, 2009), Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences (Chicago, 2016) and, most recently, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 (Chicago, 2022). He currently teaches history at Ashoka University.