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While
doing research for my book, I stumbled upon something unexpected: a body of writings
on eugenics
by and for a non-white population. There is a rich literature on the history of eugenics around the world (Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine's Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics is a great place to start). This scholarship explores the ways in which race
science glorified whiteness from the nineteenth century until the
mid-twentieth.
What I hadn’t realized was that
non-Europeans were also using eugenics for their own purposes.
In the early twentieth century, Parsis (or
Zoroastrians) in colonial Bombay published books adapting Euro-American race
theory to their own population. These authors were writing at a time when their ethno-religious
community was developing an increasingly racialized identity. Parsis disagreed
over whether ethnic outsiders could be accepted into their religion and
community, or whether European wives and adopted Indian orphans were out. This controversy played out
in the courts in a series of lawsuits across the British Empire. (I explore these cases in my book, here and here).
Parsi eugenics provided a conceptual foundation
for the newly restrictive race-based position. The founder of this school of
thought was an orthodox Zoroastrian solicitor named Jehangir J. Vimadalal. He wrote Mr. Vimadalal and the Juddin Question: A
Series of Articles reprinted from “The Oriental Review” (1910) and Racial Intermarriages: Their Scientific
Aspect (1922). Vimadalal borrowed from European race theorists like Gustave
Le Bon and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, arguing that Parsis, as a superior
race, should not intermarry with other Asians—or even with Europeans, who were also
“superior” but racially different.
Two decades later, Vimadalal’s successor,
Sapur Desai, wrote Parsis and Eugenics (1940).
Desai proposed to improve Parsi stock by creating a Eugenics Record Office and
Research Laboratory on the model of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor complex (home
of the US-based Eugenics
Record Office and now a center for
genomics research). Desai also wanted to see a “Eugenical Marriage
Association” that would encourage reproduction by eugenically sound couples.
There were critics of Parsi eugenics like journalist
R. P. Masani in the 1930s. But Parsi eugenics had more supporters in late
colonial India than did Masani’s “anti-racialism.”
Parsi eugenics fit into several larger histories among Zoroastrians. First, Parsis had long been concerned with
questions of purity—first ritual, then racial. These two types of purity were
connected. By the late nineteenth century, following the Zoroastrian purity
laws was almost impossible if one wanted to take advantage of the educational,
professional, and financial opportunities on offer to subjects of the British
Empire. But if being Parsi was no longer about ritual purity, what was it
about? Being racially Parsi may have been the answer.
Parsi eugenics also existed against the
backdrop of a longstanding debate about “next-of-kin” marriage (incestuous
marriage within the nuclear family), a practice attributed to elites in ancient
Persia. Prods Oktor Skjærvø describes the
controversy here.
Furthermore, Parsi eugenics foreshadowed genetic investigations in our own
time. Today, scientists are studying disproportionately high rates of particular
inherited conditions among Parsis. (Skjærvø surveys this research, too.)
Other non-Europeans must have developed their
own adaptations of race science. How was Euro-American race science turned into
something different in late nineteenth-century Japan or colonial Africa, for instance?
The Parsi story, explored in chapter 7 of my book, adds a new layer to the history
of eugenics. With its legal players and applications, it also speaks to the
history of law in Asia and the British Empire. It is surely not unique.
