Eugenics
Alongside the development of genetics, the pseudoscientific doctrine of eugenics was growing in popularity amongst the scientific elite of the UK. Eugenics was a term coined by the prominent statistician and anthropologist, Francis Galton in 1883. Galton believed that humans could and should improve the “racial qualities” of future generations either by encouraging procreation in those seen as fit or by discouraging or forcefully preventing it in those seen as “unfit”. At the heart of the movement was a fear that the unfit would reproduce more rapidly than the fit and would dilute the population, the antithesis of Darwinism.
As with Genetics, Eugenics was structured by conversations within societies and conferences. In 1907, the Eugenics Society was founded in London, gaining over 1000 members by the 1930s. The First International Congress on Eugenics was held in 1912, by the Eugenics Education Society, with two more sessions in 1921 and 1932. There was significant overlap between the attendees of these conferences and the International Congress of Genetics, to the point that the 1932 Congress on Eugenics was planned for Ithaca, New York, to coincide with the 6th International Congress of Genetics. In 1948 following the horrors of the holocaust the Eighth International Congress of Genetics held in Stockholm began to distance itself from Eugenics.
The Eugenics Society and its congresses garnered support from a range of ideas, both scientific and non-scientific, ranging from concerns about the standardisation of anthropology and the social need for improved birth control to the fear of mixed-race couples and calls to sterilize poor people and those with mental health conditions. As the author G.K. Chesterton noted, “I know that it means very different things to different people; but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.”
For Reginald Ruggles Gates, C.D. Darlington and J.S. Huxley, Eugenics acted as a gateway from their primary research interests of Botany and Zoology to the field of Anthropology, a field in which they had no experience. They were all at various points heavily involved in the Eugenics Society, despite having wildly different views of race. From 1964 to 1978 Darlington wrote a trilogy of books on his ideas around race, including his belief that certain races or tribes were predisposed to criminal behaviour or lacked emotional and intellectual faculties. Janaki Ammal had joined the Eugenics Society in 1934 and was enlisted by Darlington to provide additional data on anthropology in India including images of tribes.
A number of Eugenics societies were also set up in India, including in Mumbai, Simla, Solapur and Lahore. Despite having some input from the London Eugenics Society and often receiving donations, these were Indian-run societies, with memberships largely made up of Indian scientists and non-scientists. While specific rules and regulations varied, at the heart of all of the societies was a concern for improvement of family planning.
The Eugenics movement was also prevalent in Germany, where it was used to justify the Nazi “racial cleansing” programme, which ultimately resulted in the Holocaust. The Nazi party believed themselves to be “racially pure”, and that they were descended from a race of “Aryans”, who originated in northern India, and migrated to Europe. In 1938, under the sponsorship of a leader of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Himmler, German zoologist Ernst Schäfer made an expedition to India and Tibet, in an effort to prove German descent from the peoples of the Himalayas.
In India there were remarkable continuities between colonial and national anthropological endeavours in the 1940s and 1950s where biological data including cephalic and nasal indexes reminiscent of racialised colonial categories was used to group people.
