Vernacular Eugenics?Santati-Śāstrain Popular Hindi Advisory Literature (1900–1940)

What is it about?

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the development of a popular, albeit hitherto little explored, branch of ‘scientific’ knowledge in the Hindi public sphere. Known as santati-shastra (lit. ‘the science of progeny’ or ‘progeniology’), this branch of knowledge instructed newly-married middle-class couples on how to produce mentally and physically perfect children. This essay begins with a comparison between santati-shastra and eugenics as it was promoted in India and elsewhere. Analysing two specific issues treated in santati-shastra literature, it shows that this form of knowledge based its principles not on ‘classical eugenics’ as promulgated by Francis Galton and re-adapted by Indian eugenicists, but on an entirely different set of sources, which included Ayurveda,rati-shastra, and theories on heredity stemming from a mid-nineteenth-century American phrenologist. Santati-shastra’s singular frame of ‘scientific’ reference, and especially its use of Western ‘fringe science’, provide new insights into the multiple, and sometimes unexpected, ways in which ‘Western science’ functioned as a legitimising source in vernacular texts.

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Why is it important?

This work offers new insights into the complex processes of vernacularisation of ‘Western science’ in colonial India. In particular, I have emphasised how santati-shastra entailed mechanisms of ‘scientific legitimation’ which eluded most categories of analysis proposed so far in this context of study.