Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 50(4), 359–375 Autumn (Fall) 2014 View this article online at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.21692

 C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE: PSYCHOMETRY IN BRITISH INDIA, 1919–1940 SHIVRANG SETLUR

This paper describes the introduction and development of intelligence testing in British India. Between 1919 and 1940 experimenters such as C. Herbert Rice, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, and Venkatrao Vithal Kamat imported a number of intelligence tests, adapting them to suit a variety of South Asian languages and contexts. Charting South Asian psychometry’s gradual move from American missionary efforts toward the state, this paper argues that political reforms in the 1920s and 1930s affected how psychometry was “indigenized” in South Asia. Describing how approaches to race and caste shifted across instruments and over time, this paper charts the gradual recession, within South Asian psychometry, of a “race” theory of caste. Describing some of the ways in which this “late colonial” period affected the postcolonial landscape, the paper concludes by suggesting potential lines for further inquiry into the later career of intelligence testing C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. in India and Pakistan. 

INTRODUCTION This paper describes the introduction and development of intelligence testing in British India. By carefully attending to the social and political context surrounding this early period of South Asian psychometry, this study aims to shed light on key features that would come to dominate testing culture in the postcolonial period. In the first section of this paper, I will describe the early history of psychometric testing in the subcontinent, focusing on the first intelligence test to be developed, distributed, and used in British India, in the 1920s. Produced by C. Herbert Rice, an American missionary working in Lahore, this test established a context for subsequent developments in postcolonial India and Pakistan. In the second section, I will examine and contextualize early intelligence experiments by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the first South Asian to publish work in this area. In the third section, I will engage with Venkatrao Vithal Kamat, the first scholar to situate intelligence testing as a useful instrument for state action. Working in the mid-to-late 1930s, Kamat developed an intelligence test with direct political and policy implications. His work served as a model for the production of several other intelligence tests. In the last section, I will briefly engage with the postcolonial landscape, suggesting potential areas for further inquiry. Though chiefly concerned with India, this paper is crafted with the hope of spurring further studies in other South Asian contexts, and makes brief suggestions in this regard. With respect to India, uncovering the early history of psychometry is especially important, as the postcolonial state uniquely prioritized intelligence testing in its efforts to reform education. India’s colossal education network was built over the 1940s and 1950s according to a model proposed by India’s Soviet-inspired Five-Year Plans, which sought to direct the country’s development toward the twin goals of social justice and socialism. Education was an important area of concern for India’s planned economy, since it was seen to be doubly productive of modernity. Education could produce modern subjects, free from the communal, caste, and gender prejudices that permeated “traditional” India. It would also provide the SHIVRANG SETLUR is a doctoral student in the Graduate Field of History, Cornell University. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Shivrang Setlur, Department of History, Cornell University, 450 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850; [email protected].

359

360

SHIVRANG SETLUR

skilled workers that an expanding, interventionist state would need to complete its various projects of socialist modernization. Though evidence suggests that interest in psychometry exploded during this period, in many ways the early period of South Asian testing, carried out in the context of “late colonial” British rule, established the terrain with which postcolonial developments had to contend. By focusing on the “transitional” period of the 1920s and 1930s, between the “high noon” of British India and “Midnight’s Children,” its independent successor states, this paper seeks to contribute to an ongoing conversation regarding the periodization of the human sciences and the state in India. In one strand of scholarship, historians have emphasized the continuities between colonial and postcolonial India. David Ludden for instance, identified the deep structural and ideological continuities between Britain’s Indian administration, organized around the colonial “civilizing mission,” and post-Independence India’s seemingly socialist Five-Year Plans (Ludden, 1992). For Ludden, disagreements between imperial administrators and their nationalist successors were largely a question of policy, rather than ideology, and in this respect constituted a single “developmentalist regime” (Ludden, 1992, p. 247). On the other hand, recent scholarship has justly attended to the massive changes introduced after Independence, when state support for science and planning disrupted many of the practices established during the colonial period. This literature has called attention to the transformative nature of “Nehruvian Science” and its efforts to remake both the state and society through science (Roy, 2007; Arnold, 2013). Focused on questions surrounding the nature of formal independence, such studies have paid relatively little attention to the 1920s and 1930s, a period in India of especial importance to historians of the human sciences. In 1919, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms initiated the period of “dyarchy,” where particular political powers were allocated to South Asian subjects (Robb, 1976). Importantly, and perhaps decisively for the history of psychology in India, by the 1930s fields such as education, public health, and municipal government had been allocated to “natives” (Alam, 2004). By tracing intelligence testing’s migration toward the state during this period, this paper describes how the possibilities afforded by the human sciences attracted reformist impulses in the period preceding Independence. This paper also seeks to describe intelligence testing’s emergence in an unfamiliar context. John Carson, in The Measure of Merit, traced the mutual constitution of political and institutional cultures in mass democracies; in doing so, he sought to highlight how particular human differences are made to matter (Carson, 2007). This paper builds on Carson’s comparative study of France and the United States by charting intelligence testing’s career in an undemocratic polity, describing its articulation with some of the social and political institutions of colonial India. Moreover, this paper seeks to “internationalize” the history of psychology. Adrian C. Brock, in the introduction to Internationalizing the History of Psychology, has pointed out that the particular national history of psychology in the United States has stood in for the history of psychology itself. For Brock “internationalizing” this story does not consist of merely substituting one national history for another, but in producing original research so as to draw evidence “from unusual contexts in order to draw conclusions about psychology in general” (2006, p. 11). By describing how American intelligence tests and British statistics were imported to India, and how the valences of these instruments shifted within the Indian social and political context, this paper builds on the work of Wade Pickren (2009) and Anand Paranjpe (Paranjpe, 2006), and traces how a particular subfield of psychology was “indigenized” and made uniquely “Indian.” Moreover, by highlighting how the state, and particularly its colonial character, mattered, this paper seeks to enrich the notion of indigenization. Indeed, by chronicling and contextualizing some of the surprising ways in which South Asian reformers enthusiastically embraced “western” models, this study argues JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

361

that accounts attentive to “indigenization” need to accord analytical purchase to the state, and the conditions of possibility it establishes. Lastly, this paper seeks to contribute to an existing conversation regarding caste and the human sciences. On the one hand, scholars have attended to colonial notions of caste. Especially concerned with anthropology, scholars such as Nicholas Dirks have chronicled how, over the late nineteenth century, caste came to be seen as both quintessentially Indian and a reflection of race (Dirks, 2001). Though the racial model of caste has long been overturned, few studies have attended to how and why the race theory of caste receded within the human sciences. By attending to how psychometric experiments treated caste, this study seeks to begin such a project, tracing some of the transformations in such concepts over the 1920s and 1930s. BINET “GOES NATIVE”: THE 1920S Efforts to detect the intelligence of Indian bodies actually began in the latter part of 1919, when D. S. Herrick, working in Madras, administered the Goddard Form-Board test to more than 700 children, girls and boys, in 20 schools (Herrick, 1921). Though information on Herrick and his efforts is scanty, a number of important features can be discerned from the report he published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1921. In the first instance, Herrick’s battery was restricted to the standard form board, as described by Pintner and Paterson, since he viewed the adaptation of linguistic tests as impracticable. Second, Herrick was principally concerned with the anthropometric applications of intelligence testing, rather than educational or hygienic uses. Interested in investigating whether race differences extended to mental or “psycho-motor” capacities, Herrick proceeded under the popular, though by no means universally accepted, understanding that caste groups were really races (Herrick, 1921). Noting that the Government of India had collected a large set of physical measurements of castes and tribes of India during the census of 1891, Herrick sought to enrich this data by investigating the differences between two groups at the opposite extremes of the caste system, elite Brahmins and “outcast” Panchamas, the then-current term for the Dalits of this region.1 In order to do so, Herrick’s caste sample groups did not reflect the wider population of Madras, city or province, where Panchamas strongly outnumbered Brahmans. Moreover, as he was keen to establish and compare the “normal” intelligence of Brahmins, Panchamas, and Americans, Herrick discarded all the extremely low scores from his dataset, as such scores were signs of impairment. Though Herrick’s study, perhaps unsurprisingly, supported the anthropometric racial order, with Americans performing best and Panchamas performing worst, his explanation for these differences was notable; he went to great lengths to explain the differences in score between the purportedly Aryan Brahmans and Americans, but saw no need to explain the low scores of the “Dravidian” Panchamas. In Herrick’s account, the initial excellence of young Brahmans was due to the early maturity afforded by a tropical climate, while the Americans’ subsequent advances were due to their superior educational institutions. Herrick’s study did not make much of an impression in government or anthropological circles. It seems plausible that by framing his instrument principally in terms of anthropometry, 1. Over the past century and a half, communities most oppressed by the caste system, so-called “untouchables,” have contested the legitimacy of both the caste system, and the wider Hindu culture that sustains it. As part of this political upsurge, many have rejected the names given to them, preferring instead to name themselves as “Dalits,” and thus, mobilize as a group for itself. In solidarity, this paper, wherever possible, identifies these people with the name they have chosen, rather than one thrust upon them. There is a vast literature on Dalit politics; useful starting points include Ambedkar (1945), Rao (2009), and Rawat (2011).

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

362

SHIVRANG SETLUR

Herrick was contributing to a field that was unusually well-established in India; eminent theorists such as Herbert Risley had held important government positions, and had vigorously promoted their own instruments, such as the “Nasal-Orbital Index” (Bates, 1995). Herrick did find an audience, however, among American missionaries working in the 1920s and 1930s, who sought to leverage the power of intelligence testing in their educational efforts. Notably, Herrick’s attempt to discern race through caste, and his assumption of Aryan superiority, was carried forward even as intelligence testing was adapted to reform-minded educational projects. C. Herbert Rice was the first to adapt and publish an intelligence test specifically for use in India. A professor, and later president, at the prestigious Forman Christian College in Lahore, Rice was equally active as a Presbyterian missionary, and was deeply involved with the church’s village educational initiatives. In 1922, Rice enrolled as a doctoral student at Princeton’s Department of Psychology, under the supervision of Carl Brigham, who had helped develop the U.S. Army’s IQ tests, and who would soon gain fame for developing the Scholastic Aptitude Test (Carson, 2007, p. 261). Rice remained in Lahore for his fieldwork, where he ordered the translation of an eclectic variety of mental tests, first into Urdu, and then into Punjabi (Rice, 1929, p. 1). Some of the 67 tests that Rice adapted, such as the U.S. Army Alpha, were designed to be administered to large groups, while others, such as the Goddard Form Board, were to be conducted individually (Carson, 2007, pp. 197–219). For nonverbal tests, Rice employed his wife to draw pictures suitable to the local context. Over the next three years, Rice administered his battery of tests to more than 1,000 schoolboys in the environs of Lahore and Delhi, focusing on village children. Based on the data he thus collected, Rice not only standardized his tests against the population, but also heavily revised the materials he used. His finished work, A Hindustani Binet-Performance Point Scale, was accepted by Princeton’s Department of Psychology in 1925; by 1929, it was being distributed for practical use by Christian educators throughout India by various missionary presses, including the Wesleyans at the southern city of Mysore and the Presbyterians in Lahore. Subsequent editions of Rice’s work were published in India by Oxford University Press (Kamat, 1934, p. 296), while Princeton and Oxford collaborated on the English edition. Of the original 67 tests adapted, only 35 appeared in the final instrument. Of the remainder, Rice provided an inventory, and supplied some remarks describing the reasons for their omission. Some, like “giving the date” and “stating your age,” reflected the partial and incomplete penetration of Western standards into Punjabi villages. For instance, Rice noted that since there were multiple calendars in use, with adherence dependent on religious community and family history, valid responses for the date were so numerous as to preclude this test. Some other tests were excluded because they were unduly prejudicial against some students. Thus, the test for stating whether it was morning or afternoon was excluded to accommodate villagers, even though city dwellers were accustomed to reckoning time according to British custom. Similarly, the test for giving one’s family name was excluded, on the basis that only relatively Westernized families had adopted surnames that operated in the English fashion (Rice, 1929, pp. 95–98). More interestingly, however, was a third kind of excluded test. As scholars have noted, Terman’s revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence metric had sought to measure “character” just as much as intelligence. Tests such as “Resisting Suggestion” and “Comprehension, 2nd Degree” did not just demand a technically correct answer, but also required children to display obedience and steadfastness in order to pass (Carson, 2007, pp. 189–190). Surprisingly, Rice omitted both of these famous tests, and he did so without providing any substantive justification. Lastly, and most importantly, all of the tests dependent on reading and writing were excluded. As Rice noted, and as historians have described, the JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

363

languages of North India were, in the 1920s, in a state of turmoil. Under the political pressure of nationalism, the old common language of “Hindustani” was fracturing into three distinct languages, each with their own religious affiliation. Thus, Urdu adopted a Persian script and systematically began replacing Sanskrit words with Arabic equivalents. A similar process brought Hindi into being, while Sikhs adopted one script for Punjabi, and Hindus adopted another. Thus, any measurement of intelligence that sought to compare results between religious or caste groups would not be able to obtain accurate results from writing or reading tests. The result of these substantial yet carefully chosen revisions was twofold. On the one hand, Rice’s scale no longer bore any resemblance to its forebears, and its results could not be compared against their metrics. He had brought into being a uniquely “Hindustani” intelligence that was incommensurable with the intelligence measurements then being conducted in institutions across America. Moreover, his “Hindustani Intelligence Quotient” had limited mobility in India itself, as it had been carefully calibrated to the linguistic and cultural milieu of the Punjabi villagers Rice aimed to measure. On the other hand, Rice had produced a powerful tool for measuring intelligence differences between the local caste and religious groups that he collected data about and inventoried in his tables. Rice left no doubt that collecting data about group-level differences was important to his project. The subtitle of the test declared that it came “[w]ith a comparison of the Intelligence of certain Caste Groups in the Panjab [sic].” Most of the included tables calculated results by both age and caste. Moreover, in the “Essential Rules,” which preface the instrument, Rice outlined the key pieces of information that required validation and were to be filled in only by the specially trained examiner himself: age, school, class (as in year of study), caste, and social status. The first three items were essential to the Binet scale itself, and without them a measurement of intelligence could not be computed at all. Caste and social status, however, were not essential in the same way, and were peculiar to Rice’s instrument. In standardizing his test, Rice paid careful attention to ensuring that the caste breakdown of his sample group matched the purported caste breakdown both within the Punjab as a whole, as well as within the specific arena of its school system. Furthermore, following British administrative convention in the Punjab, he counted religious groups as separate castes, and counted Dalit converts to Christianity separately from their “heathen” brethren. Thus, he arrived at seven broad categories with which he could measure group-level differences: Chuhras, the name for a Dalit caste in his region, Christians, “Muhamadans,” Sikhs, Brahmins, and non-Brahmin Hindus. Rice’s use of caste is notable; in using broad, administrative categories that marked religious differences as caste differences, his work reflected anthropometry’s curious status in colonial India, at once cutting-edge science and a system that was largely constructed by colonial government, often driven more by the logic of administrative expediency than scientific accuracy. Despite averring that the Sikh and Muslim boys he measured were themselves divided by caste, and hence race, Rice justified his methods by emphasizing that his tool remained especially sensitive to the group he was most concerned with: the Dalits whose condition he sought to improve through education (Rice, 1929, p. 87). Alongside this commitment to social uplift, Rice’s study sought to emphasize that the Dalit boys with whom he worked were capable of improvement because they were actually just as Aryan as their highborn neighbors. In making this argument, Rice drew upon the anthropometric studies conducted by Herbert Risley. In Risley’s schema, the lower castes of South India with whom Herrick had worked were definitively “Dravidian,” while in Northern India, they were seen to be of “Indo-Aryan” stock. In his impassioned summary of his results, Rice affirmed Risley’s theory, arguing that missionaries working with Dalits in Northern India could be assured of their racial capacities: JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

364

SHIVRANG SETLUR

. . . we may state that our tests fail to discover any essential disability in the boys who have come from the Depressed Classes in the Panjab [sic.]. It is not now surprising to us to note Risley’s remark as to the racial stock of the Chuhras. That writer . . . cites the Chuhra, with the Rajput, as characteristic Indo-Aryan types . . . We believe that those who deal with the children of these classes have reason to be greatly encouraged with the material with which they deal, and the product of their efforts. (1929, pp. 189–191) Indeed, as Rice’s remarks about his experiment make clear, the careful calibration of his instrument to simultaneously capture both the presence of intelligence in individual boys and differences across caste was essential to its usefulness. While he argued that caste differences did not reflect differences in intellectual capacity, he nevertheless considered caste a “real thing,” worthy as a category of collection and analysis in his cutting-edge psychological experiment. Moreover, Rice remained careful in his observations, restricting his claims of Aryan belonging only to the Chuhra caste with which he worked. In citing Risley approvingly, Rice made clear that he still believed that the various castes and tribes of the Punjab represented a diversity of races. Rice concluded his work by articulating exactly how he thought his intelligence scale could contribute to improving the conditions of the “Depressed Classes”: It is important at this early stage in their emancipation to find the most capable, and to educate them for the leadership of their own people. To this end we look forward to the use of such instruments as this Scale for the discovery of those boys and girls who will respond most intelligently to the efforts of the few who are as yet enlisted in the cause of their education. (1929, pp. 191–192) Rice keenly felt the need for a tool that missionaries could use to sift through the mass of boys in their schools, and select those with the capacities most amenable to furthering the Christian mission. Moreover, Rice saw his instrument as a useful tool in maximizing the efficiency of missionary resources. Rice also felt that his test provided a suitable corrective to India’s unhealthy “regime of the Examination [emphasis original]” (Rice, 1929, p. 143). Rice characterized the life of Indians as a long series of “ordeals,” in which an endless series of examinations, administered by a host of actors, determined each person’s life course. Ironically, he felt his own intelligence test stood outside this regime (Rice, 1929, p. 143). Rice’s work made an impression on Protestant missionaries working in other parts of India. Drawing inspiration from Rice’s efforts, Emil W. Menzel, a missionary and Master’s candidate at Washington University, adapted the Goodenough “Draw-A-Man” test for use in the rural Central Provinces of British India in 1932 (Menzel, 1935; Hopkins & Washburn, 2012). Apart from accounting for the “far scantier amount of clothing” worn by Indian men, his task in adapting the Goodenough test lay in classification and standardization, rather than translation. Menzel’s study took up Herrick and Rice’s interest in race, though it did not account for caste. Menzel’s adoption of a broad “East Indian” race in this study might have reflected Florence Goodenough’s “ethnic” approach to race (Goodenough, 1926); moreover, he may have been unaware or uninterested in Risley’s theory that castes reflected race. In either case, Menzel’s experiment continued an American interest in race in India. Rice’s efforts also attracted the attention of Indian educationalists, whose influence increased markedly over the 1930s and 1940s. In the wake of World War I, Indian nationalism entered a mass phase, exerting considerable pressure on colonial authorities for political concessions (Bose & Jalal, 1998, pp. 127–155). The Government of India Act, introduced in 1919 and significantly amended in 1932, attempted to quell nationalist agitation by granting JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

365

new powers to natives. Though historical attention has principally focused on the political dimensions of these reforms, they are especially significant to historians of the human sciences because they placed responsibility for fields, such as public health, education, and municipal government, in the hands of “natives.” South Asians’ newfound ability to have some say in shaping educational, health, and municipal policy helps explain why, over the 1930s and 1940s, Indians grew increasingly interested in intelligence testing. INTELLIGENCE INTERESTS INDIANS The first South Asian to publish the results of his intelligence experiments was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mahalanobis produced a battery of pictorial and group tests strikingly similar to Rice’s, and administered it within the independent religious and reformist schools with which he worked. While Mahalanobis experimented with mental testing himself, his test never became a working tool, as the test itself was never published. Nevertheless, the articles he published concerning mental testing remain valuable as a means of gaining insight into the values he ascribed to psychometrics. Unlike the other pioneers of South Asian psychometrics, Mahalanobis’ life and work is well documented. In 1996, the Indian Statistical Institute and Oxford University Press jointly published a biography of Mahalanobis, authored by his colleague, the econometrician Ashok Rudra (Rudra, 1996). Funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, they considered it a “national duty to sponsor a project for the preparation of a biography of this great savant and nation-builder . . . ” (Rudra, 1996), the architect of independent Indian planning and a central figure in the development of Indian social sciences. Outside of India, Mahalanobis’ name has been enshrined within statistical circles in the “Mahalanobis Distance,” a method he developed for distinguishing “groups” within datasets. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis was born on Cornwallis Street, Calcutta, in 1893 (Rudra, 1996, pp. 1–13). Importantly, his family was prominent members of the Brahmo Samaj, a distinct religious group founded in the mid-1800s. Centered in Calcutta, the Brahmo Samaj were a relatively small, but immensely powerful group, committed to reformulating Indian, or “Hindu” religion along “scientific” principles, and arguing against a host of social ills, from sati, to the ban on widow remarriage, and a few caste prejudices. Largely made up of Bengali Brahmins who had lost their privileged caste status, Brahmo Samajists enthusiastically availed themselves of the social and political opportunities afforded by British imperialism. Drawing on both reformist zeal and British patronage, the Brahmo Samaj were prolific institution builders, especially in the field of education, founding prestigious schools at every level, including Presidency College, Calcutta, the Brahmo Boys School, and the City School of Calcutta. These schools explicitly combined the religious and social teachings of the Brahmo movement with the content and methods of contemporary British education (Prakash, 1999, pp. 49–85). Crucially, such schools were also veritable factories for the production of India’s nationalist elite. The list of important cultural, political, and scientific actors to emerge from these Brahmo institutions is vast, but most prominently includes five presidents of the Indian National Congress, the Nobel Prize winners Rabindranath Tagore, and Amartya Sen, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Mahalanobis himself. These Brahmo institutions would also prove important for Mahalanobis’ psychometric work, for it was in their schools where he conducted his intelligence testing experiments. Mahalanobis was trained at Cambridge, and sat the Physics Tripos in 1915. After securing the highest honors ever achieved by an Indian in his examinations, he was awarded a research fellowship at the University. Despite his training in physics, Mahalanobis’ intellectual JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

366

SHIVRANG SETLUR

contributions were almost entirely in the area of statistics. He was introduced to the work of Karl Pearson near the end of his tenure in England. Delayed on his journey back to India by the First World War, he purchased the entire published set of Pearson’s journal Biometrika to keep him occupied (Rudra, 1996, p. 127). Upon his return to Calcutta, he secured an appointment as a professor of physics at Presidency College, a Brahmo institution that was also a leading college in colonial India. Mahalanobis also became extremely active in the wider Brahmo religious community. A close personal friend of Rabindranath Tagore, he fought to bring his particular branch of the sect into close conversation with the Nobel laureate. As a result of these efforts, by the early 1920s, Mahalanobis played a crucial administrative role at a number of reformist schools. He sat on the management committee of the Brahmo Boys School, which his grandfather had founded, and he was a director at Santiniketan, Tagore’s influential experimental school, which drew on Brahmo ideals to produce a “communion between India and the world” (Rudra, 1996, pp. 65–79). Further, during the Non-Cooperation Movement that marked the 1920s, during political crises, Mahalanobis was called upon by the British administrators of Presidency College to serve as Principal (Rudra, 1996, pp. 65–79). Unsurprisingly, given both his interest in statistics and his deep educational involvement, Mahalanobis developed an interest in leveraging psychometric instruments for school management. In 1927, when Rice had already completed his experiment, and would have been preparing his dissertation for publication, Mahalanobis began experimenting with group tests of intelligence in the Bengali language (Mahalanobis, 1933a). Mahalanobis administered a test of his own design on six dates, at six different schools, from August to October of 1928. Mahalanobis was an administrator at four of the six schools, and all of them were located in Calcutta. Unlike Rice, Mahalanobis administered his group test to both boys and girls. The results from these tests were not published until 1933, when they appeared in his new statistical journal, Sankhya. Modeled on Pearson’s Biometrika, Sankhya’s very name followed the Brahmo ideal, attempting to fuse modern science with the “ancient wisdom” of the Sanskrit heritage (Rudra, 1996). Appearing in a series of six articles over a period of four years, Mahalanobis’ papers approached intelligence testing from the perspective of an interested statistician, rather than a committed psychologist (Mahalanobis, 1933a, 1933b, 1934a, 1934b; Mahalanobis & Ray, 1936). Mahalanobis did not describe the scale he constructed, nor its relationship to established testing systems. Only a very cursory description of the test was provided, and little attention was paid to the training or comportment of the examiner. In contrast to Rice, Mahalanobis made no effort to describe the population to which he calibrated his instrument. While Rice had sought to reveal low-caste children as no less capable than their peers of other castes, Mahalanobis happily examined a population composed almost entirely of privileged children from his own community. Lastly, his decision to produce a group written test was made with an eye toward minimizing the time needed to administer the test and maximizing the number of students that could be examined in any sitting. Mahalanobis was chiefly concerned with demonstrating that, with the rigorous application of statistical analysis, intelligence tests could be an effective predictor of school performance, and could also disclose factors in the wider social setting that impinged upon the results obtained. In the first article in the series, Mahalanobis described how intelligence test data, when properly examined, would prove an excellent predictor of examination results. For him, intelligence tests were a valuable tool for making decisions concerning admissions. Alternatively, in the last article in his series, he called attention to the excellent and consistent performance obtained from the girls he examined. In his view, the data obtained from the test was able to disclose the fact that social pressures against girls’ education worked to “select” only the brightest girls for schooling (Mahalanobis & Ray, 1936). Unlike Rice, who paid much JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

367

attention to the purported biological factors that influenced intelligence, Mahalanobis did not attend to this issue at all. For him, the origins or mechanisms determining intelligence were less important than merely detecting its presence or absence. All of the benefits that intelligence tests provided were subsumed by their chief virtue: the speed and scale with which they allowed bodies to be measured. In the first article in the series, Mahalanobis noted that his interest in determining the statistical validity of intelligence instruments lay in producing a test reliable enough to be widely deployed in industrial psychology and vocational guidance (Mahalanobis, 1933b, p. 25). In the concluding article in the series, Mahalanobis wrote that his results demonstrated that a known test could “be used with considerable confidence for a rapid appraisement of school pupils [emphasis added]” (Mahalanobis & Ray, 1936, p. 402). In one respect, Mahalanobis’ psychometric work was notable for its lack of attention to race or caste, an abiding interest of contemporary psychologists, and an area in which Mahalanobis himself was actively engaged. Indeed, the Mahalanobis Distance (D2 ), the tool that secured his reputation internationally, was developed in the course of his anthropometric research. Mahalanobis initially sought a tool to distinguish statistically authentic races within a large anthropometric dataset collected by the Anthropological and Zoological Survey of India (Mahalanobis, 1922). He further refined this instrument in a study of the physical attributes of mixed-race Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. Mahalanobis’ interest in race science and biometrics lasted throughout his life, though his psychometric publications did not reflect this aspect of his work. Considering Mahalanobis’ intelligence experiments in light of his administrative responsibilities, it was certainly possible that he valued psychometrics purely for the optimizations and efficiencies they promised. Nevertheless, attending more closely to the Mahalanobis’ anthropometric studies sheds further light on the notable lack of race and caste talk in his intelligence experiments. The Americans, Herrick and Rice, had worked with caste through Herbert Risley’s framework, which posited that caste strictures against intermarriage had rendered India a vast anthropological laboratory. Moreover, he claimed that the panoply of castes in India could be mapped to race and thus ranked, especially by means of nasal measurements, or the “Relative Nasal Index,” his novel proposal for a precise tool to detect and distinguish “racial types” (Risley, 1969). Importantly, Risley’s theory of race in India was organized vertically, with racial differences separating the lowborn from the high in any given area. Though Risley’s theory was well-received, earning him a knighthood, it was not without prominent critics, both domestically and in England. Karl Pearson was one such critic, and Mahalanobis another (Mahalanobis, 1949). Over a series of papers on race mixture, Mahalanobis argued that while Risley’s data was reliable, his calculations were not; the statistician chided the anthropologist for a lack of mathematical rigor. More importantly, he argued that race differences in India, far from being stable and organized vertically along social status, were receding, and were organized horizontally across regions (Mahalanobis, 1925). Mahalanobis would continue to advance this concept of South Asian racial difference, and by the 1950s it had become the standard interpretation among Indian anthropologists. Given his commitment to a regional rather than hierarchical distribution of race differences in South Asia, Mahalanobis’ lack of attention to caste in his psychometric work appears less surprising. Chiefly concerned with Bengal, and working exclusively in Calcutta, there would be little reason for Mahalanobis to organize psychometric studies according to caste if he were convinced that the anthropometric data showed that such cleavages among his subjects were neither meaningful nor stable racial differences. Despite the fact that Mahalanobis never published his intelligence test, his Calcutta experiments reflected the burgeoning interest in psychometrics among native educators. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

368

SHIVRANG SETLUR

Mahalanobis, though a gifted scholar and a particularly well-connected person, was not unique in the late 1920s, as political concessions opened up new opportunities for Indians in administration. More than this, by restricting Indian control to particular fields and ministries, colonial policy drove reform-minded Indians toward areas such as education and public health, making such sites remarkably receptive to new tools and theories. As intelligence testing got picked up by such actors, they sought to broaden its scope, applying it to problems of public hygiene and social welfare. INTELLIGENCE ENCOUNTERS THE STATE: THE 1930S Despite Mahalanobis’ experiments, Rice’s scale remained the only mental measurement instrument available for use in South Asia until 1938, when Venkatrao Vithal Kamat published his “Bombay-Karnatak” revision of the Stanford-Binet scale (Kamat, 1940). Kamat first began publishing the results obtained from his own mental measurement instrument in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, in large part in response to Rice’s work (V. V. Kamat, 1934). Kamat’s research was significant in a number of respects. First, his intelligence test was specifically designed to disclose the intelligence of a national, Indian subject, rather than a localized one. To this end, he further argued that there was no significant psychological difference between the Indian bodies he measured and Western ones, and he refused to significantly revise standard IQ tests. Kamat’s test also came to be widely used in government planning, policymaking, and practical education projects. Perhaps most importantly, Kamat’s work recoded caste in terms of heredity. In this respect, Kamat’s work decisively broke from earlier approaches that had either recoded caste as race, or had ignored the subject entirely. Kamat was first trained at the University of Bombay. When he began his work, he was affiliated with Moray House, the Department of Education at the University of Edinburgh, and undertook his studies under the supervision of Godfrey H. Thomson (Kamat, 1940, p. ix). The first results from his “Indian” adaptation of the Stanford-Binet scale were published in Cyril Burt’s British Journal of Educational Psychology. While Rice’s work had drawn upon a distinctively American tradition of psychology, Kamat was thoroughly immersed in Cyril Burt’s “British school” of the psychology of individual differences. Kamat secured an appointment as a professor at the Secondary Training College, then the premier teachertraining school in the Bombay Presidency. Kamat’s work began in 1930, when he translated a single test, the Stanford-Binet Scale, into Kannada (Kanarese) and Marathi. In the first edition of his monograph, Kamat made clear that these languages had been chosen in order to furnish a test suitable for the Government of Bombay Presidency, as these languages were spoken by over 50 percent of its inhabitants (Kamat, 1940, p. 54). In adapting these tests, Kamat hewed as closely as possible to the Stanford battery, omitting no tests and making as few revisions as possible. Over the next four years, Kamat standardized his test against a mixed population of boys and girls. At this stage, he was supported by institutional grants from The Director of Public Instruction for Bombay and the Government of Bombay Presidency. Unlike Rice and Mahalanobis, Kamat standardized his instrument in Dharwar, a town 600 km from his home. Kamat’s finished work was published as a monograph in 1940, under the title Measuring Intelligence of Indian Children. Containing a discussion of the history of intelligence testing and the purposes it was designed to serve alongside the test itself, Kamat carefully crafted his monograph to serve as both a description and summary of his research, and as a larger argument in favor of the comprehensive use of intelligence testing in government health and education projects. Mirroring the work of his British allies, Cyril Burt and his peers, Kamat framed his psychometric instrument as standing squarely within a tradition established by Francis Galton, JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

369

Karl Pearson, and Burt himself. For Kamat, intelligence was just another biological trait, subject to individual variation, and yet determined or conditioned by hereditary mechanisms. His intelligence test was thus, in his view, a powerful biometric and anthropometric tool. It could be used to generate helpful statistics about the Indian population, and it could be applied at the level of individual people to make decisions about the quality and quantity of services appropriate to their intellectual capacities. In this respect, Kamat, like Burt and his circle, sat squarely within the “liberal” strain of 1930s psychology, aiming their efforts at rationalizing policy and providing an “objective footing” on which to evaluate student performance (Buchanan, 2010, p. 49). Kamat’s revision became popular within policymaking and teacher-training circles before independence and afterwards. His “Bombay-Karnatak Revision” of the Binet scale served as the basis for a number of later translations for use in India, and it remains the standard Indian IQ test. The fourth and final edition of the text appeared in 1967. Moreover, through his position as a professor at the Secondary Training College, Kamat had the opportunity to influence a number of educators, and he popularized mental testing among this group. The first Gujarati intelligence test was prepared by his student, N. N. Shukla, who would go on to work at the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT; Long, 1966). Crucially, Kamat standardized his test against very different kinds of schoolchildren than did Rice. Beyond testing both boys and girls, he conducted his work in a town, rather than in a village. Kamat chose this location because he wanted a population that could stand in for India as a whole: This is a mid-sized town with, at that time, a population of a little over 30,000. The children of this town were expected to be neither very advanced like those of busy towns such as Bombay, nor very backward like those of remote villages. The children tested in this experiment therefore are fairly representative of the general population of Indian children. (1967, pp. 83–84) While Rice had sought to measure the specific, localized, entity “Hindustani intelligence,” Kamat’s instrument was designed from the outset to measure intelligence, unqualified, in India. It was for this reason that Kamat had made as few revisions as possible to the Stanford-Binet Scale. In 1938, this approach was unorthodox enough that he felt the need to include a foreword from the Scottish president of Wilson College, which approvingly stated that he had “gone on the justifiable assumption that there is nothing in the mental constitution of Indian children that warrants the psychologist in trying to devise tests radically different from those which have been found suitable in the West” (McKenzie, in Kamat, 1940). Where Rice had omitted every test of reading or writing, Kamat had painstakingly translated these into Marathi and Kannada, making sure that phrases retained a similar meaning, that they contained the same syllables, consonants were exchanged for consonants, and nasal sounds appeared in identical places. All the tests that Rice had excluded appeared in Kamat’s instrument, including the tests of character, “giving the date” and “stating your age.” Kamat was confident enough that his test battery produced equivalent results to the international standard that he included a number of graphs illustrating the correspondence between his “Bombay-Karnatak Revision” and the Stanford revision. Instead of carefully calibrating his instrument to the bodies he was measuring and the locale where he was working, Kamat began by stabilizing his instrument against the international standard. Kamat’s choice of experimental location, as well as the design of his instrument, reveals that he was interested in measuring a very different kind of child than Rice was. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

370

SHIVRANG SETLUR

Indeed, while Rice had considered caste and race as crucial factors in the constitution of the boys he was measuring, Kamat was much more interested in tracking the family histories of those he measured. Thus, while he dutifully tracked both the caste and subcaste of the children he measured, most of the tables that appeared in the finished work did not take these categories into account. Instead, Kamat provided a single table showing the number of participants from each group to take part in his experiment. Unlike Rice, who maintained Muslims and Sikhs outside of the caste structure, Kamat placed them within the “Intermediate Classes” for the purposes of his statistics. There was also no attempt on his part to make the group-level distribution in his study match the demographics, whether of the town or Presidency as whole. In Kamat’s work, caste is prominently recorded only in his tables cataloguing the extremely low-scoring and extremely high-scoring children. These tables also prominently featured the children’s fathers’ occupations, with the remarks column reserved for recording the intellectual state of the child’s relatives. The particular ways in which Kamat’s instrument both captured and presented caste reflect both the scale at which he hoped his tool would operate, as well as his commitment to a hereditary notion of intelligence. First, a scale that hoped to have wide applicability across British India could not calibrate itself too closely to caste or religious groups. Despite the best efforts of the administration, the legal system, and elite actors, caste relations had never been standardized across the subcontinent (Dirks, 2001). A washer man could be of high social standing in a southern village, while in a northern city, let alone a nearby town, such an occupation might be considered “beyond the pale.” This visible entanglement between local contingency and national fixity, and between inheritance and occupation, meant that if caste were to remain a factor in the constitution of Indian bodies, it would first have to be suitably recoded. The Bombay-Karnatak scale performed just such a feat, recasting caste differences within a language of heredity. Kamat was clearly interested in how heredity determined IQ. His introduction to intelligence testing contained an effusive description of Francis Galton’s contribution to the understanding of intelligence, and his pioneering work in eugenics. Most importantly, Kamat’s work included an appendix on heredity and environment, and the light his instrument could throw on the topic. In it, Kamat began by showing the large discrepancies in intelligence that he measured between children from families of low social status and those of high standing. Framed in terms of their fathers’ occupations, and given the continued importance of caste in determining such matters, Kamat’s table could not help but be read as reflecting real differences between the intelligence of the lowborn and the highborn. Kamat’s interest in rendering social status biological was in stark contrast to the way he argued that only environmental factors were to blame in causing the differences he measured between girls and boys. Summing up his results on the matter, Kamat wrote that “although it is very difficult to make out a clear case either for the hereditarians or the environmentalists, this study seems to point to the fact that heredity is undoubtedly a great factor in determining the innate mental ability of a child” (Kamat, 1967, p. 305). Indeed, given the context in which Kamat was working, his relative inattention to caste must be read as a carefully considered decision. During this period, caste distinctions carried the weight of legal and scientific authority. At once enumerated by anthropology, codified by bureaucracy, and enshrined in public and personal law, caste, or opposition to it, was inescapable (Dirks, 2001). By privileging heredity as a category of analysis, Kamat was, in effect, arguing that caste was the social product of individual differences. Kamat designed his instrument in order to place it in the hands of a diverse range of actors, including policymakers, educationalists, and public health officials. In his view, one of the crucial benefits to his approach to intelligence was providing an objective basis on which to evaluate the mental capacity of children. Like Rice, Kamat was convinced that India’s system JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

371

of public examinations, administered independently of the school system, was hopelessly subjective, and thus prone to error. In his discussion of how his instrument contributed to “objective evaluation,” Kamat expressed his hope that examinations be moved within the school system, and that they would be revised according to the scientific principles governing his intelligence battery (Venkatrao Vithal Kamat, 1967, p. 39). In this sense, he viewed his instrument as a tool able to measure both intelligence, and the institutions of education. For instance, by pointing to the results he was able to obtain from his scale, Kamat made a persuasive argument for the introduction of remedial and advanced classes into the basic school system (Kamat, 1940, p. 36). Kamat was also keenly interested in the services his scale could provide to those children who fell at the extremely low end of his scale, emphasizing the clinical and diagnostic value of mental testing. Addressing municipal officials directly, he included an appendix treating the “provision for the education and housing of backward and mentally handicapped children” (Kamat, 1967, p. 302). Here, he extolled his scale’s virtues as a tool for identifying bodies that needed to be institutionalized, as well as the principles that should structure the environments in which they would be housed. Most decisively, Kamat made specific recommendations for the children who reached a “dead line” in their intellectual development. These children fell within his normal range, but as they grew older, progressively fell behind the students who came from “better homes” (Kamat, 1967, pp. 302–303). Having already identified heredity as the cause of their deficits, Kamat argued that these students ought to be subjected to vocational aptitude testing at the earliest possible age, and moved from the standard curriculum to vocational courses (Kamat, 1967, pp. 302–303). For Kamat, vocational guidance counselors armed with objective assessments were essential, because “[t]he selection of a vocation cannot be left entirely to the children themselves or to their illiterate parents, because more often than not the schemes of children are more ambitious than it is humanly possible for them to carry out [emphasis added]” (1967, p. 36). An important value of intelligence testing was the objectivity it imparted to decisions state and school officials made about children and their futures. In Kamat’s view, echoed by educationalists in the postcolonial period, intelligence testing was a powerful tool for convincing parents to make “sound” choices about their children. Kamat’s intelligence test grew in popularity. In the years following Independence, three new editions appeared, in 1951, 1958, and 1967. His Bombay-Karnatak revision remains a working tool to this day, and it served as the basis for a number of adaptations into languages of the subcontinent. The abiding popularity of Kamat’s instrument reflects both the growing importance of psychometry to postcolonial India’s educational efforts and some of the challenges the Indian state faced as it sought to centralize and coordinate education according to Five-Year Plans. While not the focus of this paper, evidence suggests that the instruments and actors discussed here played important roles in the later career of South Asian psychometry as well as the broader educational project. A brief consideration of postcolonial developments in India may help indicate potential avenues for further inquiry. POSTCOLONIAL TRAJECTORIES With respect to caste and intelligence, Kamat’s approach to these issues had lasting significance. By rooting intelligence within a psychology of individual differences rather than group-level distinctions, Kamat’s work was an early example of a shift in the way that psychometric studies sought to apprehend caste. While he had made his “hereditarian” commitments clear, the complex character of intelligence allowed for alternative positions, a fact made clear by Kamat himself. Whether hewing to an “environmentalist” or “hereditarian” JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

372

SHIVRANG SETLUR

view, evidence suggests that subsequent psychometric experiments, carried out on the eve of independence and after, kept caste “alive” within psychometrics. As late as 1960, experimenters were comparing the intelligence of castes in North India, and in 1991, textbooks for Educational Psychology continued to frame such studies in terms of the relative influence of heredity or environment (Kuppuswamy, 1991, pp. 62–67). Unsure of what caste was, instruments to record its existence proliferated. Indeed, this persistent effort within psychometry to interrogate caste by producing measures especially sensitive to it mirrored the postcolonial Indian state’s difficult position, compelled to enumerate caste in the hopes of destroying it. In 1951, the Census ceased framing castes as race, finally mitigating Risley’s long legacy (B´eteille, 2004). Unmoored from bodies, caste became a sociological and legal thing, rather than a biological one. Recent developments in India suggest that this shift has led to an increasing politicization of the social sciences, the means by which the state knows and intervenes in caste. Uncovering how such developments have played out within the specific field of psychology remains a fascinating area for further study. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, intelligence testing moved from the periphery toward the centers of India. What began as a series of experiments carried out by American missionaries in far-flung corners of South Asia, had, by 1940, found state support in the Bombay Presidency. After Independence, intelligence testing became even more centralized, finding a home within two key organs of India’s “developmentalist regime.” Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, for instance, found himself in a crucial position following Independence. In 1951, he was appointed Statistical Advisor to the Government of India. In this capacity, he acted as the director of the National Sample Survey, the Central Statistical Office, and a major member of the Planning Commission. Moreover, he maintained his directorship of the academic Indian Statistical Institute. Centrally positioned within a new network of development institutions, he was the chief author of India’s second Five-Year Plan (Rudra, 1996, p. 138), and served on the Planning commission until his death in 1972. Psychometry was one among a number of fields that benefited from Mahalanobis’ new prominence. In 1954, Mahalanobis offered a three-year fellowship at the Indian Statistical Institute to Arthur Edwin Harper, an American Presbyterian missionary and professor at Ewing Christian College in Bangalore. An expert in educational statistics, Harper was undoubtedly familiar with Rice’s work, his compatriot, coreligionist, and professional colleague. Harper not only established a unit at the Institute wholly devoted to psychometry, but also began work on producing a centralized, comprehensive repository of every kind of mental measurement instrument available in India. This work remained incomplete until 1966, when it appeared as The First Mental Measurement Handbook for India. The continued involvement of American missionaries in Indian psychometry poses interesting questions, both within that country and in Pakistan. C. Herbert Rice’s work, importantly, was conducted in an area that became Pakistan’s heartland, and the historical record suggests that it remained the only Urdu or Punjabi language intelligence test until 1946. Documenting the fate of Rice’s instrument in Pakistan, and the extent and nature of American involvement within the Indian and Pakistani context, would enrich any study concerned with postcolonial developments. As intelligence tests grew in popularity in government circles, the scale at which they were designed to operate widened in turn. While Rice had calibrated his instrument to the specific context of a few Punjabi villages, Kamat had produced a test suitable for use across the entire Bombay Presidency, an area covering about a quarter of India. By the 1960s, the newly formed NCERT sought to accord psychometry a central place in Central Planning. The new Council established a Department of Psychological Foundations dedicated to psychometry, and dreamed of creating a single test for the entire nation. The tests also cast the bodies they JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

373

examined in a national frame; while Kamat contented himself with constructing his test so that he could measure intelligence in India, by the 1960s, educational experts at NCERT were using intelligence tests to harness children to the national mission of industrial development. During this period, two chief merits were attributed to widespread intelligence testing. In the first instance, it was seen as being especially useful in addressing the problem of “wastage” in the school system. Speaking specifically about the need for intelligence testing, one prominent NCERT official repetitively summed up the sentiments prevalent among Indian educators during this period: The problem of wastage demands urgent attention in our country and should be examined from various angles too. The nation can ill-afford to waste such a large amount of financial and human resources; and it is imperative that steps be taken to stop this wastage. (Shukla, 1970, p. 1) Intelligence tests seem to have been seen as a quick and reliable method for making decisions about what kind of education to provide students, and the kinds of futures that should be promised to them. In this respect, the evidence suggests that postcolonial administrators were interested in psychometrics not just to “make up people” (Hacking, 1999, pp. 99–114), but also to bring them into being as subjects of the national economy. The evidence that intelligence tests were viewed in such a way highlights the potential benefits of bringing the history of psychology into conversation with the ongoing scholarly conversation around development. On the one hand, recent studies of development have emphasized the bureaucratic element, placing causal stress on the way administration itself is organized (Rottenburg, 2009; Gupta, 2012; Hull, 2012). An alternate strain of scholarship has emphasized expertise, highlighting the co-construction of economics and economies, or markets and market participants (Mitchell, 2002; Birla, 2009). Though more attentive to the human sciences, this strand of scholarship has devoted its attention principally to economics and the law. Neither strand, however, adequately captures the people for whom development was ostensibly carried out, and who were “redeveloped” in order to secure its progress. By attending to the people who were prodded and produced, studies that entangle the histories of both psychology and development pose the possibility of seeing development as something more complicated than pushing paper and producing plans for power plants. From its introduction into India in the 1920s through to its widespread use throughout the nation in the 1960s, intelligence testing experienced a number of mutations. As they migrated from American projects toward South Asian ones, intelligence tests ceased to capture caste in terms of race. As psychometry moved from a peripheral position, outside of the state, to the center of planned governance, its statistical powers were given greater emphasis. Intelligence testing, initially introduced in the context of anthropometry, moved to education, and thence to state services, such as public health and welfare. As it travelled, psychometric data came to be seen as useful because it was seemingly objective. Intelligence testing could rationalize public policy, and provide better methods of student evaluation. By the 1960s, these metrics were seen as being useful in directing particular bodies to appropriate social locations. Intelligence tests were seen as being more convincing than the unaided counsel of educators. Thus, intelligence testing was valued precisely because it produced numbers that could travel from one area of concern to another, and to provide an “objective footing” for decisions about children. In this respect, South Asian psychometrics falls within a broader narrative concerning the rise of quantitative cultures since the nineteenth century. Theodore Porter has identified the peculiar power of quantification in just these abilities, allowing bureaucrats to make decisions with JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

374

SHIVRANG SETLUR

authority, and to apply findings in one area of investigation in another. The story of South Asian psychometrics reveals an important implication of Porter’s claim that quantification constructs a “world of artifice” (Porter, 1996); namely, that quantification remains implicated in both colonial projects and the nationalist efforts such states engender. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Michael Pettit provided invaluable direction and support throughout this project. I am especially grateful for Brian Beaton and Michelle Murphy’s analytical suggestions. NaomiAdelson, Joan Steigerwald, Barry Strauss, and numerous participants at the 2012 Joint Meeting of CHEIRON/ESHHS provided feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Comments from Ian Nicholson and the peer reviewers improved this paper immensely. Lauren DiMonte reviewed and commented on many drafts. Durba Ghosh and Suman Seth’s insights critically informed the final form of the argument. REFERENCES Alam, J. (2004). Government and politics in colonial Bihar, 1921–1937. 1st ed. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Ambedkar, B. R. (1945). What Congress and Gandhi have done to the untouchables. Bombay: Thacker. Arnold, D. (2013). Nehruvian Science and postcolonial India. Isis, 104, 360–370. doi:10.1086/670954 Bates, C. (1995). Race, caste and tribe in central India: The early origins of Indian anthropometry. In P. Robb (Ed.), The concept of race in South Asia (pp. 219–259). Delhi: Oxford University Press. B´eteille, A. (2004). Race and caste. In Umakant & S. Thorat (Eds.), Caste, race, and discrimination: Discourses in international context. New Delhi; Jaipur: Indian Institute of Dalit Studies; Rawat Publications. Birla, R. (2009). Stages of capital: Law, culture, and market governance in late colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bose, S., & Jalal, A. (1998). Modern South Asia: History, culture, political economy. New York: Routledge. Brock, A. C. (Ed.). (2006). Internationalizing the history of psychology. New York: New York University Press. Buchanan, R. D. (2010). Playing with fire: The controversial career of Hans J. Eysenck. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Carson, J. (2007). The measure of merit: Talents, intelligence, and inequality in the French and American republics, 1750–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dirks, N. B. (2001). Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goodenough, F. L. (1926). Racial differences in the intelligence of school children. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 9, 388–397. doi:10.1037/h0073325 Gupta, A. (2012). Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Herrick, D. S. (1921). A comparison of Brahman and Panchama children in South India with each other and with American children by means of the Goddard Form Board. Journal of Applied Psychology, 5, 253–260. doi:10.1037/h0067607 Hopkins, W. D., & Washburn, D. A. (2012). Emil Wolfgang Menzel, Jr. (1929–2012): Chimpanzee renaissance man. PLoS Biology, 10, e1001384. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001384 Hull, M. S. (2012). Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kamat, V. V. (1934). A revision of the Binet scale for Indian children: (Kanarese and Marathi speaking). British Journal of Educational Psychology, 4, 296–309. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8279.1934.tb02959.x Kamat, V. V. (1940). Measuring intelligence of Indian children. Calcutta, Indian Branch: Oxford University Press. Kamat, V. V. (1967). Measuring intelligence of Indian children. 4th ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kuppuswamy, B. (1991). Advanced educational psychology. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Long, L. (1966). The first mental measurement handbook for India. New Delhi: National Institute of Education (India). Central Bureau of Educational and Vocational Guidance. Ludden, D. (1992). India’s development regime. In N. Dirks (Ed.), Colonialism and culture (pp. 247–288). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mahalanobis, P. C. (1922). Anthropological observation on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta Part I: Analysis of male stature. Recordings of the Indian Museum, 23, 1–96. Mahalanobis, P. C. (1925). Analysis of race-mixture in Bengal. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, 23, 301–333.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

SEARCHING FOR SOUTH ASIAN INTELLIGENCE

375

Mahalanobis, P. C. (1933a). A comparison of different statistical measures of intelligence based on a group test in Bengal. Other. Retrieved April 30, 2012, from http://library.isical.ac.in/jspui/handle/10263/1659 Mahalanobis, P. C. (1933b). Studies in educational tests. No. 1. The reliability of a group-test of intelligence in Bengali. Sankhy¯a: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960), 1, 25–49. Mahalanobis, P. C. (1934a). Age variation of scores in a group test of intelligence in Bengali. Other. Retrieved April 30, 2012, from http://library.isical.ac.in/jspui/handle/10263/1775 Mahalanobis, P. C. (1934b). Studies in educational tests no. 4. A preliminary study of the intelligence quotient of Bengali school children. Sankhy¯a: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960), 1, 407–426. Mahalanobis, P. C. (1949). Historical note on the D2 -statistics, Appendix I. Anthropological survey of United Provinces, 1941: A statistical study. Other. Retrieved December 8, 2013, from http://library.isical .ac.in/jspui/handle/10263/1995 Mahalanobis, P. C., & Ray, S. (1936). School marks and intelligence test scores. Sankhy¯a: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960), 2, 397–402. Menzel, E. W. (1935). The Goodenough intelligence test in India. Journal of Applied Psychology, 19, 615–624. doi:10.1037/h0050618 Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db= nlabk&AN=90542 Paranjpe, A. (2006). From tradition through colonialism to globalization: Reflections on the history of psychology in India. In A. C. Brock (Ed.), Internationalizing the history of psychology. New York: New York University Press. Pickren, W. E. (2009). Indigenization and the history of psychology. Psychological Studies, 54, 87–95. Porter, T. M. (1996). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prakash, G. (1999). Another Reason: Science and the imagination of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rao, A. (2009). The caste question: Dalits and the politics of modern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rawat, R. S. (2011). Reconsidering untouchability: Chamars and Dalit history in North India. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rice, C. H. (1929). A Hindustani Binet-Performance Point Scale: With a comparison of the intelligence of certain caste groups in the Panjab. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Risley, H. H. (1969). The people of India. Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp. Robb, P. (1976). The government of India and reform: Policies towards politics and the constitution, 1916–1921. London Oriental Series, v. 32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rottenburg, R. (2009). Far-fetched facts: A parable of development aid. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Roy, S. (2007). Beyond belief: India and the politics of postcolonial nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rudra, A. (1996). Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A biography. Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press. Shukla, S. (1970). Development of scholastic aptitude tests, for classes 8 and 11. New Delhi, India: National Council of Educational Research and Training.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs