Skeleton Merchants as Agents of Socio-Scientific Advancements: Exploring the History of Bone Trade in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 1858–1985

My dissertation seeks to argue that the modern Western Scientific advancement was largely predicated on the supply of South Asian bones from India to Britain during the legal creation of the British Raj in 1858.

In doing so, it attempts to link the trade of bones and bodies to what I call the ‘Red Industry’—a full-fledged socio-economic establishment employing numerous labourers, specialized in different units, which thereby assumed a pivotal place in the network of imperial capitalism, propelled by profit.

Besides leading to the emergence of ancillary industries, wherein bones are seen as potentially esoteric, aesthetic and even agricultural resources, I argue that the ‘Red market’ also projected itself as indispensable with regards to the contributions in various socio-medical fields: forensic anthropology, phrenological works, osteo-archaeological discoveries and leading studies on Osteoporosis.

Focusing primarily on the local perceptions of the dead, and the surrounding inter and intra-caste polemics on dissection, the work essentially seeks to bridge the long-standing gap between the trade economy and the overarching historical debates predominantly concerning bio-ethics and public health, while interacting with law, labour, society and medicine throughout the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries—the era of decolonization.

Keywords: British Raj, South Asia, Public Health, Medicine