| Summary/Abstract |
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-śāstra’ (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-śāstra and eugenics as it was promoted in India and elsewhere. Analysing two specific issues treated in santati-śāstra 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, ratiśāstra, and theories on heredity stemming from a mid-nineteenth-century American phrenologist. Santati-śāstra'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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