A Talk on Racial Origin and Social Life of Statistics in Modern India by Dr Sayori Ghoshal

Abstract:
What is the relation between statistics and colonialism? Is statistical reasoning only applicable to social contexts or was it bound to social, empirical contexts even in its inception? In this presentation, Dr Sayori Ghoshal addresses these questions by focusing on the rise of statistics as a nationalist discipline in 20th century India. By tracing this history, Dr Ghoshal shows how Indian statistics had an intimate relation with race science.
Over the decades, Indian intellectuals strove to legitimise their discipline and statistical reasoning as the fundamental mode of knowledge production and governance by showing the social relevance of this abstract and transdisciplinary method. This need for legitimacy drove Indian intellectuals to disseminate statistical data and methods among the Indian public. This produced, Dr Ghoshal argues, a contradiction in the discipline’s self-narrative and the expectations of Indian statisticians regarding the role of statistics in public life. On the one hand, statistics was constructed as a domain of expertise, inaccessible to outsiders, and on the other, statisticians emphasized the need for statistical reasoning to become a public good. Consequently, statistical data proliferated in public writings, indicating objectivity of arguments that were based on the data, and yet such reasoning remained opaque to the public.

Bio:
Dr Sayori Ghoshal is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Krea University, India. Prior to this, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2022–2023). She has a PhD in South Asian Studies from Columbia University. Her research examines the historical development and social impact of statistical sciences, including race science, demography, and applied statistics, in colonial and postcolonial India. Her work has appeared in History Compass, Economic and Political Weekly, and in an edited volume, Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere.