1 Race, Diet and Class: Robert McCarrison’s Laboratory Rat Experiments in Coonoor, 1925-7 Abstract: Robert McCarrison’s Nutritional Research Laboratories in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, had by 1928 become the centre for nutritional research in India. The question that this article seeks to address is how did McCarrison manage to secure the status of his institute and reputation in the field? I argue that his reputation was largely established through a set of experiments he performed between the years 1925–27, in which he fed different groups of rats diets that supposedly corresponded to the different “races” of India and to working-class Britons. This article argues that these experiments were crucial in attracting funding and attention from the colonial state principally because they tapped into contemporary British anxieties about the deleterious effects of modernisation on the lower classes, as well as racial theories pertaining to the martial races that were in vogue in colonial India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also aligned with the colonial state’s desire to increase male labouring power and the physical prowess of its military recruits. Introduction n a letter, penned in 1953, eighteen years after Dr. Robert McCarrison had retired from the Indian Medical Services as the Director of National Nutrition in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, the nutritional research scientist B. G. Krishnan lauded his former employer. He wrote to McCarrison saying that “India can never and will never forget the contribution of ‘McCarrison’ to the cause of Nutrition Research in India” and that “‘McCarrison’ means nutrition in India.” 1 It is clear that Krishnan, who was one of McCarrison’s first research assistants, was expressing the high regard in which he held his mentor. His endorsement also reflected a widely held belief that McCarrison’s name and brand had by that time become synonymous with nutrition research in India. Indeed, in 1953, the same year that Krishnan penned this letter to McCarrison and at a time when India had been independent from British colonial rule for five years, the then Minister of Health, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, sent a telegram to McCarrison, which expressed the gratitude of the people of India for the nutritional research he had carried out in India (Arnold 2000). The high esteem which Kaur and Krishnan held McCarrison is notable given that by this time there had been other directors of the Nutritional Research Laboratory that had engaged in far more extensive and empirically rigorous research (McCarrison and Sinclair, 1953). 2 Historians such as David Arnold (2000) and James Vernon (2007) have discussed McCarrison’s role in establishing nutritional research in India. Vernon and Arnold have lauded McCarrison’s efforts as assisting in undermining the notion that deficiency diseases in India were due to environmental factors. Vernon argues that McCarrison’s experiments drew attention to the manner in which deficiency diseases arose from bad diets which were common to certain Indian racial groups as well as Britons, and thus not associated with the exotic particularities of the subcontinent or symptomatic of the pathologically diseased “other” (Arnold 2000; Vernon 2007). The question that this article seeks to address is why McCarrison’s name became inextricably linked with the cause of nutrition in the subcontinent. In this respect, I am particularly interested in a set of experiments which he directed between 1925–27, which subsequently attracted major attention from the colonial state. In addition, I am concerned with the ways in which he subsequently promoted his centre and his own reputation in India. Before delving into these matters more deeply it is pertinent to examine McCarrison’s life and career prior to these experiments. McCarrison’s Medical Training in Ireland and Early Career in India Robert McCarrison was born in 1878 in Portadown in County Armagh, Ireland. 3 McCarrison trained as a medical practitioner at Queen’s College Belfast and qualified in medicine in 1900 at the Royal University of Ireland in Dublin. Shortly after graduating, McCarrison was enlisted in the Indian Medical services (Aykroyd 1960). McCarrison was one of many Irishmen who embarked upon an imperial career. Indeed, colonial service in the British Empire offered military and career opportunities to young Irish graduates like McCarrison, who lacked well-placed connections or significant financial support. Given the relatively limited job opportunities in Ireland for men from middling backgrounds, a colonial career was often considered as an attractive alternative. Indeed, a distinguished service in the colonies could result in social advancement upon their eventual return to the British Isles (Kenny 2004; Fraser 1996). The Indian Medical Services was notable for paying comparatively high salaries and eventually offering greater opportunities to secure coveted research posts. Consequently, a disproportionately high number of Irish medical graduates enlisted (Jones 2010). In recognition of this fact, 1 Leer from B. G. Krishnan to Robert McCarrison dated September 3, 1953, Robert McCarrison File GC/205/B5, Wellcome Trust Library. 2 Wallace Aykroyd, whom Krishnan had collaborated with, had, in contrast to McCarrison, actually engaged in research in 1936 that was based on empirical first-hand dietary surveys of the Indian people, using actual Indian field workers. 3 Now Northern Ireland. I