In this paper I examine a set of genomic studies conducted on the people of India, more specifically the indigenous tribes of the Andaman Island. Leveraging the population of India, namely tribes and castes, as crucial bio-resource, the scientists were trying to answer questions regarding the evolutionary history of the people of India. The key assumption that drives these experiments is endogamy of the caste system that has presumably maintained pure gene pools, unlike elsewhere. I argue that these scientific studies invoke the discredited colonial science of racial anthropometry in the context of the indigenous populations of the Jarawas, Onges and Andamanese who are classified as ‘Negritos’. Though anthropometry is an extinct ‘experimental system’ (Rheinberger, 1997) the experimental reasoning has survived in racial nomenclatures. In the process they forge a seamless ‘tradition’ of science, creating a tautological, and recursive feedback loop stitching together a dead experimental system of anthropometry (hair and skulls) with contemporary genomics (DNA).
