Author Kunal Basu at the launch of his latest novel at a Calcutta bookstore on Tuesday. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

A bizarre experiment with two children, a white and a black, marooned on an African island with a mute nurse for six years is the central theme of Kunal Basu’s latest novel Racists, published by Penguin.

The experiment is the outcome of a raging debate between an English craniologist obsessed with skull sizes and a French ethnographer who believes “human species are as dissimilar as a horse and a zebra”.

Basu’s book somehow reminds one of Roald Dahl’s famous short story William and Mary. There, too, the scientist-protagonist is so obsessed with his superior intelligence that his subservient widow did all the things that annoyed her husband, like drinking a cocktail and smoking, right in front of his preserved cranium.

Dahl’s black humour is somewhat reflected in Basu’s story as the subplot of the Englishman’s assistant and the mute nurse’s love story triumphs over the rather inhuman experiment of their bosses.

The European obsession with racial superiority and the consequent intellectual endeavour through the 18th and 19th centuries is what spurred Basu’s novel.

He is at pains to explain: “It wasn’t any personal experience that prompted me to write the book. I am race blind and don’t have a minority angst. Neither am I a social scientist. Rather, it was the historian in me that led me to look into what was going on in that time.”

The time is mid-19th Century, the time of European Enlightenment when Britain and France had consolidated their colonies and needed a science-backed theory to prove their natural superiority. Ironically, against that backdrop, an Englishman and a Frenchman are at loggerheads over the superiority of races.

In the short discussion that followed the launch of the book at Oxford Bookstore on Tuesday, the audience demanded to know why the author did a “traditional” Afro-European racial confrontation and not a “more apt” Indo-European or even a Sino-European racial face-off.

Basu blamed it on the history of the times that he was writing about, when the European was at the top of the “chain of races” with the Negro at the very bottom.