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History of Science, Technology,
Environment, and Medicine in India
List of contributors x
Foreword by Prakash Kumar xiii
Acknowledgements xix
List of abbreviations xxi
Introduction 1
SUVOBRATA SARKAR
SECTION I
Science and society 27
SECTION III
Environmental issues 173
SECTION IV
Medical encounters 233
Appendix 307
Select bibliography 312
Index 325
Contributors
Notes
1 Deepak Kumar, Trishanku Nation, New Delhi: OUP, 2016, p, 35.
2 Deepak Kumar, ‘Patterns of Colonial Science in India’, IJHS, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1980,
pp. 105–113.
3 Deepak Kumar, ‘Developing a History of Science and Technology in South Asia’,
EPW, Vol. 38, No. 23, 2003, pp. 2248–2251.
4 Ibid, p. 2248.
5 Ibid, p. 2250.
6 Ibid, p. 2250. A similar case for exploring multiple engagements in India with
“western” and “Hindu” traditions of science or medicine, or about “disunity” in
development discourse emerged at different points. Deepak Kumar, ‘The “culture”
of science and colonial culture, India 1820–1920’, BJHS, Vol. 29, No. 2, June
1996, pp. 195–209; ‘Reconstructing India: Disunity in the Science and Technology
for Development Discourse,1900–1947’, Osiris, Vol. 15, 2000, pp. 241–257.
7 Deepak Kumar, ‘Developing a History of Science and Technology in South Asia’,
op. cit., p. 2251.
Acknowledgements
Note
1 Deepak Kumar and Bipasha Raha (eds.), ‘Introduction’, Tilling the Land:
Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India, Delhi: Primus, 2016, p.
8. Another recent example, Suvobrata Sarkar, Let There Be Light: Engineering,
Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945, New Delhi:
Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Abbreviations
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241980-1
2 Suvobrata Sarkar
for the history of science, present-day scientists’.3 They intend to show that
the creation of scientific knowledge is profoundly political and in a wider
sense, science is part of the entire body politic.4 There is no doubt that the
western scientific discourse occupied an extremely important place in the
colonization of India. The utility of the pioneering survey work of James
Rennell, first surveyor-general of Bengal, was recognized by early colonial
administrators like Clive and Hastings. Rennell’s work, patronized by the
East India Company and later the Royal Society, contributed simultane-
ously to the consolidation and expansion of British colonial power in India
and to the emergent scientific discourse of geography and geology in eight-
eenth-century Europe.5 Indeed, colonial encounter provides a good example
of the mutually constitutive relationship between scientific knowledge and
then-existing socio-political situation.
In the early modern period, it would be more accurate to use the term
‘useful knowledge’ than science. Savant institutions like the Royal Soci-
ety and the trading companies including the British East India Company
struggled to prove their usefulness in this period. Their mutual interests,
according to Anna Winterbottom, encouraged the expansion of networks
through which new knowledge could be transformed into ‘useful and prof-
itable knowledge’.6 The knowledge-gathering–manufacturing process was
heavily dependent on the assistance from the local informants and collab-
orators. Thus, the varieties of knowledge produced during early colonial
rule included global and local realities. Over the past decades, Rohan Deb
Roy affirms, these histories have exposed patterns of connection and cor-
respondence between the colony and imperial state.7 Thus, Eurocentric
narratives of triumphalism, progress, and unilateral diffusion of scientific
knowledge from Europe to the rest of the world have been questioned and
rejected. The increasing emphasis on a variety of non-European actors and
sources has added multiplicity to the histories of modern science. Recently,
focussing on the long nineteenth century, Deb Roy explored how Malaria
as a category reconsolidated the intellectual, cultural, and political histories
of the British Empire and concurrently sustained as an object of natural
knowledge and social control.8
In the context of nineteenth century, Guoyan Wang mentions that the
Chinese translated science as ‘Gezhi’, which is knowledge acquired through
experience. Gezhi was derived from Confucianism, and it meant under-
standing things and the ethics surrounding them; as well as emphasizing
enlightenment as a part of knowing.9 Equally important is the concept of
scientific objectivity which emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century. Lor-
raine Daston and Peter Galison’s path-breaking study reveals that modern
objectivity ‘mixes rather than integrate disparate components, which are his-
torically and conceptually distinct’.10 They argue each of these components
has its own history, in addition to the collective history that pronounces
objectivity as a multifarious, mutable concept – capable of new meanings.11
Lorraine Daston has recently identified the history of knowledge as signif-
icant analytical strategies in the history of science: ‘…some version of the
Introduction 3
history of knowledge, of which the history of science is a part, is probably
indispensable’. She emphasized that a comparative perspective is necessary
to tackle the new resources now on offer in new areas of study previously
marginal to the history of science, technology, and medicine.12 The work of
knowing and creating, according to Steven Epstein, has always been a cen-
tral concern in the sociology of science and technology. One of the crucial
moves in emergent schools such as the sociology of scientific knowledge
is to assert that scientific precisions, like any form of knowledge that does
serious work in a society, are basically social or cultural products.13
The very first issue of the Calcutta Review (1844) claimed, ‘The history
of science is almost a science; and one of the most interesting and important
of them all’.14 Sixty-five years later, an Indian philosophy professor at the
Calcutta University, wrote the following (1909): ‘My paper on the Mechan-
ical, Physical and Chemical Theories of the Ancient Hindus is tended to
be a synoptic view of the entire field of Hindu Physico-Chemical Science,
so far as this reached the stage of positive Science as distinguished from
the prior mythological and empirical stages’.15 He was Brajendranath Seal
(1864–1938), the celebrated author of The Positive Sciences of the Ancient
Hindus (first published 1915). Written within an early Hindu nationalist
framework, he was unaware that the subject would fascinate the academia
as well even after hundred years or so.16 Not only Seal but also his con-
temporary erudite class, starting from the men of science to literary giants,
continuously expressed their admiration for the HISTEM.
Great geologist Pramatha Nath Bose (1855–1934) and internationally
acclaimed chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944) both were science
enthusiasts who later turned into excellent historians. Bose’s quest for the
distinct Indian tradition of science resulted in his monumental work, A His-
tory of Hindu Civilization during British Rule, in three volumes (1890s).
Ray’s History of Hindu Chemistry, published in two volumes in 1902
and 1908, firmly established the scientific credentials of the ancient Hin-
dus and, by extension, their rightful place in the modern world of science.
But, although they saw the history of ancient Indian science as a source of
national pride and inspiration, they never considered it as something that
could be revived as an alternative to modern science; the latter alone could
bring India’s modern nationhood. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) once
met Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839–1904), an Indian pioneer industrial-
ist, and requested him not to depend on foreign products but start manu-
facturing steel in India itself. Later, the monk even advised Tata to start a
science-learning institute of excellence, and the Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore was born.17 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the laureate,
was also fascinated by the marvel of modern science and technology:
Thus, through the help of science, as we come to know more of the laws
of nature, we gain in power; we tend to attain a universal body. Our
organ of sight, our organ of locomotion, our physical strength becomes
world-wide; steam and electricity become our nerve and muscle…18
4 Suvobrata Sarkar
Interest in the development of science, technology, environment, and med-
icine in India under the British rule has grown in recent decades and has
played an ever-increasing part in the reinterpretation of modern South Asian
history. Jahnavi Phalkey has recently emphasized the significance of the his-
tory of science to understand the history of modern India and at the same
time links science’s advancement with the history of colonialism/imperial-
ism interpreting the character of empire.19 The discipline of the history of
science established itself in academic departments, centres, and programmes
in Europe and North America in the 1950s and 1960s. After initial hesi-
tancy, such histories are now being taught at numerous universities and col-
leges of India. Not even that, the country’s premier engineering and science
institutes (IITs, NITs, and IISERs) give adequate emphasis on the theme in
their under-graduate, post-graduate, and doctoral programmes.
The volume explores a variety of ways, sites, and confluences through
which the concept ‘HISTEM’ has evolved. A wide and diverse array of case
studies showcases the vibrancy of histories of science in South Asia and the
range of topics that are now being taken up for research. Here, ‘science’ in
a broad sense includes technology, medicine, and the environment. The vol-
ume as a whole is not intended as a critique of earlier perspectives; however,
attempts have been made to examine official (colonial) and Indian language
sources simultaneously to explore how ‘HISTEM’ has been constituted by
actors and agencies in specific periods and settings. Taken together, the con-
tributors of this volume reassert the significance of the theme in shaping the
histories of colonial and post-colonial South Asia.
The story of oil captures a double movement in which big and complex
technology makes possible the everyday technical, political and social
worlds, but simultaneously, the everyday use of that technology is what
enables it to become big, and therefore useful for the state.
Environmental issues
In a densely populated country like India, environmental issues have both
an ecological and a human dimension. Is the high Himalayan region the
right place for large hydel projects? Mining schemes, if not controlled prop-
erly, may devastate hillsides, and pollute rivers. Thus, in India, ecological
stewardship is not a luxury, but the very basis of human survival.69 Indian
social scientists and historians had previously ignored the environmental
underpinnings of human life. There were several studies on the relationship
between peasantry, zamindars, and the state; but few of them asked how
agrarian life was conditioned by natural environs – forests, waters, miner-
als, etc. Richard Grove and others have explained environmental history
as a historically documented part of the story of the life and death, not of
human individuals, but of societies and of spices, both others and our own,
in terms of their relationships with the world around them.70
South Asia has begun to develop its own distinctive contribution to envi-
ronmental history since the early 1990s. Environmental historians have
mostly been focused on the last two centuries, especially the period from
1858 when India came under the rule of the British Raj. Its intellectual
origins as a ‘self-conscious domain of enquiry’ can probably be traced to
the encounter of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europeans
(naturalists, medical officers, army engineers, bureaucrats, etc.), with the
entirely unfamiliar environments of the tropics, and with the damage done
to these environments by them.71 The scientists and medical men, employed
under the East India Company, played a revolutionary role in the evolution
of ecological consciousness, much before any such development in Europe.
Both forests and water, according to David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha,
have played a significant role in shaping South Asian history which seems
unimaginable in the western eco-cultural systems. In the colonial era, these
resources have increasingly come under state control. The colonial state
powerfully influenced environmental changes by formulating legislation
pertaining to and assuming control over, resources which were earlier under
more informal and decentralized systems of management.72 The focus upon
the agency of the state is crucial to the discussion of the environmental
history of South Asia.
The contributors, in this sub-section, dwell upon the ecological encoun-
ter between Britain and India – changes in the ownership and manage-
ment systems of Indian flora, fauna, minerals, etc. Sahara Ahmed engages
Introduction 15
with the issue of mining in the Bengal Presidency and its socio-political,
economic, technological, and environmental consequences both in colonial
and post-colonial contexts. With the growth of technological system, here
scientific mining, a supporting culture also grew – trained manpower to
handle the machines, and institutional facilities to burgeoning them: ‘…
importance of “scientific miners” received recognition with the creation
of mining academies’. They, in turn, advocated conservation measures to
preserve the seemingly unlimited resources. However, Ahmed emphasizes,
exploitation (of the resources) and conservation were alien to each other
from the beginning of the mining industry. ‘The crux of the problem was
extensive mining in the watershed basins’. Not only the health of the miners
but also the general health of the people, residing near the coalmines, was
deteriorated due to adverse environmental impact. Numerous committees
were set up, but their recommendations were only meant to shelve – no
question of implementation. Independent India learnt the art from their
colonial masters and Indians have excelled it!
Is pastoralism inimical to the environment? Majoritarians believe that
pastoralists’ animals contest with wildlife inhabitants, that their feeding
habits negatively affect the regenerative capacities of forested landscapes,
and that their unpredictable movements make it impossible to put institu-
tional arrangements in place that would regulate environmental use. With
the growing presence and authority of the forest department in British
India, according to Arun Agrawal and Vasant Saberwal, the rhetoric against
heralding acquired greater urgency. This was in line with greater hostility
towards a variety of land-use practices that interfered with the regeneration
of Indian forests – including shifting cultivation and pastoralism.73 Earlier,
Neeladri Bhattacharya has asked, who owned the grazing runs, the unculti-
vated land, the open pastures, the forests? He underlined, the extension of
cultivation was synonymous with progress – ‘Uncultivated tracts where pas-
toralists grazed their cattle were outside the pale of culture’ – they had to be
‘claimed’ for the people through cultivation.74 However, the environment –
pastoralism equation resolves itself in many different ways.
Himanshu Upadhyaya believes that a close attention to the policy doc-
uments on grazing lands and approach of the botanical scientists to grass-
lands helps to understand pastoralists in colonial and post-colonial phases.
The colonial experts and botanists, in the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, were not serious about the improvement of cultivated fodder in India.
The grazing lands were seen through the prism of ‘efficient management’ –
some of the remedies – relying on the appropriate indigenous species in the
permanent grasslands, assigning value to the concept of ‘rotational grazing’,
experimenting with foreign grass and cultivated fodder crops to address the
animal nutrition issue, etc. Upadhyaya elaborates on how the preference for
cultivated fodder crops hid the issue of grazing areas and grasslands. Thus,
the colonial bureaucracy attempted to tackle the seasonal shortages of rain-
fall, with ‘an agrarian and forest management’ mindset, rather than ‘pasto-
ral’ one. Following Bhattacharya, Upadhyaya shows that there were larger
16 Suvobrata Sarkar
initiatives to convert grazing lands, into the cultivable lands, to increase
food production, just after independence.
The history of Indian forestry is, according to Mahesh Rangarajan, to a
great extent, an account of the systematic growth of intervention in the pro-
cesses of natural regeneration to upgrade the value of forests for the Raj.75
For Marlene Buchy, much of the literature on the management of natural
resources has attempted to understand the degree to which colonialism has
to blame for the destruction of the tropical environment.76 Nirmal Kumar
Mahato seeks to explore in what way the scientific forestry was established
on the principles of Deitrich Brandis in Purulia, West Bengal. The insti-
tutionalization of forest service started with the appointment of Brandis
(1824–1907) as an Inspector General of Forest of India. Here, one can find
two contradictory views regarding forest conservation and utilization of
forest resources: As Mahato emphasizes that the forest officials of Purulia
were concerned to establish scientific forestry based on Brandis’s principles
while the district officials were interested to extract more revenues. Inde-
pendent India has chosen the second path – generating profits from the
forests – even at the expense of her lash green jungles.
Medical encounters
Since the late 1990s, health and medicine have emerged as major concerns in
South Asian history. This is a dynamic and innovative field of research, cov-
ering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics.
The British became the dominant colonial power in India in the eighteenth
century and, along with establishing their territorial power and market
monopolies, they introduced their own medical institutions, practices, drugs,
and marginalized indigenous ones. As Pratik Chakrabarti argues, European
medical experiences in the tropics led to the integration of environmental,
climatic, and epidemiological factors within modern medicine.77
In the nineteenth century, with the consolidation of the British Empire,
colonial medicine was firmly established through colonial medical services,
hospitals, dispensaries, educational institutions, vaccination campaigns, etc.
Roy Porter had raised a question long ago (1986), and is now familiar to
scholars interested in the history of medicine in modern South Asia: ‘What
is colonial about colonial medicine?’78 This is an indication of the ways in
which the history of medicine in India has been shaped by the experiences
and legacies of colonial rule. Several studies have examined the extent to
which modern medicine emerged from intercultural encounters in colonial
contact zones such as South Asia.79 Medicine has also been a ‘tool of empire’,
which informed the ideological justifications as well as technologies of colo-
nial control.80 Colonial practices of managing diseases, health, populations,
in turn, redefined general understandings about these categories as well. In
the early twentieth century, as a response to these colonial medical interven-
tions, indigenous medical practitioners and doctors reorganized and revived
Indian medical traditions.81
Introduction 17
Right from the late-nineteenth-century questions relating to public health
engaged both the official and public minds in India and the debates gradually
became more intense in the wake of major cholera and plague epidemics.
Public health usually refers to organized efforts made under the direction of
medical experts for preventing disease and improving the health of the peo-
ple. Deepak Kumar asks a pertinent question, ‘…how “public” was public
health?’82 Later he emphasizes, it ranged from ‘assertions of imperial altru-
ism to allegations of colonial callousness’.83 Recently, an anthology tried to
‘locate the medical’ in an already-established subfield of historical research:
according to the editors, they explore some of the ways in which the ‘med-
ical’ was put together as an ‘object of knowledge, as a subject impacting
others, and as an ethico-moral organizing concept in specific moments in
modern South Asian history’.84
The first essay in this sub-section, by Jayanta Bhattacharya, dwells upon
Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and several problems related
to medicine, health, body, and disease arising out of reading this classic. If
Ivan Ilyich is eager to know of organ localization of his disease, the doctor
appears to be omnipotent (and omniscient too) regarding medical decisions.
Ilyich was solitary and alone. He seems to be sincerely in search of some
metaphors which could fill in the vacuum of his excruciating pain and long
drawn illness. Bhattacharya asks, did he also think of a few moral and eth-
ical questions which could redress his suffering? In Ilyich’s case, nay in the
modern world too, the entire cosmos of everyday life seems to be completely
filled with metaphors of fabricated ‘health and youth’ of the commodity
world or objective scientific metaphors which have destroyed traditional
morality and the normal range of predictable moral expectations derived
from religion or interpersonal subjective network and bondage. Ivan’s story,
in its extension, poses before us multiple layers of questions regarding sub-
jectivity, person, metaphors of life, and the body of a patient. The agony
of Ivan Ilych might be felt from this position of medicine. Here, medicine
is not a theory pertaining to ‘curing machine’. Bhattacharya believes look-
ing through the philosophical matrix of Ayurveda can benefit us providing
some insight.
Epidemics stand at a juncture of medical knowledge, and the ever-chang-
ing relationship between health of the individual and the imperatives of
larger colonial economic formations. This has been explored by Arabinda
Samanta in the context of colonial Bengal.85But there were other major chal-
lenges like tuberculosis which has been dealt by Niels Brimes and Achintya
Kumar Dutta.86Brimnes claims that the late colonial debates about tuber-
culosis control offer illustrative examples of how colonial authorities saw
their obligations towards the Indian population, while post-colonial public
health initiatives reveal how this relation was transformed by decoloniza-
tion.87 In this sub-section, B. Eswara Rao analyses the history of tuber-
culosis in the Madras Presidency during the twentieth century. It was a
widespread assumption among the colonial health authorities in the first
half of the twentieth century that tuberculosis was, if not an entirely new
18 Suvobrata Sarkar
disease in India, became a serious public health concern. He focuses on
the conflict between Western medicine and indigenous perceptions that led
to the advent of fascinating results on the therapeutic practices. How the
disease was perceived and how the colonial state had struggled to bring it
under control? Rao thus settles, ‘…both preventive and curative methods
were rationalized under a state-controlled Western medical system’.
Homeopathy is a controversial medical system widely practiced in the
world – India is no exception. The public discussion surrounding homeop-
athy, then and now, has tried to reduce the problem to a simple question:
whether homeopathy is effective or not. Despite homeopathy’s ambiguous
position within public health establishments and academic sectors, many
licensed health practitioners, pharmacists, and patients endorse and pub-
licize it. This wide presence suggests long and profound roots that remain
to be thoroughly examined. Recently, Shinjini Das argued that the histo-
riographic attention in South Asia has remained overwhelmingly divided
between studying aspects of state medicine promoted by the British Gov-
ernment on the one hand, and that of indigenous healing traditions like
Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha on the other. These medical histories have
largely ignored those mostly sectarian, dissenting medical ideologies that
flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century, whose scientific val-
ues were hotly debated in the western world throughout the nineteenth
century – Homeopathy. Heterodox healing practices such as homeopathy
were routinely curbed by the colonial state in India.88 Thus, in the absence of
any substantial state records on homeopathy’s history in British India, Das
identifies the systematic publication of biographies as a significant arena of
‘assertion for a heterodox, family-based practice like homeopathy’.89
Western medicine did not only mean allopathy, but there were also sev-
eral heterodox strands of medical practices that originated in Europe and
acquired a new meaning in South Asia, including homoeopathy. Dhrub
Kumar Singh’s essay in this anthology examines the role of introducers,
their credentials and interaction with the state professed medicine, profes-
sional practice, commercial activities, certification, and the public recep-
tion of their work. Local contexts framed the development of homeopathic
institutions in India. From the homeopathic dispensary records, Singh
shows several founders of these dispensaries wanted to elevate their dis-
pensary-status to that of hospital-status. Emphasizing the issues concerning
the introduction, adaptation, and acceptance of homeopathic practitioners
and products in the context of colonial Bengal, Singh appeals for a serious
engagement with the histories of homeopathy dispensaries and hospitals as
these institutions have endured the test of times and have become an inte-
gral part of India’s plural medical traditions.
Where are the women in science, technology, and medicine? Why don’t
we see them more often? Do techno-scientific and medicinal knowledge
reinforce gender-based prejudices or liberate us from its bondage? Women’s
unequal position in various spheres of social life is an important area of
research for social scientists. Though recent studies on women’s participation
Introduction 19
in scientific professions show an increase in fields such as medicine, they are
still underrepresented in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
Neelam Kumar rightly notes, women in science resemble a pyramid – with
many women at the bottom and a few at the top in India.90 The relation
between gender and health was a major theme of the colonial Indian his-
tory. Scholars have probed the questions related to childbirth and mother-
hood, and some have examined curative care, female sexuality, and debates
surrounding birth control.91 Another subject arising from recent research
is the life and work of women who were practitioners either of traditional
medicine92 or what is normally referred to as western medicine.93 The edu-
cation of women has also suggested itself as a fruitful area of research, as
has the treatment of women in hospitals and dispensaries.94 Studies of the
nursing profession in India are still very much in their infancy.95 Recently,
other broader issues like professionalization, status, and recruitment, etc.,
are also being taken up by scholars.96
However, most of the scholarship on health and gender over the last two
decades has examined the work of women medical missionaries and its con-
nections to the so-called ‘civilizing mission’ of the churches and the colonial
administration.97 In a society like India in the nineteenth century, mission-
ary women had an advantage over their ‘male brethren’ and were able to
access women of the local communities, to whom male missionaries had no
access. Medical work for women usually began as auxiliary to zenana out-
reach, because missionary women found it a useful instrument of access to
local women living within gender-segregated structures. The early medical
work for women in non-Western societies, Maina Chawla Singh argues,
was initially tentative and experimental in nature. It grew as an offshoot
of missionaries organizing children’s schools, holding sewing and literary
classes for women, and ‘zenana-visiting’.98
The last essay in this sub-section by Ch. Radha Gayathri explores the
initiatives of the trained missionaries of Delhi Female Medical Mission
of Society (DFMMS) and institutionalization of St. Stephen’s Hospital,
Delhi, along with other medical colleges and schools in and around the
region. St. Stephen’s Hospital was started as a ‘veranda dispensary’, and
‘medical chest’ treatment gradually grew into a hospital. The medical
missionaries not only cured patients but started training programmes for
dais, nurses, and dispensers. The growth of this institution reflects the
initial struggles, efforts to reach out, the personal experiences of single
female missionaries, the disappointments, success, etc. Based on the per-
sonal experiences of the doctors, Gayathri shows the immense struggle
carried out by these missionary women. Undeniably, the female medical
missionaries had worked selflessly for saving the lives of Indian women.
Their lasting contribution was the unintentional creation of a ‘feminist’
consciousness in local women. The often-neglected area of Indian contri-
bution in such enterprises is also taken up – at the grass-root level, it was
the Indian Christians who worked as assistants and their contributions
also need to be studied further, argues Gayathri.
20 Suvobrata Sarkar
Epilogue
Can studies in HISTEM help us get a better understanding of colonial
modernity? Prakash Kumar recently argued, South Asia should not merely
be a ‘site’ to which methods and analytics of history of science and tech-
nology may be extended, rather, South Asia should emerge as a ‘site’ for
making new theories and methods for HISTEM. Prakash emphasizes writ-
ing of HISTEM and modernity in a South Asian context is to participate
concurrently in the task of decolonizing ways of knowing the past.99 Thus,
there is a growing concern not to universalize western techno-scientific
concepts to other areas and histories. Why should we be so concerned
with the national or regional characteristics of our science and technol-
ogy, so much so that we should construct our own case studies that are
quite different from the western mainstream cases? This anthology show-
cases various new trends in the historiography of science, technology,
environment, and medicine in South Asia. Taken together, the essays in
this volume endorse the significance of the new knowledge in shaping the
histories of colonial and post-colonial Indian subcontinent. Is focusing
our scope of HISTEM inquiry on South Asia – a specific geographical and
historical area – a reasonable and potentially fruitful strategy for doing
research?
The South Asian histories of modern Islamic medicine (Unani Tibb
and Tibb-ul-Nabi) were largely silent on regional variations within South
Asia. Projit Mukherji has pointed out the gap between elite (ashraf) and
popular (atrap) culture in Islam along with the absence of Bengal from
histories of the institutionalization of Islamic medicine in South Asia.100
Likewise, though scholars have discussed the changing attitudes of Hin-
dus towards science and engineering, they mostly neglect to mention the
attitudes of Muslims. Now that some influential people are talking about
rewriting history, why stick to only political history? Why not politics of
knowledge and politics of culture? Most recently, Ajantha Subramanian
has provided interesting insights into the colonial history of engineering
education and associated racialization of caste and the making of IITs in
post-colonial India as a Brahmin-upper caste space. She explores the mak-
ing of upper casteness and its inherent linkages with opposing reservations
inter alia the making of IIT as a global brand. The institutional kinship
of upper castes in the US reiterates that caste doesn’t vanish amongst the
IIT diaspora.101
Almost 125 years ago, the noted geologist Pramatha Nath Bose (referred
earlier), had given a similar self-critical assessment of our engineering capa-
bilities. He knew that
The caste system had no doubt aided progress in the earlier stages of
their civilization; it had also served to maintain some kind of order for
centuries since the decay of their civilization. But caste did so at the
sacrifice of progress; progress such as it is understood now in Europe
and America. It was not to be expected that illiterate weavers, or illit-
erate dyers, or illiterate miners, would apply the scientific methods of
modern industries to their professions. Not being able to do so, they
have gone to the wall.102
Notes
1 Deepak Kumar, ‘Developing a History of Science and Technology in South Asia’,
EPW, Vol. 38, No. 23, 2003, pp. 2248.
2 Ibid, pp. 2249–2250.
3 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. xvii.
4 The authors thus explain, ‘There are three senses in which we want to say that
history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics. First, scien-
tific practitioners have created, selected, and maintained a polity within which
they operate and make their intellectual product; second, the intellectual product
made within the polity has become an element in political activity in the state;
third, there is a conditional relationship between the nature of the polity occu-
pied by scientific intellectuals and the nature of the wider polity’. Ibid, p. 332.
5 Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire, Delhi: OUP, 1998, pp. 140–144.
6 Anna Winterbottom, ‘Science’, in William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers (eds.),
The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750, Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2019, p. 233.
7 Rohan Deb Roy, ‘Review: Science, Medicine and New Imperial Histories’, BJHS,
Vol. 45, No. 3, 2012, p. 444 (443–450).
8 This is not only the histories of colonial governance, medical knowledge, phar-
maceutical commerce, and Indian response, Deb Roy argues, but also portrays
the manner British India was linked simultaneously to events and processes in
other colonial territories. Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects, Cambridge: CUP,
2017, pp. 1–16.
9 The Opium War of 1840 convinced China that if it remained closed to the out-
side world, it would quickly fall behind. Moreover, erudite Chinese at that time
started believing that the reason of European supremacy was their technological
advances. The twentieth-century Chinese scholarship recognized well ‘science-
technology’ as the most important productive force. When science is mentioned
in Chinese terminology, it is generally mentioned together with technology as
‘Keji’. Guoyan Wang, ‘Science as Technology: What does Science Mean for the
Chinese’, Science as Culture, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2021, pp. 315–319.
10 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations,
No. 40, Autumn 1992, p. 82 (81–128).
22 Suvobrata Sarkar
11 For more information consult Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity,
New York: Zone Books, 2010.
12 Lorraine Daston, ‘The History of Science and the History of Knowledge’, KNOW:
A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017, pp. 131–154.
13 Epstein has argued that the recent research to extend studies of science and tech-
nology ‘outward’ beyond scientific settings (laboratory for example) has created
new possibilities for interchange with the sociology of culture. Steven Epstein,
‘Culture and Science/Technology: Rethinking Knowledge, Power, Materiality,
and Nature’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Vol. 619, 2008, pp. 165–182.
14 The Calcutta Review, Vol. I, No. II, 1844, p. 257.
15 Brajendranath Seal, ‘Mechanical, Physical and Chemical Theories of the Ancient
Hindus’, in Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry, Vol. II,
London: Williams and Norgate, 1909, p. E.
16 While delivering the Presidential Address to Modern Indian Section, Indian
History Congress (Diamond Jubilee Session, Calicut University, 2000), Deepak
Kumar remarked the following: ‘What made these scientists look into distant
past? Intense nationalism, quest for an identity or concern for the future?
Probably all three. All this part of self-exploration and self-criticism was consid-
ered vital. They used the term “Hindu” but not in a religious sense (or in the way
it is being used now) … Be it Bankim or Afghani, their aim was just to show that
modern science was compatible with their respective culture and traditions. It
was not retrogressive revivalism’. Later published as Deepak Kumar, ‘Science
and Society in Colonial India: Exploring an Agenda’, Social Scientist, Vol. 28,
Nos. 5/6, 2000, pp. 24–46.
17 Sankari Prasad Basu (ed.), Swami Vivekananda in Contemporary Indian News,
Vol. II, Kolkata: The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 2007, pp. 48–50.
18 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sadhana’, in S. K. Das (ed.), English Writings of
Rabindranath Tagore, Vol. 2, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996, p. 304.
19 Jahnavi Phalkey, ‘Introduction’, Focus: Science, History, and Modern India, Isis,
Vol. 104, No. 2, 2013, pp. 330–336.
20 One of the main emphases of the literature has been to critique and overthrow
George Basalla’s tripartite model of the ‘diffusion’ of science from the core to the
periphery. His model, informed by modernization theory, further viewed non-
European societies as passive recipients of science, which had a formative influ-
ence on much historical scholarship through to the 1980s. George Basalla, ‘The
Spread of Western Science’, Science, Vol. 156, No. 37, 1967, pp. 611–622.
Gradually, historians were beginning to find that a single model of develop-
ment of science could not cover its wide-ranging trajectories in different parts of
the empire. In this context, Roy Macleod’s concept of ‘moving metropolis’ is
worth a mention. In his scheme, local centres such as Sydney, Toronto, or
Calcutta could achieve autonomy to a significant extent while remaining within
the parameters of imperial control. Roy Macleod, ‘On Visiting the Moving
Metropolis: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science’, Historical
Records of Australian Science, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1982, pp. 1–16.
The early Basalla-inspired studies (Daniel R. Headrick, Michael Adas, among
others) granted limited agency to the colonies themselves in the spread of
Western science and technology. As one critique emphasizes that ‘these studies
embody a non-interactive approach, for they merely view the non-West as labo-
ratories for the performance of scientific experiments’. Dhruv Raina, Images and
Contexts, New Delhi: OUP, 2003, p. 177.
21 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, New Delhi: OUP, 2nd Edition, 2006.
22 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.
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