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History of Science, Technology,
Environment, and Medicine in India

This volume studies the concept and relevance of HISTEM (History of

Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine) in shaping the histo-
ries of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Tracing its evolution from
the establishment of the East India Company through to the early decades
after the Independence of India, it highlights the ways in which the disci-
pline has changed over the years and examines the various influences that
have shaped it. Drawing on extensive case studies, the book offers valuable
insights into diverse themes such as the East–West encounter, appropriation
of new knowledge, science in translation and communication, electricity
and urbanization, the colonial context of engineering education, science of
hydrology, oil and imperialism, epidemic and empire, vernacular medicine,
gender and medicine, as well as environment and sustainable development
in the colonial and postcolonial milieu.
An indispensable text on South Asia’s experience of modernity in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book will be of interest to scholars
and researchers of modern South Asian studies, modern Indian history, soci-
ology, history of science, cultural studies, colonialism, as well as studies on
Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

Suvobrata Sarkar is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the

Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India. His research explores history
of technology in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South
Asia. His most recent publication is Let There be Light: Engineering, Entre-
preneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 (2020).
History of Science,
Technology, Environment,
and Medicine in India

Edited by Suvobrata Sarkar

First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Suvobrata Sarkar;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Suvobrata Sarkar to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
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trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kumar, Deepak, 1952- honoree. | Sarkar, Suvobrata, editor.
Title: History of science, technology, environment, and medicine in India /
edited by Suvobrata Sarkar.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | “Essays in
honour of Professor Deepak Kumar.” | Includes bibliographical references
and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021030009 (print) | LCCN 2021030010 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032148458 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032149691 (paperback) | ISBN
9781003241980 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kumar, Deepak, 1952- | Science--India--History. |
Technology--India--History. | Environmental sciences--India--History. |
Medicine--India--History. | Science--Historiography. |
India--Historiography.
Classification: LCC Q127.I4 H597 2022 (print) | LCC Q127.I4 (ebook) | DDC
509.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030009
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030010
ISBN: 978-1-032-14845-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-14969-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24198-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241980
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Essays in Honour of Professor Deepak Kumar
Contents

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

1 Medicine, natural history and the curious case of Soorjo

Coomar Goodeve Chuckerbutty 29
JOHN MATHEW

2 Examining the foundations of science: an essay on Ramendra

Sundar Trivedi’s epistemological inquiries 41
SANTANU CHACRAVERTI

3 Professor Balaji Prabhakar Modak: a forgotten science

propagator 61
ABHIDHA DHUMATKAR

4 Cultural politics of engagement: Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad

and the shaping of a scientific-citizen public in Kerala 79
SHIJU SAM VARUGHESE
viii Contents
SECTION II
Technology and culture 97

5 Electricity and urbanization in Madras, 1895–1930 99

Y. SRINIVASA RAO

6 Academic engineering and India’s colonial encounter:

Bengal Engineering College, Sibpur, a historical perspective 121
SUVOBRATA SARKAR

7 Of geologists and water-diviners: the quest for groundwater

knowledge in mid-twentieth-century India 139
KAPIL SUBRAMANIAN

8 From battlefields to homes: oil’s imperial and quotidian life

in colonized and independent India 157
SARANDHA JAIN

SECTION III
Environmental issues 173

9 Designing scientific mining: evolution and implementation,

c. 1860s–1960s 175
SAHARA AHMED

10 On grazing lands and cultivated fodder 195

HIMANSHU UPADHYAYA

11 Deforestation, ecological deterioration and scientific forestry

in Purulia, 1890s–1960s 214
NIRMAL KUMAR MAHATO

SECTION IV
Medical encounters 233

12 When man meets medicine: some reflections on

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Āyurveda with its
epistemological consequences 235
JAYANTA BHATTACHARYA
 Contents ix
13 Therapeutic practices of tuberculosis in the Madras
Presidency, 1910–1947 251
B. ESWARA RAO

14 A case for the social history of homoeopathic hospitals

in India: an invitation for its construction and rendition 268
DHRUB KUMAR SINGH

15 Saviour sisters: services of the Delhi female medical

missionaries in late colonial India 288
CH. RADHA GAYATHRI

Appendix 307
Select bibliography 312
Index 325
Contributors

Sahara Ahmed is Professor at the Department of History, Rabindra Bharati

University, Kolkata, India. She received both her M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees
from the University of Calcutta, India. Her research focuses on the envi-
ronmental history of Bengal, with particular references to aspects of for-
estry and related themes in colonial and postcolonial eras. She received the
Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship Award in 2017. Author of the book
Woods, Mines and Minds (2019), she has several published chapters in
national and international journals.
Jayanta Bhattacharya by training as a physician, did his Ph.D. on history of
medicine. He is the author of Biomediicne theke Najardari Medicine (2017)
and edited an international Bengali collection on history of medicine in
India, Bharatiya Patabhumite Cikitsa-Bijnaner Itihas: Ekti Sankshipta Par-
yalocana (2009). His other significant publications include ‘From Hospitals
to Hospital Medicine: Epistemological Transformation of Medical Knowl-
edge in India’, in Historia Hospitalium (2012), ‘Anatomical Knowledge and
East-West Exchange’, in Medical Encounters in British India (2012), and
‘The Body: Epistemological Encounters in Colonial India’, in Making Sense
of Health, Illness and Disease (2004).
Santanu Chacraverti is an activist associated with Society for Direct Initia-
tive for Social and Health Action and works on environmental and rights
issues. His unpublished doctoral dissertation – Ramendrasundar Trivedi
and Bengal’s Response to Modern Western Science (Jadavpur University) –
deals with Ramendra Sundar’s epistemology of science in analytical detail.
Further, his monograph on Bengal’s Subhankari, published by the Asiatic
Society, provides a detailed historical and mathematical treatment of the
tradition. His book The Sundarbans Fishers: Coping in an Overly Stressed
Mangrove Estuary (2014) has been published by the International Collec-
tive in Support of fish-workers.
Abhidha Dhumatkar is presently Head, Department of History, Sathaye
College, University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India. She has several research
publications to her credit in the reputed journals – EPW, IJHS – among oth-
ers. She was recipient of the Senior Research Fellowship of the INSA, New
 Contributors xi
Delhi, India. She is the biographer of Balaji Prabhakar Modak, a forgot-
ten science popularizer of Maharashtra. She is the first visually challenged
woman from India to receive the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Research
Fellowship.
Ch. Radha Gayathri works at Educational Records Research Unit (ERRU),
JNU, New Delhi, India. She is author of the Female Medical Education in
Colonial India (2008) and co-editor of Education in Colonial India: His-
torical Insights (2013). Many of her articles and chapters are published in
reputed journals and books. She is currently working on the volume Decid-
ing the Destiny of Nation: Selections from Nationalist Ideas on Education
in India 1920–1964. Her areas of research and publications are history of
education, medicine, healthcare systems which she primarily analyses from
women’s perspective.
Sarandha Jain is a doctoral and teaching fellow in the department of
anthropology at Columbia University (USA). Her Ph.D. project is about
the relationship between petroleum, the state, and citizens in contemporary
India. Her previous work was on rivers, specifically a cultural study of the
Yamuna: the relationship people share with this river, and how the state
intervenes in it.
Prakash Kumar is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Penn-
sylvania State University (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the Georgia
Institute of Technology in 2004. He spent two years as a postdoc at Yale
University’s History Department and was Assistant and Associate Professor
at Colorado State, before joining Penn State in 2014. He is the author of
Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (2012).
Nirmal Kumar Mahato is Associate Professor, Department of History,
Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India. He has been
awarded Charles Wallace Fellowship, 2019–2020 in the UK. He is also a
member, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata. He is the author of Sorrow
Songs of Woods: Adivasi-Nature Relationship in the Anthropocene in
Manbhum(2020).
John Mathew is Associate Professor in the Divisions of the Humanities and
Social Sciences and of Science, Krea University, Sri City, Andhra Pradesh.
He has taught at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Duke
University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, and the Indian Institute of Sci-
ence Education and Research (IISER), Pune, Maharashtra, India.
B. Eswara Rao is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Uni-
versity of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. He is specialized in the history
of medicine. His research interests include sanitation, hygienic practices,
and policies in South India. His significant publications include ‘From
Rajayaks(h)ma (disease of kings) to “Blackman’s plague”: Perceptions
on prevalence and aetiology of tuberculosis in the Madras Presidency,
xii Contributors
1882–1947’,IESHR (2006), and ‘Taming “Liquid Gold” and Dam Technol-
ogy: A Study of the Godavari Anicut’, in Deepak Kumar et al (eds.), The
British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South
Asia (2011). He is also a recipient of the Travel Grant, Wellcome Trust for
the History of Medicine, London.
Y. Srinivasa Rao did his M.A. and M.Phil. at the University of Hyderabad
and Ph.D. at IIT Madras, Chennai, India. He is Associate Professor and
Head, Department of History, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli,
India. Though he is specialized on the history of science and technology of
colonial India, his academic interest covers areas such as studies on subal-
terns, caste, development, social exclusion, and cinema. He was an Interna-
tional Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology (2008 and 2009).
Dhrub Kumar Singh is at the Department of History, Faculty of Social
Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. His major publications
include ‘Choleraic Times and Mahendra Lal Sarkar: The Quest of Homoe-
opathy as “Cultivation of Science” in Nineteenth Century India’, Medizin,
Gesellschaft und Geschichte, No. 24, yearbook of the Institutfür Geschichte
der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung, Germany (2005), and, ‘Cholera,
Heroic Therapies, and Rise of Homoeopathy in 19th Century India’, in
Deepak Kumar and Raj Sekhar Basu (eds.), Medical Encounters in British
India (2013), among others.
Kapil Subramanian is a historian of technology trained at Imperial College,
London, and King’s College, London, UK. His research has thus far focused
on the Green Revolution. He is presently engaged in climate policy research.
Himanshu Upadhyaya is Assistant Professor at School of Development,
Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. His doctoral research at the CSSP,
JNU, New Delhi, India, explored the interrelations between crops and cattle
and transformations brought about during the late-colonial and postcolo-
nial period (1890–1980) in western India. He is interested in contributing
to the areas of history of veterinary medicine in South Asia.
Shiju Sam Varughese is currently Assistant Professor at the Centre for Stud-
ies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, School of Social Sciences,
Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India. His areas of interest
include social history of science, public engagement with S&T, media and
science communication, cultural studies of S&T, and regional modernities
in South Asia. He is the author of Contested Knowledge: Science, Media,
and Democracy in Kerala (2017). He has also co-edited Kerala Modernity:
Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (2015).
Foreword

Historical studies of science, technology, and medicine expanded in India

in distinct phases. The first forays after independence were made by histo-
rians with Marxist leanings in the 1950s and 1960s. But these leads were
not followed by any significant spurt in historical writings on the subject
although historians remained broadly interested in questions of scientific
and technological traditions and industrialization. A second round of disci-
plinary interest developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Deepak Kumar entered
the realm in the second round of early stabilization of the field. He has
remained a sentinel of the discipline as it expanded and therefore it is emi-
nently suitable that an “Indian” history of STM should celebrate the schol-
arship of Professor Deepak Kumar.
In the middle of the 1970s when Deepak Kumar started exploring the
fringes of history of science, the shape of the field was still malleable. A wide
array of approaches filled the analytical space for exploring the nature of
STM traditions in India’s past. A bedrock of humanistic and social scien-
tific analyses of Indian STM had slowly solidified. This corpus provided a
rich if fissiparous ensemble of analytics, examining not any definitive set of
core questions but rather clusters of themes that sought to track the antiq-
uity of STM, embed them in India’s religion and “culture,” and find link-
ages between STM and India’s hierarchical social structure. The world of
academic communities and discourses on the history of STM that Deepak
Kumar would have encountered was heterogeneous at best.
Deepak Kumar’s scholarship became one with a cohort of other works in
providing a definitive characteristic to the historiography of science, tech-
nology, and medicine. More than anything else, it was Kumar’s unsullied
commitment to the examination of the “colonial encounter” that imparted
a unifying weave. From among a number of problematics that scholars were
considering, Kumar chose to focus specifically on the “colonial question.”
This mirrored a broader trend in a rush to colonial archives to explore the
history of STM and reflected a definitive turn in academic histories that
declared a priority to examine the history of STM through an exhaustive
treatment of the colonial context. The use of the vast resources of colo-
nial archives pushed the existing historiography of STM towards a political
economy analysis in the modern period.
xiv Foreword
Apparently, Kumar’s individual journey into colonial criticism of STS
developed over a long arc of time and in the face of significant headwinds.
The argument that science was not “apolitical” drew upon well-known con-
structivist frameworks of the time, but the ingenuity came even before – in
the very choice of “science” as an arena for investigation, given the modes of
research and subject interests of modern India history scholars at the time.
Significant works by pioneers aside, historians at large in the universities
were still slow to warm up to the study of science, technology or medicine.
As Deepak Kumar later wrote in a semi-autobiographical account, it took
significant energy and commitment on his part to just zero in on “science”
in the search for papers in the archives. In the indexes of archives, he had to
run down a list of words starting with “A for Agriculture and B for Botany
down to Z for Zoology” as he assembled materials to allow for studying
the treatment of science under the colonial regime.1 The conceptual frame-
work for a critical analysis also emerged only slowly. There were defining
moments in Kumar’s intellectual trajectory that signalled these shifts. His
Ph.D. theses was completed at the University of Delhi in 1984, titled Science
Policy of the Raj. Alongside, he had been communicating a certain critique
of STM that started to emerge at talks and symposia. He presented a paper
specifically on “colonial science” at the Indian History Congress session
at Hyderabad in 1976. This was later published in the Indian Journal of
History of Science in 1980.2
The first, complete enunciation of Deepak Kumar’s colonial science
scholarly project came with the publication of Science and the Raj in 1995.
It bears emphasizing that at this moment, Kumar’s primary intellectual goal
as a historian of STM was not in pressing the Kuhnian programme forward
in the Indian historiography. Neither was his re-launch of historical studies
of STM shaped by any enthusiastic embrace of the Social Construction
of Technology formulations for an object-focused history of technology.
Instead, Kumar’s scholarship – as heralded by Science and the Raj – chose
to align with the dominant Colonial Studies orientation of modern Indian
history scholarship at the time. The book announced the core programme
of Kumar’s history of STM project, which was to explore the colonial
underpinnings of STM. This quest was replicated in a number of edited
volumes that seemed to cover the entire spectrum of STME: Technology
and the Raj (1995); Disease and Medicine in India: A Historical Overview
(2001); and The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental
Encounters in South Asia (2010). In books and articles, Kumar covered an
exquisitely broad array of topics. The subjects of public health and tropical
agriculture received further focused treatment in two edited books down
the road: Medical Encounter in British India (2013) and Tilling the Land:
Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India (2016).
Kumar remained steadfast in his reliance on the formidable repositories
of colonial state and its institutions for a recounting of science and tech-
nology histories. But through the three decades that were the prime period
 Foreword xv
of Kumar’s publishing career, South Asian historiography redefined its rela-
tionship with “colonial archives.” A critique emerged that acknowledged
the fact that colonial thought inhered in the archives created by the colonial
state. In a note on bibliography for Science and the Raj, Kumar wrote about
how frequently he was warned by his contemporaries against an over reli-
ance on the archive. Kumar’s resilience in the light of these attacks spoke
of a certain conviction. It also spoke of a methodological choice in favour
of archive and not theory as the ultimate arbiter of an historical account.
His standard reply to the contrarian ripostes was to argue that internal
debates and discussions in the official files, in conjunction with nationalist
tracts and vernaculars, provided sufficient avenues to track the decolonized
perspective.
That said, it would be far too simplistic to paint the entire scholarship
of Deepak Kumar in one broad brush, as if that scholarship did not alter
over the long span in which he has remained dominant in STM’s historiog-
raphy. There are two aspects that came to bear more emphasis in Kumar’s
later works. One of these was to move to the many institutions outside
the state’s immediate purview whose study enabled an exploration of how
wider processes added to the colonial state’s outreach. The other was an
increased reliance on the vernacular archives. For the sake of convenience,
we can call them, respectively, the project of decentring and the project of
vernacularizing.
The project of decentring has paralleled trends within the South Asian
historiography more generally. Within the scholarship on colonial South
Asia, the early focus on the operations, institutions, and archives of the
colonial state faded. The first act of decentring involved moving to locality
and to “case studies” that were distant from the day-to-day imperatives of
colonial policy and implementation. The second act involved moving away
from a primary focus on the colonial state’s institutionalized bureaucracy.
The new points of focus in the later iterations invoked and considered activ-
ities of indigenous actors and recognized the importance of the concurrent
emergence of new forms of institutions that developed outside the realm of
the state. Their study allowed for a focus on micro-processes that no doubt
reproduced state power in the final reckoning but were clearly outside the
latter’s direct influence. They did not reflect imperial thinking, but rather
the conflict between norms and practice, and by that very fact also scientific
and technological practice in small, relatively autonomous spaces.
The project of vernacularizing in Kumar’s scholarship has also mimicked
a trend within South Asian Studies. The pursuit of vernacular archives was
a calculated search for a specific type of archive, revealing a deliberate effort
towards studying more regions and languages and adding underlying lay-
ers of empiricism. The invoking of vernacular provided entry to looking at
Indian actors and colonized elites and their engagement with colonialism.
In the wider South Asian historiography, “vernacular” was an expansive
descriptor for historical experiences related to the local and discordant, to
xvi Foreword
kinships, and to identities, all of which has proved enormously useful in
exploring alternate political imaginaries. But it bears mentioning that in
Kumar’s project, the vernacular was to be studied along with colonialism,
not outside of it or independent of it.
These twin projects formed part of the kernel of Kumar’s reenacted pro-
ject of colonial STM. This reenactment came more or less around the time
of publication of an important article in Economic and Political Weekly of
2003. Here, Kumar laid down his vision for the future direction of histo-
riography of STM in India, which he fundamentally pinned on the explo-
ration of local archives in their multitudes.3 This was his call to develop
an Indian perspective on STM by using empirical data in India in all of its
regional, vernacular, and local contexts. His argument was simple: India
had syncretic and multiple traditions of scientific knowledge and myriad
engagements between local and western knowledge. STM in every region
had “its own distinctive flavour and history”4 and Indians had multiple
visions for modernization. He wanted historians to map this internal het-
erogeneity through Indian case studies. The indigenous STM could best be
explored by studying complex engagements in the Indian locale and socie-
ties “through their own literature and practitioners.”5 Kumar believed that
more explorations of the Indian context would provide the rightful under-
standing of STM history in India, a task that “metropolitan theorisations”6
were restricting.
The EPW article was also important in generally suggesting a subtle shift
from the era of the first decade of publications. The first book, Science and
the Raj, was fundamentally an economic and institutional critique of colo-
nialism. The latter two decades of Kumar’s scholarship summoned a much
broader critical framework. The EPW article argued for the need “to move
away from state-centric approaches and look to more complex engage-
ments.”7 At this instance in this piece, there was not only a wide-ranging
reference to ecological and environmental historians and to Bruno Latour’s
cultural critique on pasteurization of France, but also an explicit admission
that the additional pivots of “nature” and “culture” must be examined. The
later works of Kumar reflect this openness that seemed to mark a departure
from those that determined the framework of Science and the Raj.
The current volume extends the goals of the project of decentring and
the project of vernacularizing in Kumar’s redefined agenda in three specific
ways. One way the chapters implement the foregoing agenda is in their
exploration of multiple institutions. Several chapters provide fleshed out
accounts of what transpired in the making of institutions and in their oper-
ation. In this way, they give representation to institutional history outside of
state and take analysis towards the sites of operation of STM in society. The
discussions of education or engineering, or of electrification, street-lighting,
and urban transport together give centrality to vignettes from Indian actors
and recover their voices about questions on the ground and from their per-
spective. The focus on popular science-writing, on “popular science” or
 Foreword xvii
“science movements” serves the same purpose of drawing the argumenta-
tive axis away from the central concerns of the colonial state and instead
attends to the Indian engagement with colonial imperatives. The focus on
homeopathy or on curing and healing in the zenana shows that the institu-
tions could be simultaneously complicit in the act of “delivering, disciplin-
ing, [while also standing in for the] disruptive” (p. 301).
The chapters execute simultaneous decentring from the colonial state and
its networks on the one hand and from the single pivot of “nation” on the
other hand by focusing on a number of “middle level” Indian actors and
their writings. The middling positionality of these subjects are flagged as
much by their distance from any subcontinent-wide common vision as by
their spatial location in isolated places that are still significant locally. To
the extent that they focus on colonized Indian elites, they reveal their multi-
faceted response to colonial conditions. They also underscore a “contested”
colonial history which is narrativized from the perspective of the colonized.
Their method of correlation between STM and nation is also nuanced. It is
important to point out that in their zeal to avoid any single-minded focus
on the nation the chapters do not avoid “nation” altogether. What comes
out in their readings of colonized Indians is then a disaggregated notion of
the nation and other solidarities. They show actors to be holding multiple
conceptions of freedom and justice that shines through in the scientific and
technological visions they espouse. The new emphasis seems to be on the
“local” but also to speak to the “national” as an aggregate of multiple con-
stituents. This conjuring of “Nation 2.0” may as well be a reaction against
the extreme and comprehensive “anti-statism” and “anti-elitism” of specific
writings.
The third major innovation comes in the use of vernaculars and in the
emphasis on vernacular knowledge of STM. This trend is epitomized in
the use of Indian language materials in the regional archives, in memoirs,
tracts, and journals that are buried deep in local libraries across India which
would stay unused unless they are utilized by language-proficient analysts
who can spend the time in these archives. This treasure trove allows for
placing Indians as knowledge-makers, including those who were not for-
mally trained in the colonial institutions. The latter are likely to go amiss
in historical accounts that only place reliance on the views and works of
experts who were so recognized on account of their professional credentials.
This unshackling from a formulaic view of expertise also opens the way for
the study of Indian engagements with “skill” and “practice” that were not
anointed by modern science. Such knowledge domains are more likely to
be found in the vernacular materials. The vernacular as a historiograph-
ical stance pushes historians towards uncovering domains of knowledge
forms, artisanship, and traditions of curing that would be missed if one is
cloistered by the visions of state records alone. As recent works on Indian
STM have highlighted, the vernacular itself was not static or in a state of
changelessness. Indeed, it could sometimes grow using tools provided by
xviii Foreword
colonial modernity while at other times it ran the risk of being swept aside
by modernist forces. As these scholars set their minds on pursuing these
new archives, they add new layers to the history of STM. Where they do not
go the distance, they shine light on the path forward.
Prakash Kumar
Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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

This is to bring to your kind attention the need to introduce courses

in History of Science in university curriculum. History departments of
various universities would, I think, be right vehicles for the dissemina-
tion of knowledge concerning developments in science and technology
and its ramifications.

So wrote in 1983 a young history lecturer in a letter to Professor Mad-

huri Shah, the then Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC),
requesting to introduce courses on history of science and technology. India’s
history students had to wait for another 15–20 years for such an opportu-
nity! Probably in 2002–2003, UGC introduced a course on the theme as
an optional chapter at the post-graduate level in history. By that time, the
young lecturer has already pioneered a new genre of writing Indian history
– in his own words – HISTEM (history of science, technology, environment,
and medicine). The celebrated author of Science and the Raj (1st edition,
1995), Professor Deepak Kumar has tried to popularize HISTEM during
his four decades of teaching and research in India and abroad. For a proper
socio-economic development, he believes that HISTEM can be of great
value to the civil society and the policy-makers. This anthology is for Pro-
fessor Kumar, my teacher and mentor, a selfless man gifted with boundless
generosity and inspiration.
The present volume reflects the diversity of the field and displays exciting
new scholarship from early and mid-career researchers by bringing together
several locations and dimensions of HISTEM and modernity in South Asia.
The idea first grew sometime in 2013! Later, I approached some of my
fellow colleagues and friends and they immediately accepted my invita-
tion with great enthusiasm and thus eager to honour Professor Kumar for
his enormous contribution to history of science. The original plan was to
release the volume on 31 August, 2017 on the day of superannuation of
Professor Kumar. However, things shaped slowly. I accept full responsibility
for the delay in publication. My greatest debt is to my contributors for their
participation, patience, and perseverance.
xx Acknowledgements
Dr Prakash Kumar has been very kind in his encouragement. He has been
the guiding force throughout and set the tone of this festschrift with his
foreword. Several senior scholars appreciated my labour – Professor Roy
MacLeod, Professor David Arnold, Professor Robert Anderson, Professor
Ross Bassett, Professor Smritikumar Sarkar, Professor Arnab Rai Choud-
huri, Professor Chittabrata Palit, Professor Ranjan Chakrabarti, Professor
Arun Bandyopadhyay, Professor Michael Mann, Professor Mahesh Ranga-
rajan, Professor Arabinda Samanta, Professor Sujata Mukherjee, Professor
Achintya Kumar Dutta, Professor Raj Sekhar Basu, Professor Sutapa Chat-
terjee Sarkar, Professor Bipasha Raha, Professor Mahua Sarkar, Professor
Ishrat Alam, Professor Jagdish N. Sinha, Professor Madhumita Mazumdar,
and of course the late Professor Srilata Chatterjee. I am also grateful to
Dr Rohan D’Souza, Dr Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Dr Sambit Mallick, and
Dr Aparajith Ramnath for their support and encouragement. All of them,
have enriched the theme – HISTEM – with their writings, and are very
gratefully acknowledged here. I have also benefitted immensely from the
interest, suggestions, and advice of Professor Suranjan Das and Professor
Tirthankar Roy.
I take this opportunity to remember late Amitabha Ghosh (pen-name
Siddhartha Ghosh), once a close friend of Professor Deepak Kumar, who
had contributed immensely to the field of history of technology by empha-
sizing the relevance of Indian language sources in the writing of HISTEM.
The response to modern science, technology, and medicine could be more
interestingly traced in the vernacular press as it had greater reach among
the general people. There indeed was a close relationship between the rise
of the vernacular press and the development of engagement with modern
science and technology in different sections of society.1
My thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. I would
also like to express my gratitude to Shashank Sinha, Antara Ray Chaudhury,
Anvitaa Bajaj, and others at Routledge for their help and encouragement.
We are glad to note that this festschrift comes out as Professor Deepak
Kumar enters the seventh decade of his life.
This book is a collective intellectual product. I hope that readers will find
this work useful.
Suvobrata Sarkar
Rabindra Bharati University
Kolkata

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

BJHS The British Journal for the History of Science

CUP Cambridge University Press
EPW Economic and Political Weekly
HISTEM History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine
IESHR The Indian Economic and Social History Review
IHR Indian Historical Review
IISER Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
IIT Indian Institute of Technology
IJHS Indian Journal of History of Science
INSA Indian National Science Academy
MAS Modern Asian Studies
MUP Manchester University Press
NIT National Institute of Technology
OUP Oxford University Press
SHOT Society for the History of Technology
SIH Studies in History
STM Science, Technology and Medicine
STS Science, Technology and Society
T&C Technology and Culture
Introduction
Suvobrata Sarkar

The development of a history of science, technology, environment and

medicine (HISTEM) in south Asia has not merely to draw on different
discipline, but also has to shape its concerns from unique and divergent
regional traditions and histories that prevail in the region. The south-Asian
techno-scientific tradition has largely been a syncretic one, evolving as a
result of socio-politico and cultural interactions through the ages; the colo-
nial experience too played its part. The appeal of HISTEM is therefore
wider, it belongs to the mainstream of social and cultural debates in history.
Deepak Kumar (2003)1

The concept of ‘HISTEM’ is popularized in the academic arena by Deepak

Kumar. Referring to William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society (1784),
he argues, taken together, man and nature (also society) constitute the basis
for the history of science, technology, environment, and medicine (HIS-
TEM). The most significant feature of HISTEM, according to him, lies in
its necessarily interdisciplinary nature. ‘There need not be one history, there
can be many’. Technology, for example, can be seen from the perspectives of
social history, economic history, even cultural history. Medical history can
also be written in multiple directions. HISTEM, like any other historical
project, ‘involves a study of several cross-sections representing events and
ideas that are inter-connected, and which exemplify the cause and effect
relationship’.2 It also affirms the complementary co-existence of the natural
and social sciences (even engineering). But one should not make a fine his-
torical analysis jargon-ridden by borrowing concepts from other disciplines
frequently; theories and empirical study should go together, and HISTEM,
according to Kumar, provides enough opportunities to do so.
However, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, authors of one of the signifi-
cant interdisciplinary studies of our time, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (first
edition 1985), emphasize that ‘The writing of history could be and should
be governed by standards internal to the community of professional histori-
ans and not by standards circulating among the laity or among groups who
spoke in the name of the practice – for the political history, present-day
politicians; for the history of art, present-day artists and aestheticians; and,

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.

On methods, questions, and theory

An important question that has engaged historians of science in the last few
decades is the relationship between science and European imperialism.20 It
is now apparent that science was influenced by the Europe’s imperial expe-
riences. Both modern science and colonialism grew together, and as Deepak
Kumar argues ‘hand-in-hand’. Hence, he talks about ‘colonial science’ to
emphasize that coloniality was the most dominant feature of science in
India during the period.21 ‘Science’ was directly driven by imperial achieve-
ments and needs. Early map-making operations including the work of the
Great Trigonometrical Survey of India came from the need of trade and
military campaigns. The geological surveys were linked with intelligence
gathering on minerals and local politics. Efforts to control various epidemic
diseases led to attempts to regulate the habits, diets, and movements of
colonial subjects. According to David Arnold, this was a political process
(colonization of the body)22, by which the imperialists converted medicine
into a weapon to secure their rule. New technologies were also put to use
expanding and consolidating the empire.23
Discussions on science and European imperialism inevitably open up the
very question of the diffusion and institutionalization of Western science
across the world. Most recently, Warwick Anderson argued, in response to
 Introduction 5
Basalla, it had become necessary to situate colonial science precisely in its
local, political, economic, and cultural settings, to render it multi-centred.24
Earlier, Palladino and Worboys claimed, ‘Western methods and knowledge
were not accepted passively, but were adapted and selectively absorbed in
relation to existing traditions of natural knowledge and religion and other
factors’.25 Increasingly, we were exposed to concepts like contact zones of
mobile knowledge practices, often using anthropological and post-colonial
approaches. The post-colonial agenda in science, technology, and society
studies (STS) has attempted to describe how formal knowledge and practice
travel, and what happens to them at their arrival points, how they artic-
ulate across and within cultures. As Steven Shapin observes, ‘we need to
understand not only how knowledge is made in specific places but also how
transactions occur between places’.26
As far as theoretical terms are concerned, it is the idea of networks, fol-
lowing the influential work of Bruno Latour, which has had tremendous
impact in understanding the making of modern science. Latour probably
first emphasized to look to the colonies, not the ‘home country’ to under-
stand ‘…transformation of a society by a “science”’.27 On the other hand, the
popular term ‘contact zones’ comes from Mary Louise Pratt: ‘By using the
term “contact”, I am to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimen-
sions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist
accounts of conquest and domination’.28 Sandra Harding issued a plea to
‘locate modern sciences on the more accurate historical and geographical
maps produced by the postcolonial accounts’.29 From a feminist perspec-
tive, she envisioned a multicultural science integrating the knowledge and
practice of Third World peoples.30 The flow of knowledge and practice from
Europe, and into it, according to Warwick Anderson, began to seem more
turbulent, no longer laminar; matters of local terrain and inescapable fric-
tion came to complex the entire picture. Problems of translation, mediation,
transformation, as well as indifference and resistance, seemed ever more
pressing.31 Anderson firmly believes that post-colonial analysis offers a ‘flex-
ible and contingent framework for understanding contact zones of all sorts,
for tracking unequal and messy translations and transactions that take place
between different cultures and social positions, including different labora-
tories and disciplines even within Western Europe and North America’.32
Interest in indigenous responses to Western science, however, precedes
current concerns with the nature of ‘colonial modernity’, as is evident, from
the wide-ranging literature on South Asia. Several historians dwell upon
India’s rational approach to Western science, both pre-colonial and colonial
times.33 Sometimes, the indigenous revivalist attempts sought to regenerate
India’s techno-scientific traditions; whereas, the secular modernizers reject-
ing the past, completely embraced western rationality and science.34 Most
Indian responses to western science existed somewhere between these two
extremes. A few of them, tried to accept western science, believing it as part
of a universal knowledge tradition, to which they had earlier contributed;
others attempted to search analogues of Western sciences in the ancient
6 Suvobrata Sarkar
Indian texts and culture.35 By emphasizing the local condition (context),
concepts like ‘colonial science’, ‘Indian responses’, etc., enhance compli-
cations to the idea of direct transplantation of western knowledge in the
colony. Gyan Prakash argues that western science was reinterpreted in and
for the colony by the Indian intellectuals. These science enthusiasts, in inter-
preting western scientific ideas into Indian languages, involved in a ‘rene-
gotiation of knowledge and power’, and, thus became the champions of an
‘Indian’ modernity. Prakash views this as a form of ‘hybridity’.36 For Pratik
Chakrabarti, the search for cultural legitimacy that characterized Indian
science and technology, between the 1850s and 1900s, was displaced by an
increasingly dominant discourse of scientific industrialism.37
David Arnold advocates that understanding the significance of ‘science
as modernity’ is the best available alternative to diffusion theory. Thus, a
need to construct a particularly Indian modernity has been seen as the driv-
ing force behind Indian elites’ participation in the debates on science and
technology. In the early twentieth century, techno-scientific ideas, closely
associated with the ideas of modernity, became central to the discourse of
Indian nationalism.38 In this context, Kumar’s interpretation of the ‘disunity
in the science and technology for the development discourse’ leading up to
independence is significant. He shows how Indian nationalist voices and
the British government each articulating their own versions of what a mod-
ern (independent) India should look like. Between the two World Wars, the
Indian National Congress had first adopted scientific planning as an ideal,
whereas the colonial government also drafted its own agenda to upgrade
the material life of the ordinary Indians, which according to Kumar, was a
credible option to jeopardize Gandhi’s call of ‘Quit India’.39
These studies provide a further reminder of the limitations of the dif-
fusionist conceptions of science. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina rightly
observe that ‘the standard tale of the assimilation of modern science as
a Western cultural import was inadequate and missed out the multifari-
ous nature of exchange between modern science and so-called traditional
knowledge forms’.40 Some scholars have emphasized the need to see beyond
fixed centres and peripheries. Rather, each locality has the capacity to
become central, to act as the point of a route of information.41 As an alter-
native to Eurocentric diffusion theory, Kapil Raj proposes a ‘circulatory’
model for the spread of western science. He seeks to illuminate the ‘co-pro-
duction of the local and the global’.42 As circulation can only be inferred
from the ‘intercultural encounter’, he provides fascinating examples of the
construction of scientific knowledge in the ‘contact zone’ – South Asia.43
Much of what we believe as western science was produced in the colonies,
rather than being exported to them. The expansion of colonial power and
the production of techno-scientific knowledge were closely related, and, in
the process, India served as the arena for the construction of a large-scale
scientific research system. For example, colonial expansion was crucial to
the development of botany and geology – where the collection and com-
parison of specimens were dominant. Similarly, it provided a spur to the
 Introduction 7
emergence of modern medicine and environmental thought.44 An important
point Zaheer Baber raises is the immanent connection between instruction
on science in India and the emergence of the colonial capitalist state.45 This
required that the colonial state be innovative in the founding of formal
technical institutions. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had
no formal institutions imparting technical education and engineers received
their training as apprentices; the engineering colleges established in colonial
India served as models for replication in Britain and the colonial encounter
contributed to the development of technical education in the metropole.46
Recently, Sujit Sivasundaram explored the technicalities of researching
and writing globally oriented histories of science. There should not be one
history, but history in all possible dimensions – multiple histories. To under-
stand colonial science, he argues, it is necessary to think beyond categories
of colonized and colonial and to identify traditions of knowledge from all
corners: ‘Take, for instance, Mughal traditions, which were themselves part
of a Persian world. If all of this is taken into account, the global history of
science becomes the history of the shifts and reinventions of a variety of
ways of doing science across the world. European imperialism becomes a
chapter in this story …’47 The global historians of science should address
the question of modernity as well. For Sivasundaram, to be modern in the
twentieth century meant using techno-scientific knowledge for develop-
ment. The journey towards modernity is not teleological or linear; a true
historian should contextualize it in the broader history of movement and
reappearance of traditions of knowledge. Thus, ‘networks’, ‘contact zones’,
‘people-in-between’, ‘mobility’, ‘circulation’, ‘practice theory’, among oth-
ers, have emerged as crucial categories to identify the emergence of modern
science. These recent works have continued to reveal how modern knowl-
edge was built by the mechanism and need of imperialism.
To reject the core–periphery deliberation altogether, Kumar argues,
would be like ‘throwing the baby with the bathwater’.48 Studies in HISTEM
may help us get a better understanding of colonial modernity. Scholars have
talked and written about how modernity reached India riding the colonial
wave for long. The evolution of ‘Indian modernity’ is different from Europe.
The traditional knowledge which they inherited played a significant role in
the formation of ‘Indian modernity’, along with the western knowledge,
after the colonial-watershed. Exploration of this complex yet dynamic rela-
tionship from multiple dimensions is one of the agendas of HISTEM.

Science and society

Science has been integral to modern Indian history. Until the end of the
eighteenth century, European travellers, traders, bureaucrats, army engi-
neers, and missionaries remained busy in building up the colonial project,
and they emerged as the major informants on what was happening. The
British colonial government established several scientific institutions and
surveys primarily to serve the economic needs of the colonial state and
8 Suvobrata Sarkar
exploit India’s natural resources through scientific research. Later, Indians
also became curious about what was happening around them. They were
no longer passive recipients, and, on several occasions, they emerged as
collaborators – they contributed to the knowledge-dissemination process.
Generation was not easy those days, as for generation, they always looked
to the metropole. However, generation in certain areas also took place in
the colonies, for example, in Canada, Australia, and India, in the zoologi-
cal and botanical sciences. In these branches of knowledge, the metropole
learnt from the colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, India’s share went
up – when educated Indians wanted to trace European scientific ideas and
principles within Indian culture as well as to adapt them for the material
development of their country. Thus, according to Pratik Chakrabarti, sci-
ence had two broad meanings in modern Indian history. Firstly, it sym-
bolized European Enlightenment, modernity, and westernization. Secondly,
embracing the western scientific ideas enthused Indians to identify scientific
and rational traditions within their past. The deep engagements with these
two, Chakrabarti argues, led to both assimilations of ‘modern science’ in
the Indian society and culture and its redefinition.49
The history of natural history from the ‘Age of Discovery’ has been insep-
arable from the history of imperialism. Two scholars have recently empha-
sized, ‘The networks of empire were not composed of a centre and radiating
spokes, as is often imagined; rather, they formed a complex of crisscross-
ing flows and routes spanning much of the world. Nevertheless, Britain
was flooded with new information and objects, and together they helped to
transform the metropole. Conversely, the possession of such knowledge and
data could be translated into power and authority’.50 India, with much left
unexplored, attracted broad scientific interest in the flora and fauna from
the early days of the English East India Company; the interest intensified
during the nineteenth century due to growing accessibility to the interi-
ors. The state scientists recognized the importance of biological surveys in
empire-building. As India became part of the British Empire and much of
the research on its flora and fauna and natural environment was under the
tutelage of the colonial state, most of the scientists involved in botanical and
zoological surveys, as classifies by John Mathew, were ‘translocators’.51 The
professionalization of natural history in British India had largely been the
creation of this group of European experts – administrators, doctors, mili-
tary officers, and missionaries. Yet Indians, apart from serving as seasoned
collectors, trackers, and draughtsmen, were absent from this enterprise.
However, Indians were increasingly entering the ranks of medical men,
there was no such related increase in their numbers in the branch of natural
history. An extremely interesting kind of evidence was provided by John
Mathew in his essay on Soorjo Coomar Goodeve Chuckerbutty, one of
the first Indians to be sent to England for a higher medical degree (1845).
Soorjo Coomar won the gold medal for comparative anatomy at University
College London and was trained by a former teacher of Charles Darwin,
Robert Grant. Despite such exposure and intelligence, Soorjo Coomar did
 Introduction 9
not continue his studies in natural history to any great extent, and upon his
return to India, he became professor of ‘Materia Medica’ at the Calcutta
Medical College. In the early nineteenth century, the newly emerged middle
class looked to western knowledge with great admiration. They tried to
articulate the new knowledge in terms of Indian traditions or requirements.
These were torn people in the sense, they wanted to have the best of both
worlds – Soorjo Coomar was not an exception.
The desire to understand the new knowledge and machines that the col-
onizers had brought, and to appropriate them, was there. The vernacular
press reflected the ripples in the Indian minds, and a handful of intellec-
tuals responded by publishing scientific books and journals, while some
took to founding associations and institutions of scientific nature. The most
important characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century-Indian thinking was an
enormous emphasis on cultural synthesis. The idea of a cultural synthesis,
Kumar argues, gave them the best of both worlds – first, it empowered them
to absorb the cultural shock, and, second, promised a possible opportunity
to overcome the obstacles imposed by the colonial state.52 The local inter-
locutors adopted several strategies – imitation, translation, appreciation,
and then assimilation, even sometimes boycott – but without much suc-
cess. Two things are striking in this interpretation, popularization of science
through translations, and constant reference of ancient tradition to vali-
date the existence of a spiritual, although rational, scientific past. The new
paradigms in science were quickly accepted and numerous popular articles
traced the seeds of modern advancements in ancient texts. Akshay Kumar
Dutt (1820–1886), a contemporary crusader, worked for ‘Indianizing west-
ern science’. But the man, who gave a new meaning to science populariza-
tion, taking the discourse to a new professional height, was none other than
Ramendra Sundar Trivedi (1864–1919).
Ramendra Sundar simplified some of the most complicated physical and
astronomical phenomena, all in a highly readable and informative, popular
style in Bengali; and drew references from mythology, folklore, and popular
local traditions. Santanu Chacraverti deals with Ramendra Sundar Trive-
di’s personal intellectual inclinations and the specific philosophical trends
that influenced him. Trivedi’s academic training allowed him to compare
the western and Indian philosophical traditions. While analysing Ramendra
Sundar’s epistemological inquiry into the nature of scientific knowledge,
Chacraverti indicates to his patriotic attachment towards Indian tradition –
a combination of Brahmanical and Loka or popular traditions. He believed
in scientific pursuit for the sake of knowledge only. This has some con-
temporary relevance as well. The notions of science and its terminologies
entered so deep in the cultural lexicon of the country that no Indian erudite
could afford to ignore them.
The science enthusiasts and popularizers, mostly from Bengal, have
attracted considerable scholarly attention. However, there also existed sub-
stantial indigenous initiatives, without much intellectual limelight, in the
field of modern science in other parts of India too. Abhidha Dhumatkar
10 Suvobrata Sarkar
in her pioneering research on Balaji Prabhakar Modak (1847–1906), an
unsung public intellectual from western India, seeks to explore his ideas
and works as a prism to understand the reception of modern science and
subsequent cognitive movements in South Asia. Balaji Prabhakar tried to
create a scientific attitude in Maharashtra by spreading scientific knowl-
edge through his books in Marathi language, public lectures and demon-
strations, and annual science exhibitions in Kolahpur. He viewed science,
Dhumatkar argues, as a stimulus to the regeneration not only of the Indian
industry and agriculture but also of the Indian nation. He was one of the
first in western India to begin translation of important scientific works into
simple Marathi so that it could percolate deep in the society. Unfortunately,
Balaji Prabhakar left no loyal band of followers after him as his movement
was restricted to the intellectual domain – not social and political, which
according to Dhumatkar, explains his invisibility in the discussion of the
formation of a distinct Indian modernity.
Science communication as a pedagogical project was put forward by
James A. Secord. He wrote that the image of scientific ideas and techno-
logical projects as social processes rested on the inter-dependence of the
two variables: In order to appreciate the ‘social roots’ and ‘social impact’
of scientific knowledge, it was essential to acknowledge that a wider soci-
ety existed beyond the known community of experts. Their appreciation
and appropriation of scientific knowledge were as important as their gen-
eration.53 Later researches add several complexities in the process – ‘public
communication’ is shaped by the cooperation and conflict of several inter-
est groups involved in the process, including the public. Shiju Sam Var-
ughese has identified that research on public engagement with science and
technology (PEST) is in its ‘infancy’ as an academic field, although there is a
growing interest in recent years.54 He talks about a ‘scientific-citizen public’
and explores the significant social and historical processes that made possi-
ble its emergence with reference to Kerala.
Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Balaji Prabhakar Modak, along with other
science popularizers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, suc-
cessfully created for vernaculars a linguistic space that could accommodate
scientific, philosophical, and epistemological themes without much jargon.
It was their object to bring the joys of science to the learned audience. How-
ever, the medium of science communication, mostly vernacular periodicals,
monographs, and tracts was confined to the elite minority – the readership of
popular science writing could hardly be the ‘public’. In his deliberation, Shiju
Sam Varughese deals with a new form of public engagement with science
that emerged in the post-independence Kerala and the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya
Parishad (KSSP) was the prominent medium in creating a ‘scientific-citizen
public’. The KSSP and similar organizations involved in the People’s Science
Movements (PSMs), in the early decades of independent India, provided the
impetus to a new cultural trend: promotion of a serious engagement with
science beyond scientism. These organizations aimed at the democratization
of scientific decision-making beyond a mere popularization of science.
 Introduction 11
Technology and culture
As a discipline, the history of technology was institutionalized with the for-
mation of the Society for the History of Technology and the creation of the
journal Technology & Culture in 1958.55 According to Melvin Kranzberg,
all history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.56
The history of technology is an effort to recount the history of all those
things, those artefacts that we have produced over the years. The social
history of technology goes one step further, integrating the history of tech-
nology with the rest of human history. Works on the social construction of
technology virtually revolutionized the field of history of technology.57 A
social history of technology assumes a mutual relationship between society
and technology; it also assumes that changes in one can, and have, induced
changes in the other.58
Until recently, much academic endeavour has tended to view technology
from an imperial, post-imperial, and global-capitalist perspective on indig-
enous societies. Recent discussion on technology in nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century Asian or African countries have begun to move away from
earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and instrumentality
of the empire’s ‘tools’ of conquest and exploitation.59 Enquiry has in part
shifted away from a diffusionist preoccupation with a system of one-way
‘technology transfer’ that privileged Euro-American innovation over local
agency, and form seeing technology in terms of European representations
of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other.60 A lan-
guage of ‘transfers’, ‘diffusions’, and global ‘commodities’ tells us remark-
ably little, as recent studies argue, about the origin and growth of various
modern technologies in the non-Western world.
David Arnold and Erich Dewald have argued that technology’s social
fashioning is a difficult concept to employ in an Asian colonial context
than in relation to autonomous European and North American industrial
societies. These were not designed or manufactured locally but in the West.
The social construction of these technologies in a colonial or semi-co-
lonial setting perhaps takes in a different form. How various technolo-
gies were locally accepted or rejected were depended on significant local
emendation and reinvention to match the local cultural norms and social
usages.61 Another interesting dimension in this archive is that there has
been a growing interest in small-scale ‘everyday technologies’, such as the
sewing machine, wristwatch, radio, typewriter, and bicycle. According to
David Arnold, colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or reluctant to
control these small-scale technologies and they passed with relative ease
into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspi-
rations of colonized and post-colonial populations.62 These small-scale
‘everyday technologies’, according to this new trend of research, can be
found in the diaries, novels, journals, pamphlets written mostly in Indian
languages – in the self-representation of the people – rather than in the
official archives.
12 Suvobrata Sarkar
However, the emphasis on ‘everyday technology’ does not mean that
large-scale technologies are not researched or written about, albeit no longer
in a ‘celebratory’ way.63 Recently, Smritikumar Sarkar demonstrated that it
is possible to write a history of technology in modern India without differ-
entiating the ‘big’ and ‘small’ technologies, where the voices of the British
Raj can be analysed together with the ordinary Indians.64 In this burgeoning
field of historical research, Sunila S. Kale identifies another lacuna: ‘Yet in
much of this scholarship, what is arguably the twentieth century’s most vital
technology—electric current—is largely absent’.65 The subject of electrifica-
tion in the ‘Global North’ has fascinated historians and social scientists for
long, but the history of power generation and supply industry and subse-
quent electrification in the ‘Global South’ is a less-frequented area of study.
Y. Srinivasa Rao emphasizes the initial urban-centric character of electric-
ity in Madras. With the expansion of electricity, the boundaries of the urban
area also expanded; the urban growth, in turn, created greater demand for
electric power. Madras city, as colonial administrative and power centre,
slowly began to acquire all the electric utilities (tramcars, lights, fans, elec-
tric lift, etc.), and began to blur the difference between the metropolitan and
periphery. The electricity generation and distribution system, and various
other technological systems powered by electricity came to India with colo-
nial patronage. Initially, electricity faced oppositions in Madras, like several
other western technologies, but gradually the relationship stabilized. ‘…
lack of interest from the natives and lack of interest from the government
had created some sort of regional inequality in electricity within the pres-
idency’. This article dwells on how electricity as a motive power in urban
Madras transformed from ‘luxury’ to ‘necessity’.
The question of technology systems or technology projects cannot be ade-
quately addressed unless engineering education is taken care of. Suvobrata
Sarkar makes a plea for a serious engagement with ‘academic engineering’
by discussing how, in a colonial setup, the status of engineering searching for
recognition in India, citing examples from the history of Bengal Engineering
College, Sibpur. One might wonder why a college of engineering was opened
at Roorkee (1847), and subsequently at Calcutta (1856), at a time when
Britain itself did not provide academic training to engineers except for mil-
itary purposes. The Bengal Engineering College produced several efficient
engineers who excelled in their profession later. Several of them accepted
government, semi-government, or private employment. But the combination
of engineering and entrepreneurship was extremely rare in those days. The
college produced a large cadre of civil engineers, but in the fields of mechan-
ical and electrical sciences, its performance was meagre. Why this was so?
Unlike the predominant historiography which emphasizes ‘centre–periphery’
relationship, the influence of the Public Works Department, military, and so
on, Sarkar elucidates several positive points. Based on the archival sources,
college materials, and other contemporary sources, the essay explores the
struggle of the college to transcend the barrier imposed by colonialism, and
appropriation of modern technical knowledge by the Indian elites.
 Introduction 13
Kapil Subramanian traces the story of how interwar India became a
global pioneer in the use of tube-wells for irrigation and the crucial role
these tube-wells played in the Green Revolution later that some have
called it a ‘tube-well revolution’. The Geological Survey of India played
a significant role in providing information on groundwater for the pur-
poses of irrigation, municipal and military. Knowledge about groundwater
was, Subramanian opines, a ‘heavily contested concern’ in mid-twentieth-­
century India. Here comes another twist in the story! The transmission of
techno-scientific knowledge between Europe and Asia has been the sub-
ject of several historical studies during the past decades. These studies
explore the long nineteenth- and early twentieth century. However, by the
mid-twentieth century, the rise of the USA as the ‘Superpower’, added mul-
tiplicity in the whole story. Subramanian explores the shift from British to
American expertise in the development of water-divining science vis-à-vis
role of the Geological Survey of India. He also traces Indian participation,
initially as water-diviners, and, later as collaborators in the generation of
engineering geology and groundwater knowledge in the late years of the
Raj to the post-colonial India.
India by 1940 was among the eight most industrial countries in the
world; it also had one of the largest scientific communities to be found
anywhere outside Europe and North America. The early twentieth century
saw far-reaching developments in technology. Among the most momentous
was the advent of electric power. Like hydro-electricity, the rapid rise of the
internal combustion engine, according to David Arnold, had several ‘spin-
off’ effects for Indian science as well as industry. One was the fresh stimulus
given to geology by the search for the country’s own oil resources; another
was the growth of transport and communications.66 Oil’s multiple uses
made it a very profitable industry. The widespread use of petroleum was
a calculative move, encouraged by the private industry as well as the state,
once it entered in the households, it was not simply a ‘colonial instrument’.
Ever since the 1980s, there has been great disappointment among renew-
able energy supporters that the shift from fossil-fuel dependence has been
painfully slow.67 Timothy Mitchell observes, ‘Fossil fuels helped create both
the possibility of modern democracy and its limits’.68 A search for deeper
understanding of the historical development of reliance on petroleum in
India, and, society’s present-day oil addiction, underline Sarandha Jain’s
contribution, ‘From Battlefields to Homes’. The transformation of oil, from
an agent of illuminant to lubricant, to fuel, contributed it an entirely ‘new
identity and meaning’. Jain rightly claims oil’s chemical properties have
the capacity to generate multiple substances, created versatile political and
social possibilities. The two world wars demonstrated the contradiction of
oil conservation and the growth of the oil industry inter alia national secu-
rity. With independence, India found, ‘Building a nation was about making
a future with oil’. With the passage of time, being ‘import-dependent’ oil
country, her dilemma increased endlessly: The ‘oil shock’ (the 1973 Arab–
Israeli War) reveals oil was now a ‘big enough issue’, which was directly
14 Suvobrata Sarkar
related to the political stability of the country. Citing examples from the
National Archives of India extensively, Sarandha Jain concludes,

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

Remains of temples, roads, bridges and reservoirs testify to the engineer-

ing skill of the Hindus in pre-British times. But, though some Sanskrit
books on engineering subjects have come down to us, they had long
before the establishment of British rule ceased to be taught in schools.
 Introduction 21
He also argued,

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

In an era of (pseudo?) revivalism, Deepak Kumar emphasizes, HISTEM

acquires special significance and makes insistence on scientific temper and
definitive sources even more important. HISTEM research studies may pro-
vide a better understanding of the historical processes and forces. Quite
exciting possibilities!103

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.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 "Näin se nyt kävi."

Eikä mitään muuta. Ja vieläkään hän ei ymmärtänyt mitä se

merkitsi.

Mitä siinä sen pitempiä sitten onkaan. Eräänä päivänä hän menee
isänsä kanssa Linnaan.

"Kun Linna ottaa meiltä ja me Linnasta", oli ukko päätellyt, "niin

siinä ei kummallakaan puolella ole mitään vaatimisia ja syrjäinen saa
pitää suunsa kiinni."

Ja vuotta myöhemmin oli maisteri vuorostaan saanut lyödä häntä

olalle:

"No, patruunan-alku, kun olet saanut, niin pidä hyvänä myöskin."

Kulhian patruuna pysähtyy keskelle tietä.

Piruako hän näitä miettii? Hänellä puolestaan ei ollut syytä

valittamiseen. Ketä muuta hän olisi rakastanut kuin Linnan Sofiaa.
Eikä heillä koskaan ollut sananharkkaakaan tai pienintäkään
erimielisyyttä ollut.

Mutta kai se tuli siitä, että Niemen rouva aina oli niin kuihtuneen ja
väsyneen näköinen. Tuli kyllä ja jutteli hyvinkin hauskasti ja kyseli
kuulumisia, mutta kasvoista näkyi, että ajatukset olivat jossain
maallisen yläpuolella.

Ja kuitenkaan ei kukaan Niemestä tiennyt mitään, ei hyvää eikä

pahaa. Siellä elettiin kuin haudassa, oltiin kohteliaita, milloin vieraita
tuli, harvoin sydämellisiä, kun itse käytiin vieraisilla. Mutta jotakin
siinä täytyi olla.
 *****

Kas, siinä se nyt oli!

Auto tulee takaapäin, on sivuuttamaisillaan Kulhian patruunan,

mutta pysähtyykin kohdalle.

"Kas sinäpä se olet", sanoo Niemen maisteri. "Nouse vaunuun,

niin vien sinut ohikulkiessani porraspäähän."

"Tiedä, onko vaaratonta tuollaiseen nousta."

Kulhian patruuna nousee kuitenkin maisterin viereen ja maisterista

huomaa selvästi, että hän tulee suoraan kaupungista.

"Sinulla on se tytär… Esterihän hänen nimensä oli?" kysyy

Niemen maisteri.

"Niin. Mitä sitten?"

"Ajattelin tässä vain itsekseni… Olen joskus häntä tarkastellut,

näyttää niin kovin hentoveriseltä ja poissaolevalta. Kuule, ethän pidä
pahana jos enemmän elämää nähneenä ja jonkunverran
lukeneempana miehenä sanon sinulle erään asian."

"Mitäpäs minä, sano vaan."

"Niin, en tahdo antaa sinulle neuvoja. Mutta kun hänen aikansa

tulee — ymmärräthän? — niin älä sekaannu hänen asioihinsa, vaan
anna hänen tehdä kuinka itse tahtoo. Se on onnellisinta. Katsoppas,
Kulhian patruuna, tämä mainen vaelluksemme vaatii ollakseen edes
suhteellisen onnellista hiukan muutakin kuin rahaa."
 Auto tekee kauniin kaaren Kulhian porraspäässä ja kiitää sitten
taas puistokujaa pitkin maantielle patruunan ehtimättä edes pyytää
maisteria pistäytymään sisällä tai kiittää kyydistä.

Siinä hän seisoo kuin viskattuna omassa porraspäässään ja oman

ällistyksensä varassa. Hän miettii, mutta mihinkään johtopäätökseen
hän ei pääse. Viimein hän kuitenkin luulee keksineensä jonkun
salaisuuden ja hänen olonsa tuntuu tukalalta, kun hän nousee
portaita ylös.

Kulhian patruuna auttaa ihmistä

Kulhian patruuna kuljeskelee rouvansa ja tyttärensä kanssa

kaupungin pääkatua ja silmäilee varrelle sattuvia taloja.

"Neljäkymmentäyhdeksänhän se oli", sanoo hän vaimolleen. "Eikö

se niin ollut?"

"Niin, niin kai se oli", vastaa rouva hajamielisesti. Sitten hän

muistaa jotakin ja jatkaa melkein vihaisesti:

"Sinä nyt kanssa olet… Käyt niinkin usein kaupungissa etkä tiedä
oman serkkusi taloa."

"Katsos kun on oltu niin vähän tekemisissä", myöntää Kulhian

patruuna hiljaisesti, "niin, ei oikeastaan missään tekemisissä
ennenkuin nyt vasta. Kas, kun sentään muisti minutkin."

Syyskuun auringossa on vielä lämpöä, mutta syksyn tuntu

ikäänkuin väreilee ilmassa, ja puiden lehdet kellastuvat hitaasti,
mutta varmasti. Ah, miten se syksy aina tuleekin odottamatta,
varkain ja yllättäen. Vaikka, sen puolesta, pitäisihän se tietää.
Kulhiassa on leikattu ja leikataan parhaillaan eloa.

Torin kulmassa patruuna tapansa mukaan hetkeksi seisahtuu. Hän

on tuon aamupäiväisen väen vilskeen, metelin ja liikkeen nähnyt
vähintään sata kertaa aikaisemminkin, mutta aina se on hänestä
uutta ja mielenkiintoista. Siinä tulee torin yli parvittain koululaisia,
joilla vielä loman jälkeen on väriä naamassaan. Niihin se tuo tytärkin,
Esteri, kuului vielä joku vuosi sitten, mutta lieneekö hänellä
milloinkaan ollut tuollainen kiire ja noin rusoittavat posket. Olisi sekin
saanut lukea eteenpäin aina vaan niinkuin Kelhon tytärkin ja sitten
hankkia itselleen nimikortteja ja painattaa niihin nimen alle, että
"fil.maist." ja lähettää niitä sitten ihmisille. Kun Kelhon isäntä tai
emäntä joskus saattoivat tytärtä asemalle, niin näkipä sen jo heidän
nenänsäkin päästä, että siinä se nyt istua touhottaa vieressä, se
fil.maist. "Kyllä se on Jumalan onni ja siunaus, että on varaa antaa
lapsilleen oppia ja sivistystä", saarnaavat jokaiselle, joka viitsii
kuunnella. "Se on kalleinta, mitä voi antaa." — No niin, saahan sitä,
kun on sitten antamista muutakin kuin oppia ja sivistystä.

Kulhian patruuna heittää äkäisesti sammuneen sikarinpätkän

maahan ja sytyttää uuden. Näkyypä joku tuttukin naama joukossa.
Tuolla on Linnan vihannes- ja juurikaskuorma. Niillä on hallissakin
joku kaupantapainen. Pitäisi oikeastaan mennä kysymään,
kannattaako se. Ja tuossahan tulee Saarenpään taloustirehtööri, —
aivan päissään tietenkin. Mistä se nyt aamupäivällä on itsensä noin
täyteen saanut. Paras, kun laittaa tästä itsensä tiehensä, saa taas
muuten poiketa lähimpään kahvilaan kraapustamaan nimensä
vekseliin.
 "Joo", päättelee Kulhian patruuna ja kääntyy vaimonsa ja
tyttärensä puoleen. "Menkäähän te nyt asioillenne, minä tässä vähän
menen torin yli pankkiin asioimaan. Tavataan sitten jossakin,
vaikkapa tuossa ravintolassa."

*****

Kulhian patruuna, kuten sanottu, käy usein kaupungissa, mutta

koskaan hän ei lakkaa katselemasta eikä ihmettelemästä. Tämäkin
ihmispaljous, — mihin sillä oikein on kiire, millä se elää ja mitä se
toimittaa. Ja palkkojensa pienuutta narisevat kaikki, poikkeuksetta.
Jos ne nyt veisi maalle ja jokaiselle osoittaisi tarpeellisen kokoisen
palstan, niin tietenkään ne eivät eläisi sielläkään, koskeivät ole
syntyneet maanviljelijöiksi.

Annappahan tuo Antti-serkkukin, tai oikeastaanhan se on vain

vähäserkku äidin puolelta. Mies on ison talon ainoa poika ja
tuomariksi lukenut. Onpa lisäksi hyvän piirin vallesmannikin, mutta
eikös, eikös vain pidäkin heittää vallesmannin virka pois, myydä
juhlallinen talo, ja muuttaa kaupungin virkamieheksi ja ostaa kivitalo.
Ja joutua vaikeuksiin. Siinä on nyt sitten, Kelhon äijä, sinun
kouluviisautesi. Vaikka kyllä sitä meidänkin tyttären pää olisi kestänyt
saman kuin sinunkin tyttösi, jos vain olisi tahtonut. Yhtä paljon ja
enemmänkin eikä olisi kukkaron pohja alkanut paistaa eikä olisi
tarvinnut virkaa ottaa. Se, kunhan olisi vain muuten tiennyt paljon
asioita ja kertonut vanhemmilleenkin. Vaan eipä se, Esteri.

Niin, se Antti. Eikö se silloin kun oltiin poikasia, sanonut, että

hänellä, Kulhian patruunalla, on pää täynnä sahajauhoja ja
sammalia. Että hän suoraan puhuen on vähän yksinkertainen ja
tyhmä. Ja vielä myöhemminkin sitä usein toistanut. Mutta niilläpä
sahajauhoilla sitä on tultu toimeen, vaikkei olekaan tehty afäärejä
eikä nautittu opetusta viisaudessa.

Niinpähän tämä Antti sitten jonakin päivänä viime viikolla ilmestyy

Kulhiaan. Eivät ole miehen asiat oikein, sen hän, Kulhian patruuna,
näkee jo heti naamastakin. Ja käy heti suoralta kädeltä asioihin
käsiksi. Kulhian patruunan pitäisi ostaa toinen puoli hänen
kivimuuristaan.

"Miksi?" oli hän, patruuna, kysynyt.

"Se olisi hyvä sijoitus."

"Mitäpäs sinä minun sijoituksistani. Itse sijoitan sen pienen, mitä

on sijoittamistakin."

"Mutta sinä et ole koskaan osannut oikein valvoa omia etujasi."

Kulhian patruunan oli täytynyt naurahtaa.

"En minä tiedä kuinka heitä olen valvonut", oli hän vastannut.
"Mutta kyllä minä hyvin olen elänyt."

"Niin, mutta olisit voinut hankkia suuret voitotkin."

"Samapa. En minä niitä tarvitse. Niitä tavoitellessa voivat mennä

entisetkin."

Sitten hänen oli täytynyt ruveta oikein vakavaksi.

"Kuule nyt, Antti", oli hän sanonut, "heitä pois tuo. Tiedäthän, että
kaupassa täytyy toisen voittaa ja toisen hävitä. Miksi sinä tulet
minulle kauppaamaan talosi puolikasta? Tiedäthän sinä, etten sitä
tarvitse".
 "Tekisit hyvän sijoituksen."

"Saattaisihan olla niinkin. Mutta minä kun en tarvitse. Sano

suoraan, ovatko asiasi huonosti?"

Siihen se sitten oli jäänyt. Antti tarvitsi rahoja. Mutta hän vaati
puolesta taloa saman hinnan, minkä itse oli maksanut koko talosta.

"Rahan arvo on laskenut, mutta talojen arvo noussut", oli Antti

sanonut. "Sinä tiedät sen kyllä".

Kyllä sillä pojalla oli päässään vähän muutakin kuin sahajauhoja ja

sammalia. Kulhian patruuna oli luvannut miettiä asiaa. Viikon vain, ei
sen enempää.

"Käy nyt muulloinkin, paitsi milloin sinulla on taloja myytävänä", oli

hän sanonut.

Vaan hänestä näytti siltä kuin olisi Antin ilmeessä ollut jotakin
pyytävää ja säikähtynyttä, kun hän nousi kieseihin ajaakseen
asemalle.

*****

Kulhian patruuna on jo vanhemmalla puolen ikää ja käveleminen

on hänelle raskasta. Voisihan hän hyvin ottaa ajurinkin, mutta
tuoreessa syysilmassa liikkuu sentään kernaasti ja katselee
vastaantulevia.

Hän on nyt ottanut selvän siitä talosta ja tullut siihen

vakaumukseen, että kauppa kannattaa. Jos tätä menoa menee, niin
saattaa voittaakin. On ihmeellistä, miten Antti on saanut asiansa tälle
mallille ja miten se keksi kääntyä juuri hänen puoleensa. Luulisihan
sellaisella miehellä olevan tuttavia kaupunki täynnä. Vaan jospa sillä
on asioita muuallakin. Olkoon, eivät ne häntä liikuta. Talojuttu ainakin
on selvä. Kulhian patruuna istahtaa hetkiseksi puiston penkille. Kun
siihen kauppaan nyt ryhtyy, niin tuhottomasti siihen menee rahaa.
Mutta tekeväthän ne muutkin kauppaa tänä aikana, tekevätpä vielä
velaksikin, niinkuin Saarenpään taloustirehtööri. Mitenhän senkin
miehen oikein siunatuksi lopuksi käy? Kovin liikkuu suurissa asioissa
eivätkä ole erinomaiset entuudestakaan. Hän on ainoita miehiä, joille
Kulhian patruunan on täytynyt sanottaa, ettei ole kotona, vaikka
hyvinkin on ollut ja valehdella, ettei ole rahaa, vaikka on ollut. On niin
kovin vaikea kieltää ihmisiltä.

Patruuna lähtee taas liikkeelle. Vai tässä se nyt on, se

neljäkymmentäyhdeksän! Onhan hän toki sen ennenkin huomannut,
vaikkei ole tullut aavistaneeksi, että tulisi sen kanssa mihinkään
lähempiin tekemisiin. Ja Kulhian patruuna menee kadun toiselle
puolelle ja toteaa, että onhan se talon näköinen ja kerroksiakin on
kolme, mutta paljon, hm, se maksaakin.

Sitten Kulhian patruuna menee sisäänkäytävään ja huomaa siellä

kipsiin valettuja äijänpäitä katonrajassa olevassa syvennyksessä.
Mitähän nekin siellä oikein pyhittävät? Niinkuin ei tässä osattaisi
kulkea ilmankin. On hänelläkin kotona Lönnrot ja Snellman ja
Esterillä on pronssinen Topelius, ainakin se on pronssinvärinen, ja
puistossa sitäpaitsi valkoinen, marmorinen poika, jolla on siivet
selässä. Mikähän sekin oikein lienee? Liian virnaileva ja maallisen
näköinen se on enkeliksikin, ja nuoletkin sillä on kädessä. Kun niiden
pitääkin aina veistää ne sellaiset alastomina kaahottamaan,
panematta riepuakaan ylle. Vaikka korealtahan se sen puolesta
näyttää vihreyttä vastaan. Talveksi tytär sen aina korjaa pois.
Mitenkähän on, taitavat nuo äijänpäätkin maksaa koko paljon ja
korottaa talon hintaa!

Tästä Kulhian patruuna taas muistaa varsinaisen asiansa ja

kiipeää portaita ylöspäin. Kuinka se Anttikin nyt sille mallille… jaha,
tässä se onkin. Hän painaa nappia.

*****

Puolihämärä, hiukan tuoksuava etehinen, josta ovi saliin on auki.

"Onkohan tuomari kotosalla?"

"Kyllä se on. Odottakaa!"

Mikähän tolsisko sekin oli piiaksi. Jättää siihen vain seisomaan

kuin… Eikö se osaa eroittaa ihmistä kulkijasta.

Mutta pianpa siinä on Anttikin ja Kulhian patruunasta näyttää, kuin

ei säikähtynyt, kysyvä ilme hänen kasvoiltaan vieläkään olisi
hävinnyt. Punastele siinä nyt vain, piika, ja auttele vanhanaikaista
palttoota yltä.

"Kas, sinäkö se olitkin. Oli oikein hyvä, että tulit. Tervetuloa ja käy
sisään, käy sisään!"

Eipä se enään olekaan se entinen itsevarma Antti, jolla on päässä

vähän muutakin kuin sahajauhoja ja sammalia. Tämä on
hermostunut ja kalpeaksi käynyt, ja sen touhukkaisuudessa on
jotakin alistuvaa ja mielistelevää, joka Kulhian patruunaa ellottaa ja
tekee hänetkin miltei araksi. Ja henkikin tulee väkeville kirkkaana
aamupäivänä niinkuin Saarenpään tirehtöörillä. Eivät taida asiat olla
erinomaisesti!
 "Istahdapas tuohon sohvaan ja ole iloisen näköinen. Tässä on
sitten vaimoni, — niin, tehän tunnette jo entuudestaan toisenne, — ja
vanhin poikani, toisen vuoden ylioppilas, ja tyttäreni… noin monta
niitä on, katsopas, — kuusi."

Antin rouvalla on kova ja käskevä katse, mutta Kulhian

patruunasta näyttää, kuin kaiken takaa kuultaisi suru. Hän tervehtii
rouvaa ja koko lapsilaumaa ja tuntee itsensä vähän kömpelöksi ja
saamattomaksi eikä tiedä, mitä oikein sanoisi.

"Onpa niitä sinulle siunautunut. Minulla ei ole kuin yksi… se voi

olla vanhimman poikasi ikäinen."

"Onhan niitä. Ja niiden kouluutuksen takia minä etupäässä

muutinkin kaupunkiin. Mutta taisi se tilanmyynti lopultakin olla hiukan
hätiköity juttu".

"En osaa sanoa. Mutta en minä ainakaan osaisi mennä

myymään."

"Niin, no. Istuhan nyt ja puhellaan asioista. Ehkäpä tässä jotakin

saadaankin, kun jaksetaan rauhassa odottaa."

Kulhian patruuna katselee kaikkea sitä komeutta, mikä Anttia

ympäröi, nahan ja plyyshin paljoutta, kirjoja, seinätauluja ja mattoja
ja hän ajattelee, että mikähän senkin miehen niin panee
hätäytymään ja saa liikkeelle. Onko se vain pelkkä väärä laskelma,
vai olisiko siinä muuta alla? Onhan hän kuullut, että Antti on
korttimies ja vielä viinaan menevä, olisikohan sattunut joku
harhapisto. — Eikä hänellä ole mitään syytä olla Antille kiitollinen:
ensinnäkin se puhe niistä sahajauhoista ja sammalista ja toiseksi se
ajoi torpparien väärää asiaa häntä pikkuserkkuansa, Kulhian
patruunaa vastaan. Hävinnythän se sen kyllä oli, mutta ei ollut
malttanut olla oikeuden eteishuoneessa nauraa räkättämättä:

"Häviöhän siinä tuli, tiesin sen jo edeltäpäin, mutta taisipa serkku-

poika olla hermostunut."

Johon Kulhian patruuna oli tiuskaissut:

"Piruakos sitten ajat sellaista asiaa ja kynit köyhiltä torppareilta

heidän ainoat rahansa. Taisivat sinulle vielä velkaantuakin."

Tämä kaikki on hiukan kaivellut Kulhian patruunaa ja hän oli

ajatellut Anttia vähän koukutakin, että "kuinkas nyt löysit Kulhian".
Mutta rouvan ja lasten näkeminen on hänet häkellyttänyt. Voi olla
vaara hyvinkin suuri ja syyttömiähän nuo ovat, rouva ja alaikäiset
lapset. Sitten lisäksi: mitä se turha koukkuileminen hyödyttää, on
siinä Antilla muutenkin tekemistä.

"Se on sillä tavalla", selittää Antti-serkku, "että viikon kuluttua

tarvitsen seitsemänkymmentäviisi, muuten on piru irti".

Kulhian patruuna kohauttaa kulmakarvojansa: miten niin irti? Hän

aikoo sitä kysäistä, mutta peruuttaa samalla päätöksensä. Mitä
häneen toisen asiat koskevat, parempikin, kun ei tiedä.

"Niin että jos sinä kauppaan suostut", jatkaa sukulainen, "riittää

kun maksat heti kolmanneksen. Loput sitten sopimuksen mukaan."

Eipä tämä niin vaarallista näy olevankaan. Mutta Kulhian patruuna

on otattanut asioista selvän ja tietää, että kauppa kannattaa.

"Jos maksan, niin kerralla maksan koko homman", sanoo hän

yksitoikkoisesti.
 Nyt Antti rehahtaa nauruun.

"Sinäpä olet", nauroi hän, "sinunhan pitäisi sitten saada

jonkunlainen alennus".

Kulhian patruuna suutahtaa, nyt se jo taas sai rämisevän

itsevarmuutensa. Hän aikoo sanoa, että sillä ehdolla maksan, ettet
enää puhukaan sahajauhoista ja herkeät ajamasta vääriä asioita.
Mutta mitäpä hän! Ja sanookin vain:

"En minä alennuksia tarvitse. En minä siinä kaupassa aio hävitä."

Toisen varmuus tyrmistyttää sukulaismiestä ja hän tulee aivan

totiseksi.

"Niinhän se on, että kauppa on kauppa", myöntää hän hiljaisesti.

"Mutta kyllä sinä autoit minut pahasta pulasta."

*****

Vasta paikallisjunassa Kulhian patruuna tapaa vaimonsa ja

tyttärensä. Hän on kävelemisestä ja kauppakirjain teosta väsynyt ja
hän huohottaa astuessaan vaunuosastoonsa.

"Nyt on sitten niin, Esteri", sanoo hän tyttärelleen, "että kun äidistä
ja minusta aika jättää, on sinulla talo kaupungissa ja maalla."

Juna nytkähtää ja lähtee liikkeelle.

"Mitä, mitä sinä oikein tarkoitat?" kysyy hänen rouvansa. "Me

istumme ja vahtaamme sinua tuntikausia ja sinä vain juokset
talokauppoja tekemässä."

"Antilta ostin puolet hänen kivimuuristaan."

 "Herrajess sentään! Ethän sinä niitä asioita ymmärrä."

Mutta Kulhian patruuna ei huoli vastata. Hän on väsynyt ja hän

nojaa päänsä sohvan kulmaan. Silmäluomet painuvat itsestään
umpeen ja pian hän alkaa kuorsata. Siinäpä hän sitten, väliin
havahtuen, vuoroin torkkuu, vuoroin nukkuu tämän vajaan tunnin
matkan, nukkuu niinkuin mies, jolla on omatunto suurin piirtein
reilassa.

Tehdas

"Neuvos käski sanoa terveisiä ja pyytää, että jos patruunan ja

patrunessan sopisi, niin sitten illalla seitsemän aikana… Siellä on nyt
nuori herrakin kotosalla…"

Kulhian patruuna pyyhkäisee kämmenellään paksuja, harmahtavia

viiksiänsä, ja raskaat silmäluomet rävähtävät. On aivan kuin ei hän
Kautisten palvelijaa huomaisikaan, vaan koko ajan ajattelisi muita
asioita. Ja kuitenkin hän on kuullut jok'ainoan sanan, jopa niitä
tarkasti punninnut ja harkinnutkin.

Mutta hänellä on niin paljon muuta mietittävää. Tuollakin nyt,

jossakin kamarissa, kuuluu istuvan pitäjän emäntiä, ja kappalaisen
rouva on joukossa. Ja hänelle niillä kuuluu olevan asioita. Eiköhän
vaan taas liene jotakin siitä olutpruukista, ainaisesta vaivasta. No
niin, pääsee siitä. Elleivät osaa kohtuudella juoda, olkoot ilman.

"Niin että millaisen vastauksen minä saan viedä neuvokselle?"

 Jaha — vastauksen, aivan oikein. Aivan yhtäkkiä patruunan
mieleen juolahtaa, ettei ole pitkä aika, ei monta vuosikymmentä, siitä
kuin Kulhian isännät kunnioittavasti ja paljastetuin päin puhuttelivat
Kautisten herroja. Ja samalla hän johtuu ajattelemaan, kuinka voi
olla mahdollista, että neuvos talvikaudet ja melkein vuodet
ympäriinsä asustaa milloin kaupungissa, milloin ulkomailla, ja
inspehtuurit, ne hyväkkäät, sill'aikaa pruukaavat maata miten
parhaaksi näkevät. Eivät kai nekään vanhan senaattorivainajan
jättämät rahat iankaikkisesti mahtane riittää.

"Niin että millainen vastaus minulla on kunnia…"

"Kuinka siellä Kautisissa oikein jaksetaan?" keskeyttää Kulhian

patruuna.

"Kiitos kysymästä, herra patruuna, minun nähdäkseni oikein

hyvin."

"Jaha — jaha. Joo. Sanokaa nyt sitten neuvokselle, että kyllähän

me, kyllähän me, sano, koetamme tulla. Seitsemän aikanako se oli?"

"Seitsemän."

"Hyvä on. Tullaan."

Eikä Kulhian patruuna vähän ajan kuluttua muista Kautisten

neuvosta eikä kello seitsemää. Hänen on nyt järjestettävä ne ämmät
siellä jossakin kamarissa. Saavat jotakin ompeluseuroissaan
päähänsä ja sitten juoksevat tänne lähetystönsä kanssa. Ja sitten
istutaan kamarin loukossa ja juodaan kahvia. Ja ollaan
kristillismielisiä ja raittiita.

"Päivää vain, rouvat", tervehtii patruuna.

 Siinä on isojen talojen emäntiä, Joutsjärveä ja Puotinientä, on
siinä pari torpan muijaakin ja kaiken kruununa pastuurska.

"Hyvää päivää, patruuna", vastaa pastuurska.

Emännät ovat häkeltyneen näköisiä ja patrunessa silittelee

pukuaan.

"Tässä on Sivusen ja Portaan torppien emännät sieltä meidän

maalta", esittelee hän muijat.

"Vai niin, jaha, kylläpä tunnen, kun tarkemmin katselen. Kai teille
tuotiin ne uudet lattiavärkit?"

"Tuotiin. Kiitoksia vaan hyvin paljon, patruuna", vastaavat muijat

kerkeästi ja yhteen ääneen.

"No, niin pästä sitten."

Pöydällä on kahvivehkeet ja viinilasit, ja pastuurska miettii, kuinka

hän nyt alkaisi puhua patruunalle.

"Etkös sinä ota, isä?" kysyy patrunessa.

"Enpä tiedä, jospa nyt lasin viiniä."

"Me tulimme nyt taas niinkuin lähetystönä patruunan luo", aloittaa

pastuurska. "Siitä vanhasta asiasta."

"Jaa, ettäkö sulkea pruuki."

"Niin, kun siitä on niin paljon kirousta pitäjälle."

 Kulhian patruuna miettii. Tätä samaa laulua on hän kuunnellut jo
melkein kymmenen vuotta. Kaikissa asioissa pitäjäläiset voivat olla
erimielisiä, mutta yhdessä asiassa he pitävät yhtä: oluttehtaan
sulkemisessa. Ei suinkaan raittiuden vuoksi, vaan siksi, että
pelkäävät hänen voittavan.

"Jos niinä suljen", vastasi hän, "niin tuovat ne kuitenkin

kaupungista."

"Eihän se sitten tule patruunan omalletunnolle", väittää pastuurska

sanavalmiisti.

"Onhan se kyllä niinkin. Mutta minä kun en kauppaa tavaraani

kenellekään. Ja mestarille olen antanut sellaisen määräyksen, ettei
köyhille eikä juopoille saa myydä pulloakaan."

"Siinä patruuna on tehnyt oikein. Mutta saavat ne kiertotietä ja

muitten avulla."

Nyt patruunan täytyy hymyillä.

"Mutta kuinkas nyt, pastuurska", sanoo hän, "minä huomaan, että

te siinä ja te kaikki, luvalla sanoen, istutte viinilasit edessänne. Ja
lisäksi tyhjät lasit. Täytäpäs, äiti."

"Mutta sehän onkin aivan eri asia, patruuna. Lasi tai pari hyvässä
seurassa kiitollisuudella ja kaikella kohtuudella nautittuna. Vaan kun
ei osaa pitää rajaa ja köyhiltä menevät kaikki rahat, — kyllä patruuna
tietää, älkää väittäkökään vastaan."

"No niin, no. Olenhan minä kuullut."

 Marraskuinen päivä on jo mennyt sivu puolen ja huone on tumma
ja totinen. Silloin Kulhian tytär tulee huoneeseen hiljaisena ja
vaaleana, tulee ja istuutuu isänsä taakse.

"Joko se nyt taas on siitä pruukista?" kysyy hän.

"Siitä, siitäpä aina."

"Ja siitä me sitten saamme joka vuosi niinkuin joululahjaksi."

Se on tämän Kulhian tyttären ääni niinkuin kellonsoittoa eivätkä

sanat ole kohdistetut oikeastaan kenellekään. Naiset istuvat hiljaa ja
vilkuilevat häntä vähän niinkuin ihaillen, mutta toiselta puolen
kysyenkin. Ilmestyy vain siihen ja lieneekö edes tervehtinyt
tullessaan. Ja lieneekö tuo edes oikein tervekään? Ei näy missään,
ei liiku kotiporttia ulommaksi, käyneekö edes kirkossa? Pastuurska
ei todellakaan muista nähneensä häntä muualla kuin Linnan
ristiäisissä, missä hän muiden mukana seisoi kummina
kruununvoudin kanssa. Merkillisen valkea ja väritön tyttö.

"Sulje vaan, isä", sanoo tytär. "Sillähän siitä pääsette."

Pastuurska tarttuu oitis asiaan ja emäntien silmät välähtävät.

"Kuulkaapa nyt, patruuna, mitä neitikin sanoo."

"Niin no", ratkaisee Kulhian patruuna hiljaisesti. "Mitäpäs minä sitä

käytän, jos siitä on haittaa ihmisille. Sanokaa nyt sitten terveisiä, että
ensi vuoden alusta saavat ihmiset tuottaa oluensa kaupungista, kun
eivät osanneet pitää rajaansa."

*****
 Tämän päätöksen teko ei lainkaan tuota Kulhian patruunalle edes
jälkimietteitä. Kun ihmiset koreasti pyytävät ja niin vähällä voi olla
heille avuksi, niin miksei sitä sitten olisi. Toinen asia olisi, jos se
tuottaisi taloudellisia vaikeuksia, rahanpuutetta ja sen sellaista, mutta
oli kai tuolla jo tarpeeksi voitettukin. Eikähän hän toisekseen välitä
noista saksalaisista ja tanskalaisista panimomestareistakaan. Joka
kuukausi vain pitäisi palkkaa lisätä, ja sittenkin tahtovat olla
tietäväisempiä kuin herra itse. Niinkuin tämä nykyinenkin, Olaussen,
— tulee muutamana päivänä ja sanoo, että hänellä pitäisi tehtaan
puolesta olla vaunut. Vaunut! Perhana, — ei hänkään, Kulhian
patruuna, ollut edes koskaan ajatellut vaunuja.

Kulkiessaan tallilta navetalle Kulhian patruuna lauhduttaa

mietteensä mitä vaunuihin tuli. Kun kesään päästään, niin eikö
pitäne hänenkin tosiaankin hankkia vaunut. Äiti on tahtonut tulla
huonokulkuiseksi ja hänellä itselläänkin käy tuo hengenahdistus ja
sydämentykytys… ovathan ne vaunut kaikin puolin mukavammat.
Mutta vain yhden hevosen, — tai pitäisikö olla kahden. Saattaa olla
liian ankaraa yhdelle hevoselle, eikä patruuna halua, että eläimiä
vaivataan.

Nyt ei Kulhian patruuna enää ollenkaan muista tehdastaan. Ei hän

tule ajatelleeksi, että hän olisi voinut koettaa myydä sen toiselle ja
pestä kätensä. Ei hän edes muista, että sitä monesti on pyydetty
häneltä ostaa. Hän on vain päättänyt sulkea sen. Ja sillä hyvä. On
mukavaa katsella, rupeaako juopuneita nyt sitten näkymään
vähemmän.

Yhtäkkiä hän sitten muistaa kutsun Kautisiin ja menee sisään.

*****
 "Niin, me kai menemme sitten, äiti", sanoo hän sisälle tultuaan.

"Eiköhän", myöntää patrunessa. "Tiedätkö, onko Linnan väki

kutsuttu."

"Ei minulle ainakaan mitään mainittu. Mutta eiköhän. Se nuori

herrakin kuuluu muuten olevan kotosalla."

"No sekin… Ja mitähän se oikein hommaa?"

"Mitäpä se meihin kuuluu", murahtaa patruuna väsyneesti, mutta

huutaa sitten toiseen huoneeseen:

"Esteri!"

Siellä on jo valo sytytetty ja tytär istuu käsityön ääressä.

"Niin", vastaa hän.

"Tulepas tänne", huudahtaa patrunessa tiukasti. "Meillä on sinulle

asiaa."

"Meitä on kutsuttu Kautisiin seitsemältä", selittää hän sitten. "Isä

tahtoo, että sinä lähdet mukaan."

"Niin", jatkaa Kulhian patruuna. "Olisi kai epäkohteliasta, ellet

tulisi. Siellä on nuori herrakin kotosalla."

Viipyy ennenkuin Kulhian tytär vastaa. Mutta sitten hän sanoo:

"Minä en välittäisi koko Kautisista, en sen herrasväestä enkä

heidän nuoresta herrastaan."

"Et! Mutta tokko ketään heistä edes kunnollisesti tunnetkaan!"

 "En, mutta minä näen joka päivä heidän päätynsä kamarini
ikkunaan. Se on harmahtava ja vihertävä ja ränstynyt. Ja aina kun
sen näen, tulee minun paha olla."

"Se on tyttö", mutisi Kulhian patruuna. "Mitä nyt sanomme

neuvokselle?"

"Sanokaa, että voin huonosti."

"Kuule, Esteri", keskeytti hänen äitinsä. "Ennen sinä et ole

narrannut."

"Sanokaa sitten suoraan, etten halunnut tulla."

"Yhä hullumpaa!"

Mutta Kulhian patruuna on arka tyttärensä suhteen, ja hän nousee

mennäkseen muuttamaan pukuansa. Pientä mutinaa hän kyllä pitää
itsekseen, mutta "kun et tule, niin pysy poissa".

Eikä hän myöskään välitä vaivata hevosta tälle viheliäisen lyhyelle

matkalle. Eikö juuri ole satanut puhdasta, kaunista lunta? Ja eikö
terveydekseen kävele niitä paria tai kolmea kilometriä, jotka erottavat
Kautisten tienhaaran Kulhian puistokujasta! Tulee muutenkin niin
vähän liikutuksi. Tulkoon renki sitten hakemaan, sanotaan nyt
kymmenen vaiheilla. Voidaanhan kävellä hiljaa, ei tee mitään vaikka
myöhästyykin muutaman minuutin, sitähän vallasväet pitävät
hienona ja "fiininä". Myöhästyvät ne muutkin, — jos nyt Kautisiin
tänä iltana muita ylimalkaan on käskettykään.

Kulhian patruuna ajattelee, että hän samalla kertaa voi katsella

vainioitaan, miten ne alkavat peittyä lumeen. Jonkunlaisella
nautinnolla hän muistelee, miten hänen peltonsa ulottuvat melkein