Culture of Science and The Making of Modern India

Contents: Preface. Introduction. HISTEM: Some Questions, Some Explanations. Part I: The Inheritance. 1. Perspectives on Scientific Knowledge in Ancient India. 2. Techno-Scientific Knowledge: A Study of Eighteenth-Century India. 3. Science, Religion, and Society: Gleanings from Our Colonial Past. Part II: An Era of Surveys. 4. Survey Explorations and The East India Company. 5. Scientific Surveys in British India, 1850–1900. 6. Science in Agriculture: A Study in Victorian India. Part III: A Colonial Helix. 7. Patterns of Colonial Science in India. 8. Racial Discrimination and Science in Nineteenth-Century India. 9. The ‘Culture’ of Science and the Colonial Culture, India 1820–1920. Part IV: The Development Debates. 10. Science, Technology, and the Development Discourse, 1900–1947. 11. Tagore’s Pedagogy, Science and Rural Reconstruction. 12. Mahatma and the Machine: Gandhi on Technology. Bibliography. Index.

This book is a collection of essays focussed on the science and society interface especially in the context of colonization. It begins with discussing the strength and weaknesses in our inheritance, and gradually moves to what changes colonization had brought and how did our society grapple with. Divided into four parts and based on an extensive use of primary data, this book takes into account the contestations, adaptations, compromises and hybridity without ignoring the over-arching framework of colonialism. Closely linked to the power or success of the colonial or metropolitan knowledge is the status and relevance of the indigenous (non-Western) knowledge. Can the indigenous be viewed as historical and social reality or should they be understood only in a metaphysical sense? In fact, the indigenous has a historicity of its own, if we try to take both the text and the context together. The neo-Orientalists, now in ascendance, thanks to the power-shift, may not like it but their over-dependence on extended deductions and myth-making will never be able to erase historicity founded on diverse yet authentic sources.