Abstract
Decolonizing science and modernity is an attempt to understand the emergence of science in colonial and independent India. The volume, as the title suggests, is about ‘decolonization’ in the context of science—a move towards creating a scientific paradigm, which is not dependent on the West and other developed countries. This means the development of independent scientific traditions by scientists exposed to Western education and science in colonial India. The idea of decolonization, like nationalism, leads to the prioritization and privileging of the traditional past against modern science, in their response against colonialism. The rise of Indian science, therefore, certainly is not a mirror reflection of European science and modernity. It was grown within the specific contexts of colonial hegemony, yet unlike political dominance, modern scientific and modern values offered the possibility of critically engaging with contemporary social institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume edited by Sarkar and Ahmed brings together a range of essays that engage with the concerns of Indian scientists in their engagement with Western scientific rationality and Indian knowledge traditions. Their relationship and concerns with the colonial state and the European scientists in India shaped collaboration and subordination under colonial political dominance. As the contributors have vividly highlighted, Indian scientists were working under a social and cultural hierarchy created by the colonial science. Their exposure to modern education, science and modernity created a sense of alienation that emerged from being dispossessed from the cultural environment of their traditional society as well as being confronted with the concern of being recognized within the world of Western science. This crisis was not confined to science per se, but was part of the larger political dominance that shaped Indian nationalism. Thus, the emergence of Western science in India also reflected the crisis of Western values of rationality and modernity that led to the revival of Indian knowledge traditions. As Deepak Kumar repeatedly argues in his various writings on science in colonial India, ‘that even in resistance there was an implicit acceptance of the standard set by the coloniser’, raising questions on whether Indian scientists under colonialism were engaged in the process of decolonization or dissemination of Western science. Did revivalism create a new paradigm of the traditional Indian knowledge system or did it dent the vibrancy of Western science in India? As the scope of understanding nationalism by the end of the twentieth century widened, scholars were trying to look at the impact of Western influence in domains outside that of politics to argue that nationalism and anti-colonial sentiments reflected in the range of domains, including that of art, architecture, science and medicine. Panikkar argues in the context of the reformulation of indigenous medical traditions in colonial India that Indian medical reformers, rather than being revivalists, creatively engaged with both Western and indigenous medicine against the dominance and hegemony of Western medicine, thereby creating a rational medical practice. Thus, Panikkar underlines reform as a form of nationalism, an idea that finds resonance in this volume on decolonization.
The volume tends to engage with three broad objectives. The introduction of Western science in India, its adaptation, dissemination and resistance to Western science and the cultural crisis faced by scientists, who oscillated between Western science and Indian traditions. V. V. Krishna rightly mentions that colonial experience was essential in the professionalization of science and the emergence of a national science community in India. He highlights the efforts of Jagadish Chandra Bose, Mahendralal Sarkar and others’ attempts to create the Indian Association of the Cultivation of Science. This collective effort played a significant role in the professionalization of science and the emergence of a national science community in India. Bose’s work on Hindu science attempts to locate Indian scientific traditions in the light of Western science. Indian scientists had to confront the prejudice amongst Western scientists as to whether Indian minds were receptive to Western science. Santanu Chacraverti engages with the Shubhankari oral tradition of mathematics that developed in early modern Bengal, a complex computation system, which he argues lost significance by the late twentieth century. Kamlesh Mohan draws attention to the spread of science in colonial Punjab primarily through the initiatives of Ruchi Ram Sahni. His attempts to disseminate science in the vernaculars draw on the nature of rising nationalism in the region. Saurav Kumar Rai rightly argues that the engagement between Western medicine and Ayurveda created a new domain of indigenous medicine which was distinctly different from the ancient medical practice. However, it is difficult to conclude whether the institutionalization of Ayurveda, by borrowing Western standards, does not signify the victory Western science over Ayurveda.
Neshat Quaiser argues that the binary between the textual and the popular traditions within Unani medicine does not hold ground as the popularization and dissemination of the textual tradition also influenced and shaped the popular and the local within Unani medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argues that the texts disseminated to become popular and continue to cater to a large portion of the people, even when they were subject to state regulation and control. Sahara Ahmed discusses the rise of professional dentistry in India in the second decade of the twentieth century, which then was handled by unqualified and untrained professionals in dental care.
Roop Kumar Burman engages with the professionalization of traditional bonesetters in the foothills of the Himalayas in north Bengal, particularly among the Rajbanshis. He highlights the role of Rajmohan Eshor and his family members in the popularization of a reorganized tradition of bonesetters in the former state of Cooch Behar.
Suvobrata Sarkar deals with the rise of engineering education in colonial India and the emergence of a community of technically trained Indians in electrical engineering supported by the British engineers, leading to the popularization of the branch of electric engineering in India.
Dinesh Sharma highlights the emergence of the electronics industry as a key component in the rise of technology in the 1960s and 1970s. With the changing nature of science and industrial production, advancement in electronics was vital for the advancement of technological and communication networks in independent India. This was inherent to the ideological contexts that shaped independent India, which desired for self-sufficiency rather than technological transfer from the industrialized and developed countries.
Arnab Rai Choudhary writes about the concern among Indian scientists for recognition and titles from the British government towards being recognized within the community of European scientists. Titles and recognition were essential in an age where Western scientists viewed the intellectual potential of Indian scientists with suspicion. Sandipan Bakshi engages with making scientific terms in Hindi and the debate surrounding the creation of the language of science. He argues that the discussion reflected the larger tensions that accompanied the rise of linguistic nationalism in India. Shiv Vishvanathan, engaging with the works of Tagore, argues that even when he was conscious of the hegemony of Western science and its practical use in Indian conditions, Tagore was aware of the rise of revivalist tendencies within Indian knowledge traditions. His critical reading of nationalism also shaped his approach to modern science.
Dhruv Raina argues that in engaging with the rise of science in colonial India, one needs to move from the history of science to the history of knowledge, as epistemological differences between Western sciences and Indian knowledge traditions shape the politics of knowledge. Nirmalya Narayan Chakraborty, writing about the changing nature of philosophical discussions in India under the colonial context, argues that Indian philosophers, influenced by Western philosophy, viewed pre-colonial Indian intellectual traditions in a new light. Deepanwita Dasgupta writes about the rise of science in the margins and argues that the influence of Western sciences often led to the adaptations and transformations of science within specific historical and spatial contexts.
Thus, the volume engages with a wide range of issues on the dissemination, popularization and often the institutionalization of science and medicine in colonial and independent India. The process of creating science societies and institutions in India was a process of consolidating the community of scientists, creating group identity as a means of collective bargaining, a form of nationalism in science and denying Europeans the hegemony of Western sciences. However, the entire process of the dissemination of Western sciences in India by Indian nationalists and scientists under colonial dominance could also be seen as a means through which Indian scientists became familiar with the principles and practices of science that developed in the West.