Dhruv Raina

Situating the history of science : dialogues with Joseph Needham

The essays in this volume engage with the history of sciences outside the West and pay tribute to the work of Joseph Needham. Informed by Needhams theory of the history of science, the contributors of this volume critically examine both the originality of Needhams endeavour and the limitations in his theory of history. In so doing, their essays throw up a number of questions that relate to contemporary concerns within the history of sciences as well as multiculturalism.

The Moral Legitimation of Modern Science: Bhadralok Reflections on Theories of Evolution

This paper takes up the discussion of a nineteenth-century theory of science — that of biological evolution — among members of the Indian National Council of Education, and in the pages of an important journal called The Dawn, published from Calcutta between 1897 and 1913. It discusses how, toward the turn of the century, science was legitimated as a morally worthy endeavour among the Bengali Bhadralok community. The debate pursued in The Dawn was representative of the anxieties and aspirations of that community, which had embarked upon the project of modernity, and was the first on the Indian continent to take modern Western science seriously. The socio-political context of the debate is important, in that the nationalist struggle for freedom from British rule was gathering momentum, and received notions of progress and social evolution were open to questioning and challenge. While colonialism is a backdrop for this study, the papers main focus is the act of cultural redefinition of modern science in a non-Western context.

Evolving perspectives on science and history: A chronicle of modern India's scientific enchantment and disenchantment (1850–1980)

Abstract This paper chronicles the cycles of scientism and romanticism that structure the discourse on science and technology in India since 1850. However, it does not promise a detailed review of this enormous archive. On the contrary, it aspires to identify the principle concerns, the important interlocutors, the prevalent frameworks and contextualizes them socio‐politically, in both their local and global embodiments. In historical time, as has been suggested elsewhere, the scientism‐romanticism dialectic acquires diversified formulations. This review suggests that in post‐colonial India there has been an attempt to situate science within culture across this essential dichotomy.

The unfolding of an engagement: 'The Dawn' on science, technical education and industrialization: India, 1896-1912

century India in terms of the encounter of knowledge systems and social groups is at variance with the historiographies of science that see the transfer of scientific knowledge as a passive process of diffusion. As pointed out elsewhere,’ the realization that scientific knowledge and the ideology of science are actively redefined in the milieu of a recipient culture, opens up the history of science in the colonies to readings that run counter to the

Bhadralok perceptions of science, technology and cultural nationalism

as a form of knowledge had by this time acquired legitimacy as a valid cognitive enterprise.’ The programme of cultural dialogue was initiated by the first generation of Orientalists seeking to transplant modern science on to a traditional knowledge base.~ The orientation of this programme was to be altered by the first two generations of Indian scientists over the next 50 years: a task that embodied divergent epistemic and political commitments.3 3

The introduction of scientific rationality into India: A study of Master Ramchandra—Urdu journalist, mathematician and educationalist

Summary This is a study of Master Ramchandra, a nineteenth-century Indian mathematician, social commentator and Urdu journalist. The contradictions manifest in his projects, it is contended, were actually the products of the contradictions manifest in the political and ideological thinking of the period. One encounters in his writings a dominant critique of the prevalent religious, social and educational systems and also a call for social transformation, wherein scientific rationality and realism came to play an important role. Ramchandras understanding is quite close to that of the Comtean positivists. An attempt is made here to locate this emerging scientism within the context of nineteenth-century colonial politics.

Technical Content and Social Context: Locating Technical Institutes. The First Two Decades in the History of the Kala Bhavan, Baroda (1890–1910)

The three jewels in the imperial crown, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, had acquired universities by the 1870s1. By 1887, Punjab and Allahabad had also acquired university status. In the Native Indian States the project of modernization had to be undertaken, not through imperial structures in alliance with local elites, but at the initiative of the native elites and ruling classes themselves. The process was in turn catalyzed, among other factors, by the demand for an emerging class of literates and professionals. Thus it is of interest to investigate the founding of a technical institute in the Native State of Baroda in 1890. This interest does not merely rest in commemorating the centenary of the event as institutional history, but in identifying one more modality for the introduction of modern sciences to 19th century India.

Disciplinary Boundaries and the Civilizational Encounter: The Mathematics and Astronomy of India in Delambre's Histoire (1800-1820)

The history of the sciences had an important role to play in the crystallization of disciplinary identities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. This was particularly true as the identities of the emerging scientific disciplines stabilized and modem science entered a new phase of institutionalization and disciplinary differentiation during the last decades of the eighteenth century. The present essay is part of a larger study on the changing image of Indian mathematics and astronomy in French Enlightenment historiography. In this essay, we look at the history of astronomy and mathematics after the French Revolution, in a period of institutional reform of the sciences. This attempt at a social epistemology of the disciplinary histories of the exact sciences in Enlightenment France and the place of India in this imagination draws upon a particular archive. The larger archive consists of the histories of mathematics and astronomy produced by France’s leading astronomers and mathematicians during the period 1750-1850, most of whom were members of the distinguished Acad6niie des Sciences. A significant volume of this production’ addresses the history of mathematics and astronomy of the ’Orient’. An appreciation of the mathematics of the

Modernization in East Asia: Alternate theories of science

East Asian Science: Tradition and Beyond, Papers from the Seventh International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, edited by Hashimoto Keizo, Catherine Jami, and Lowell Skar, Osaka,...