Postcolonial narratives of modern science in the making: the exchange of scientific knowledge between India and Europe (1700-1950)

Abstract

"Postcolonial theory of science professes to mark a departure in the way science and modernity in non-Western regions is either narrativised or discussed. This papertakes up the particular case of India, and proposes that over the last two and a half centuries three frames have historically been available for the understanding of science and modernity. These broad historical frames are those of orientalism, nationalism and post-colonialism. Each of these in turn is marked by a multiplicity of investigative themes and theories. This paper specifically looks at historical writing on the subject of science and modernity in India, the historiographic and thematic variations and differences marking these broad frames. Further, it explores the continuities and relationships both in theme and theory between this multiplicity of theories of science and Indian modernity. For it becomes evident that what we have is a criss-crossing of genealogical lines across the three frames, rather than a distinct evolution along each of the registers of the triptych. Thus the nationalist discourse on science in India itself emerges out of different strands of Orientalist scholarship. Nationalist historiography of the pre-colonial period itself is fractured along several lines, though each of them shares the same theory of science. In the post-colonial accounts, which are themselves informed by the nationalist historiographie(s) of the previous periods, thisborder-crossing is complicated by the crumbling of the positivist theory of science and the emergence of embodied conceptions of science and scientific knowledge." (author's abstract)