Download or read book Social History of Science in Colonial India written by S. Irfan Habib and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can science be seen as the flag bearer of the 'civilizing mission' dispelling the darkness of centuries of superstition? Did the installation of new technological systems displace ancient primitive techniques? Rejecting the simplistic notion of transmission of science and technology, this reader argues for a variety of perspectives. Part of the prestigious Themes in Indian History series, it provides an excellent introduction to the world of science and technology in colonial India. Departing from the standard practice of seeing science as a cultural universal, Social History of Science emphasizes the need for redrawing boundaries long taken for granted. It investigates how modern science - considered as a pristine Western cultural import - was reconstituted in the encounter with other ways of knowing and acting on the world. Bringing together some of the finest writings - even rare - on the subject, this volume highlights the multiplicity of historiogaphic positions on colonial science and the changing landscapes for the study of science in South Asia. The contributors approach issues related to science and colonialism from a variety of scientific disciplines. They engage with the drift produced by the entanglement of science and values and the complicity of the scientific project in that of imperialism.

Download or read book Domesticating Modern Science written by Dhruv Raina and published by . This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume examine the cultural reception of modern science in late colonial India. They show how the first generation of Indian scientists responded to and creatively worked the theories and practices of modern science into their cultural idiom. The process of cultural legitimation of modern science is revealed through the debates surrounding these theories. The first set of essays deals with the encounter between the rationality of modern science and the exact sciences as portrayed by missionaries and British administrators, and so-called traditional ways of knowing. A second set of essays shifts the focus of attention to Calcutta between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when it virtually functioned as India s scientific capital. The essays examine the reception of theories of science such as that of biological evolution and the rejection of social Darwinism. Further, a new set of concerns of scientific and technical education and the installation of modern scientific and technological research systems acquired central importance by the end of the nineteenth century. These concerns dovetailed with the thinking of the emerging nationalist movement, and the essays that discuss the larger Indian picture indicate how the scientific community enlisted the political elite into its vision, and how this very elite drew upon the nascent scientific community in the project of decolonization. Dhruv Raina teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. S. Irfan Habib is a scientist at the National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi.. . . a collection of essays which seeks to examine . . . the cultural offensive [of modernity] during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The Book Review

Download or read book Chemical Science in Colonial India written by Aparajita Basu and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With special reference to the study of chemistry; covers the period, 1765-1947.

Download or read book Science Technology and Medicine in Colonial India written by David Arnold and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in the science, technology and medicine of India under British rule has grown in recent years and has played an ever-increasing part in the reinterpretation of modern South Asian history. Spanning the period from the establishment of East India Company rule through to Independence, David Arnold's wide-ranging and analytical survey demonstrates the importance of examining the role of science, technology and medicine in conjunction with the development of the British engagement in India and in the formation of Indian responses to western intervention. One of the first works to analyse the colonial era as a whole from the perspective of science, the book investigates the relationship between Indian and western science, the nature of science, technology and medicine under the Company, the creation of state-scientific services, 'imperial science' and the rise of an Indian scientific community, the impact of scientific and medical research and the dilemmas of nationalist science.

Download or read book History of Science Technology Environment and Medicine in India written by Suvobrata Sarkar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume studies the concept and relevance of HISTEM (History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine) in shaping the histories 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 discipline 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, sociology, history of science, cultural studies, colonialism, as well as studies on Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

Download or read book Science and Technology in Colonial India written by Kamlesh Mohan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a significant contribution to the socio-political history of science and technology in India, combining a wholistic perspective with a strong regional flavour. It revolves around two basic issues. First is the role of science and technology in empire-building in Asia, specifically in India, and financing its maintenance through maximum exploitation of its human, natural, agricultural and other resources by launching and executing a number of exploratory projects, termed as ‘field sciences’. Such an imperial focus was undergirded by a crucial objective; the acquisition of hegemony through social control based on intimate knowledge of horizontal and vertical divisions in lndian society around the axes of religion and caste. Formalised as colonial ethnography by the administrators, it was institutionalised as a discipline in the British universities. Second concerns the decoding of the complex response of the Indian intelligentsia including the English-educated as well as the experts and advocates of classical and regional languages which were the key to indigenous knowledge in indigenous sciences, arts and literature. The book also discusses the innovative use of print technology by Arya Samaj in recasting Hindu consciousness and its alternative of seeking historical guidelines in the past.

Download or read book Bazaar India written by Anand A. Yang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of markets in linking local communities to larger networks of commerce, culture, and political power is the central element in Anand A. Yang's provocative and original study. Yang uses bazaars in the northeast Indian state of Bihar during the colonial period as the site of his investigation. The bazaar provides a distinctive locale for posing fundamental questions regarding indigenous societies under colonialism and for highlighting less familiar aspects of colonial India. At one level, Yang reconstructs Bihar's marketing system, from its central place in the city of Patna down to the lowest rung of the periodic markets. But he also concentrates on the dynamics of exchanges and negotiations between different groups and on what can be learned through the "voices" of people in the bazaar: landholders, peasants, traders, and merchants. Along the way, Yang uncovers a wealth of details on the functioning of rural trade, markets, fairs, and pilgrimages in Bihar. A key contribution of Bazaar India is its many-stranded narrative history of some of South Asia's primary actors over the past two centuries. But Yang's approach is not that of a detached observer; rather, his own voice is engaged with the voices of the past and with present-day historians. By focusing on the world beyond the mud walls of the village, he widens the imaginative geography of South Asian history. Readers with an interest in markets, social history, culture, colonialism, British India, and historiographic methods will welcome his book.

Download or read book The Science of Empire written by Zaheer Baber and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-05-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the complex social processes involved in the introduction and institutionalization of Western science in colonial India.

Download or read book The Initiation of Engineering Education in Colonial India and the Colonial Way of Understanding Science written by Diana Vegner and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Social Studies (General), grade: 1,3, University of Kassel (FB05-Gesellschaftswissenschaften), course: Nature, Science & Empire in Colonial India, language: English, abstract: This paper examines the ways in which the implementation of different kinds of science innovations had been done in the British Raj between 1858-1947. This period was powerfully influenced by new creations from the European and Indian people within the system of Colonial rule. The paper traces and compares the different understanding of science and technology. Therefore, it will contrast the relationship of science between Indians and English people. In order to comprehend “colonial science”, it is first of all important to understand the development and knowledge of local traditional (or indigenous) and European (especially the British) understanding and knowledge of science. The paper seeks to give a precise answer to the reason why the development of technology and science was so vital then. The next main part deals with engineering teaching and learning and how the Indian caste system contributes to the participation of Indian population in engineering science.

Download or read book The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India written by Biswamoy Pati and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It explores a unique set of themes that capture the diversities of India, such as public health, medical institutions, mental illness and the politics and economics of colonialism. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the contributions offer valuable insight into topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars in the field, incorporate sources ranging from palm leaf manuscripts to archival materials. This book will be of interest to scholars of history, especially the history of medicine and the history of colonialism and imperialism, sociology, social anthropology, cultural theory, and South Asian Studies, as well as to health workers and NGOs.

Download or read book Another Reason written by Gyan Prakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation. Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous. Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.

Download or read book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India written by Somaditya Banerjee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph offers a cultural history of the development of physics in India during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on Indian physicists Satyendranath Bose (1894-1974), Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) and Meghnad Saha (1893-1956). The analytical category "bhadralok physics" is introduced to explore how it became possible for a highly successful brand of modern science to develop in a country that was still under colonial domination. The term Bhadralok refers to the then emerging group of native intelligentsia, who were identified by academic pursuits and manners. Exploring the forms of life of this social group allows a better understanding of the specific character of Indian modernity that, as exemplified by the work of bhadralok physicists, combined modern science with indigenous knowledge in an original program of scientific research. The three scientists achieved the most significant scientific successes in the new revolutionary field of quantum physics, with such internationally recognized accomplishments as the Saha ionization equation (1921), the famous Bose-Einstein statistics (1924), and the Raman Effect (1928), the latter discovery having led to the first ever Nobel Prize awarded to a scientist from Asia. This book analyzes the responses by Indian scientists to the radical concept of the light quantum, and their further development of this approach outside the purview of European authorities. The outlook of bhadralok physicists is characterized here as "cosmopolitan nationalism," which allows us to analyze how the group pursued modern science in conjunction with, and as an instrument of Indian national liberation.

Download or read book Contagion and Enclaves written by Nandini Bhattacharya and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.

Download or read book Science War and Imperialism written by Jagdish Sinha and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-05-31 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why could not the Second World War catalyse science in India as it did in the West? This is one of the central questions of this volume on the British policy towards science and technology in India. Its focus is on education, research, innovation and organisation of science in such sectors as industry, agriculture, public health and transport and communications. In the process the author comes across revealing developments where science played a crucial role: an Anglo-American tussle for dominance in the region, the clash between capitalism and socialism, and the entry of neo-colonialism triggering Cold War in Asia. Many faces of humanity and science are on view --- British scientists concerned about India’s development, and Indian scientists planning for national reconstruction. Of interest to all those aiming for a better understanding of the impact of science, war and international influences on the socio-economic progress in India - or other erstwhile colonies.

Download or read book Subject Lessons written by Sanjay Seth and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-29 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge “traveled” to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India’s British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all “serious” knowledge about India—even within India—is based on western epistemologies. In Subject Lessons, Sanjay Seth’s investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself. Drawing on history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy, Seth interprets the debates and controversies that came to surround western education. Central among these were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memorization—and were therefore not acquiring “true knowledge”—and that western education had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, western knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Seth argues that these concerns, voiced by the British as well as by nationalists, reflected the anxiety that western education was failing to produce the modern subjects it presupposed. This failure suggested that western knowledge was not the universal epistemology it was thought to be. Turning to the production of collective identities, Seth illuminates the nationalists’ position vis-à-vis western education—which they both sought and criticized—through analyses of discussions about the education of Muslims and women.

Download or read book Society Medicine and Politics in Colonial India written by Biswamoy Pati and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

Download or read book Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India written by Prakash Kumar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prakash Kumar documents the history of agricultural indigo, exploring the effects of nineteenth-century globalisation on this colonial industry. Charting the indigo culture from the early modern period to the twentieth century, Kumar discusses how knowledge of indigo culture thrived among peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period and was then developed by Caribbean planters and French naturalists who codified this knowledge into widely disseminated texts. European planters who settled in Bengal with the establishment of British rule in the late eighteenth century drew on this information. From the nineteenth century, indigo culture became more modern, science-based and expert driven, and with the advent of a cheaper, purer synthetic indigo in 1897, indigo science crossed paths with the colonial state's effort to develop a science for agricultural development. Only at the end of the First World War, when the industrial use of synthetic indigo for textile dyeing and printing became almost universal, did the indigo industry's optimism fade away.