topics: |  science | history | india | mathematics

The questions that can be asked about science in modern India are essentially
those pertaining to the history and sociology of science elsewhere.

 - What is the social character of scientific knowledge?
 - Who produces science and why?
 - How does science exercise authority within a society and across cultural
	divides?

As historians and sociologists have begun to investigate science, less in
terms of its self-declared aims and putatively objective interrogation of
nature and more in terms of its internal ordering, social construction and
cultural authority, it has become clear that science is ‘a highly social
activity’, one that cannot be ‘sealed off from the values of the society in
which it is practised’. It is increasingly recognised, too, if not yet
universally accepted, that science, far from being monolithic, manifests
itself across time and cultures in myriad forms, reflecting as much as
informing a given society's cultural, economic and political
modalities. Science thus ‘reveals itself as much more contingent and
culturally specific’ than it was once assumed to be. [Stepan: Eugenics,
1991:10] Individuals and groups produce scientific knowledge not in isolation
but ‘against the back-ground of their culture's inherited knowledge [and]
their collectively situated purposes’ [Shapin, 1982: 196]

Although the history of science, technology and medicine continues to be
presented in general histories as a record of Western discovery and
dissemination, it has become more widely acknowledged than a generation or
two ago that not all such histories can be conflated into a single story of
European achievement or saga of European enterprise overseas. p.1

Although the richness and diversity of India’s ancient scientific
traditions has long been recognised, over the past two centuries it has
been the convention to see this as a history of precocious early
achievement followed by subsequent decline and degeneration. The European
Orientalist scholarship of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries represented India as having had an ancient civilisation
equalling, in some respects excelling or anticipating, those of classical
Greece and Rome. . . .

In astronomy, mathematics and medicine in particular, Hindu science was
considered to have been remarkably advanced well before the dawn of the
Christian era and to have been the source of discoveries and techniques
that were only later taken up and incorporated into Western civilisation,
such as “Arabic” numerals and the use of zero. However, according to this
Orientalist interpretation, Indian civilisation was unable to sustain its
early achievements and lapsed into decline. There followed an uncritical
reliance upon earlier texts: tradition replaced observation as surely as
religion supplanted science. . . . The history of Indian science thus
served as a mere prologue to the eventual unfolding of Western science in
South Asia as science was rescued from centuries of decline and obscurity
by the advent of British rule and the introduction of the more developed
scientific and technical knowledge of the West.  p.3

   This Orientalist triptych— contrasting the achievements of ancient Hindu
   civilisation with the destruction and stagnation of the Muslim Middle
   Ages and the enlightened rule and scientific progress of the colonial
   modern age — has had a remarkably tenacious hold over thinking about the
   science of the subcontinent. It was a schema deployed not only by
   British scholars, officials and polemicists but also by many Indians,
   for whom it formed the basis for their own understanding of the past and
   the place of science in Indian tradition and modernity.... [deployed
   also] by many Indians... [regret that] the 'creative spirit' of Indian
   science sunk to its 'lowest ebb' between the twelfth and mid-nineteenth
   centuries.  [Bose, Sen, Subbarayappa, Concise Hist of Sci in India 1971,
   p. 484] [p.4].

Three elements:

- traditions of India's own science, technology, and medicine (STM) over the
  200 yr period [of colonial rule]
- nature of Western STM as practiced in India, their impact, organizational
  forms, etc
- authority of STM as central attributes of India's modernity

India's scientific traditions

Vedic period: concerned with rituals

post-Vedic: study of astronomy, trigonometry and algebra saw a partial move
	away from the earlier stimulus of religion and ritual.  Thus, the
	Surya Siddhanta (composed ~ AD 400) devoted a series of chapters to
	the motion and position of the planets, the nature and timing of
	eclipses, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and
	astronomical instruments such as the armillary sphere; but it also
	dealt with cosmogyny and 'certain malignant aspects of the sun and
	moon.' [Zaheer Baber, The science of Empire, NY 1996, ch. 2] 3

Although the richness and diversity of India’s ancient scientific traditions
has long been recognised, over the past two centuries it has been the
convention to see this as a history of precocious early achievement followed
by subsequent decline and degeneration. The European Orientalist scholarship
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented India as
having had an ancient civilisation equalling, in some respects excelling or
anticipating, those of classical Greece and Rome.

'The Asiaticks had climbed the heights of science before the Greeks had
learned their alphabet', one entusiast declared. [David Kopf, British
orientalism and the Bengal renaissance, Berkeley 1969. p.102].
In astronomy, mathematics and medicine in particular, Hindu science was
considered to have been remarkably advanced well before the dawn of the
Christian era and to have been the source of discoveries and techniques that
were only later taken up and incorporated into Western civilisation, such as
“Arabic” numerals and the use of zero. [Mountstuart Elphinstone, History of
India 9th ed. 1901, p. 118-60). However, according to this Orientalist
interpretation, Indian civilisation was unable to sustain its early
achievements and lapsed into decline. There followed an uncritical reliance
upon earlier texts: tradition replaced observation as surely as religion
supplanted science.  [increasing rigidity of in Hindu society, rise of
Islam... ] Although introducing some scientific and technical skills of its
own, Islam was largely seen to have been destructive of the remnants of the
old Indian civilization.  [anarchy after the 1707 breakup of the Mughal
empire] adduced as further evidence for the stagnation and decay of Indian
STM.

The history of Indian science thus served as a mere prologue to the eventual
unfolding of Western science in South Asia as science was rescued from
centuries of decline and obscurity by the advent of British rule and the
introduction of the more developed scientific and technical knowledge of the
West. This Orientalist triptych— contrasting the achievements of ancient
Hindu civilisation with the destruction and stagnation of the Muslim Middle
Ages and the enlightened rule and scientific progress of the colonial modern
age — has had a remarkably tenacious hold over thinking about the science of
the subcontinent. It was a schema deployed not only by British scholars,
officials and polemicists but also by many Indians, for whom it formed the
basis for their own understanding of the past and the place of science in
Indian tradition and modernity.  [p.3–4].

modern historians of science - revealing the neglected importance of Muslim
contribn to India's sci traditions - emergence through science, of a dynamic
and syncretic Indo-Muslim culture.  Mutual enrichment through 'creative
synthesis' between Hindu Ayurveda and Unani-tibb, with its Graeco-Arabic
origins, and the apparent absence of rivalry or enmity between vaids and
hakims exemplify the continuing vitality and fruitful intermingling of sci
traditions in India well into the 18th c.
   [RL Varma: The growth of Greco-Arabian medicine in Medieval India, IJHS 1970
   p.347-63]

Far from existing in isolation, India has borrowed extensively from, and
contributed generously to, the sci and tech knowledge from the Middle East to
Central Asia to China and SE Asia, in agriculture, architecture, astronomy,
chemistry, medicine, metallurgy, textile production, shipbuilding and
armaments
   [SN Sen, "Influence of Indian science on other culture areas, IJHS, 5 1970,
   p.332-46. ]
   [Lynn White: Medieval Technology and Social change, Oxf 1962]

After Mughal decline, patronage for ST was less, but manuscripts on ST
continued, though there were signs of slowing down. p.5-6

Raja Jai Singh - astronom observatories 1722-1739 at Jaipur, Delhi, Mathura,
Ujjain, Benares.
Serfoji of Tanjore: library of Indian and Western medical texts
   [Deepak Kumar: Unequal contenders, uneven grounds: medical encounters in
   British India 1820-1920", in cunningham and andrews Western Medicine as
   contested knoweledge, 1997, p. 168-82]
   [G Kuppuram and K Kumuddamani eds, Hist of S & T in India, Delhi 1990]
New centers of learning sprang up under the Nawabs of Awadh and the Nizams of
Hyd [islamic science and unani medicine], while Hindu seats of learning such
as Benares and Nadia continued to flourish.
Delhi also remained a significant locus, until 1857
[Gail Minault: Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi and the "Delhi renaissance" 1986]

Printing in India: (see [Bayly, Empire and Information, 1996, p.235-43])
Despite the intro of the press by Jesuits in Goa in mid-16th c. it did not
spread much until its spectacular take off in the 19th c, [which] belies
claims of some intrinsic "mechanical backwardness" [O'Malley 1941].

Selective spread of technology; printing was slow but military technologies
faster.  e.g. Tipu Sultan of Mysore or Ranjit Singh's foundries in Lahore and
Amritsar mfg heavy guns and mortars in the 1820s-1830s.  p.6-7

Decentred nature of Indian science; continental proportions and multiplicity
of cultural and political constituencies p.7

Regional schools of Ayurvedic and Unani medicine, just as in the variations
in weaving and dyeing cloth.

Rise of science in the three colonial cities of Bombay Madras and Calcutta
would be to overlook the contribution made to their evolution by the artisans
and intellectuals who flocked to them from older centres of manufacturing and
scholarship.   It is not without significance that a no of univ's w leading
science depts by the 1940s - e.g. Lahore, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Dacca, were
located in cities already prominent 2 c's earlier. 7

Social groups: old intellectual elites resurfaced as agents and interpreters
for the new science - as in the brahmins, vaidyas and kayasthas, the
bhadralok of colonial Bengal.
	[Kapil Raj, Knowledge: the brahmins strike back, in Deepak Kumar,
	ed. "Science and Empire" 1991]

Chapter 2: Science under the Company

by 1662, when the Royal Society of London was founded, was already a
flourishing concern with trading bases at Surat, Madras and Masulipatam. The
sciences prominent in early colonial India – botany, geology, to a lesser
extent zoology – were still at a formative stage when the Company embarked on
its career of territorial expansionism in the mid-eighteenth century. The
first volume of Buffon's Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749, as Anglo-French
rivalry in the Carnatic was reaching its peak; Linnaeus's Species plantarum,
which established the binomial system of nomenclature, was published in 1753,
four years before the battle of Plassey opened the floodgates to British
ascendancy in Bengal. By the time the Geological Society of London, model for
a new generation of metropolitan scientific societies, was founded in 1807,
British power had been extended over vast tracts of northern and peninsular
India and was poised for the final defeat of the Marathas. The publication in
1830 of the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology, one of the
foundational texts of modern geology, came three years before the Company
lost its vestigial trading rights; and Darwin's Origin of Species was
published in November 1859, twelve months after the East India Company had
finally been declared extinct.

Organization of science
The trigonometric survey
[initiated by William Lambton, who first measured the distance between
Madras and the W coast, using 100' steel chains as baseline measure.
Followed by George Everest.

About Radhanath Sikdar and other Indians in the survey,
Edney: By meaxuring the land, by imposing European science and rationality on
the Indian landscape, the British [did] science, the Indians did not. p.43]

Technologies of the steam age

shipbuilding, steamships
railways and roads

Ganges canal, begun in 1842 by army engineer and fossil hunter Proby Cautley:
   aqueducts - most impressive is the Solani aqueduct, 16 miles below Haridwar,
   its 750 foot causeway supported on fifteen arches, each 50 ft wide, with
   piers sunk 20' below the ground.  To its admirers, it was unmatched anywhere
   in the world.
A number of defects in design and construction soon discovered; flow velocity
too high, undermined the foundations of bridges; major remodelling in 1866
and 1870.  Became a model for hydraulic experts from the semi-arid regions of
America and Australia.  p.117

--blurb
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.

David Arnold is professor of South Asian History, School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London.