Investigates the complex social processes involved in the introduction and institutionalization of Western science in colonial India.

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.

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.

In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold’s fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.

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.

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.

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.

This book studies the correlation between technological knowledge and industrial performance, with the focus on electricity, an emerging technology during 1880 and 1945.

The relationship between technology and colonialism in British India is the focus of this book. Three important areas are examined: the practices shaping and constraining technology transfer and the growth of education in the fields of technology and engineering; the emerging patterns in transportation and communication; and the struggle for technological sovereignty before India achieved political independence in 1947. Presenting new research in these areas, the book relates the history of technology in India to issues of economic relations and culture.

A fascinating account of the invention of fingerprinting in colonial India and the story of how the technique was exported back to Victorian England. Opening with the first case in a British criminal court to use the radical new technique of fingerprinting to identify the perpetrators of crime in 1902 this riveting book takes us back to the origins of fingerprinting in India. Despite many books on the subject of fingerprints in general, none have looked closely at the fact that this standard tool of forensic science was born in India during the Raj. As the author points out, with the exception of curry there is not one other instance of something so fundamental to British life being imported fully-formed from the Empire and then being tailored to fit conditions at home. Based on original and hitherto unpublished research imprint of the Raj gives a unique insight into our colonial past and offers a vivid account of this extraordinary and largely ignored story.