Technology in the South Asian imaginary

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Martin Collins, Dina Siddiqi, David Ludden, and Anoo Siddiqi for their helpful comments in preparing this introduction.

Notes

1. Jaggi, History of Science and Technology in India; Kuppuram and Kumudamani, eds., History of Science and Technology in India; Bag, ed., History of Technology in India; Srivathsa and Narasimhan, eds., Science & Technology in India Through the Ages.

2. For representative examples of critical inquiry on the colonial period, see McLeod and Kumar, eds., Technology and the Raj; Baber, The Science of Empire; Prakash, Another Reason; Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India; Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India; Kumar, Science and the Raj; Raina and Habib, Domesticating Modern Science.

3. Here, the often-cited and critiqued reference point is George Basalla’s (in)famous ‘The Spread of Western Science.’

4. For a general survey of science and technology in twentieth century South Asia, see Chakrabarti, “Science in India in the Twentieth Century.” For a brief meditation on the problems and challenges of scholarship, see Kumar, “Developing a History of Science and Technology in South Asia.” For critical historiographical surveys covering similar periods and often beyond South Asia, see Arnold, “Europe, Technology, and Colonialism in the twentieth Century”; Raina, Images and Contexts.

5. For a recent overview on Nehru and science, see Arnold, “Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India.”

6. See the works of Robert S. Anderson, particularly his Nucleus and Nation.

7. See the special issues of: Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 15 (Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise), especially its “Introduction” by MacLeod; Science, Technology & Society: An International Journal Devoted to the Developing World 4, no. 2 (1999) and especially the “Introduction” by Osborne; and the special issue of Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009).

8. In addition to the works cited in Ref. 3, the most trenchant literature on the history of science, technology, and medicine in mid and late twentieth century South Asia includes: Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb; Gupta, Postcolonial Developments; Sur, Dispersed Radiance; Phalkey, Atomic State; Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern; Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body; and Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism, and Commerce. To these, one should add the special focus section in Isis 104, no. 2 (June 2013) edited by Phalkey on “Science, History, and Modern India.”

9. For postcolonial science and its problematics, see Anderson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience”; Moon, “Introduction”; Seth, “Putting knowledge in its place.”

10. Attentive readers will note that the three papers focused on the post-1947 era are largely about India, rather than the other South Asian nation-states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bhutan. This geographical demarcation was entirely accidental rather than deliberate. Our original goal was to include contributions that cut across large parts of the geography of South Asia, unfettered by national boundaries. However, due to a number of scheduling and logistical factors, we were unable to include those contributions.

11. I appropriate the term ‘an anthropology of intersecting imaginaries’ from Tsing’s ‘anthropology of intersecting global imaginaries.’ See her In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, 289 which is cited in Anderson, “Introduction,” 658 (Ref. 65).

12. For a useful meditation on the problem the ‘local’ in the history of colonial science, see Chambers and Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science.”

13. Anderson cites this quote in his ‘Introduction’ as do a number of other historians working on colonial and postcolonial contexts. For the original, see Pigg, “Inventing social categories through place.”

14. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Burton, ed., Archive Stories. See also Chowdhury, “A Historian among Scientists.”

15. See, for example, Arnold, Everyday Technology. For broader literature, see Edgerton, The Shock of the Old; Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds., How Users Matter.

16. In many ways, the literature on the history of science and technology in South Asia is one about biography. In lieu of an exhaustive list, the following constitute some of the more widely known works in this genre: Venkataraman, Bhabha and His Magnificent Obsessions; Deshmukh, Homi Jehangir Bhabha; Chowdhury and Dasgupta, A Masterful Spirit; Joshi, ed., Vikram Sarabhai; Shah, Vikram Sarabhai; Mallik and Chatterjee, Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan; Parameswaran, C. V. Raman; Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.