Scholar's Award: Science and Improvement in South Asia: Empire, Nation, and Colonial Modernity, 1860-1922

The proposed project is a political history of agricultural science in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in colonial south Asia. It builds on the PI's doctoral research 'Facing competition: The history of indigo experiments in colonial India, 1897-1920,' which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation in 2004. The doctoral dissertation developed a case study of efforts in six laboratories and agricultural stations to improve natural indigo (the blue dyestuff extracted from the leaves of the indigo plant) to highlight the resistance of 'plantation science' to the transition towards synthetic dyestuffs. The proposed project incorporates a focus on the science surrounding indigo within a broader study of agricultural science and modern science in late colonial India. It discusses the insertion of new technologies into South Asian agriculture by the moving diasporas of European planters, targeted effort by European entrepreneurs to organize 'private' science and their wider impact, the creation of public institutions of science by the colonial state, and colonial cultural reforms in the field of education (particularly the efforts to promote curricula based on western sciences).

The research problematizes the transmission of science in the imperial-colonial continuum, maintaining that several earlier studies of technological imperialism failed to engage with the thick local politics in the colony and the context of power at the level of the colony and globally. The scrutiny of documents is planned to proceed on two planes. The analysis consistently emphasizes the engagement of Indians with the passage of western agricultural science and education into the colonial order. In this regard the work probes the political actions of aristocratic landlords in the mid nineteenth century, the vernacular public in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who wrote in the regional press, and nationalists. Science in this work thus becomes a surrogate for aspirations to nationhood just as much as a tool for making claims to modernity on behalf of the civic society constituted by the people. The research plan expends an equal amount of effort towards understanding the nature of agricultural change with reference to the role played by global actors and ideologues such as the American philanthropist Henry Phipps, the famous Pittsburgh based industrialist and conservationist whose financial contribution was instrumental in the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Institute at Pusa in India in 1905, and the impact of German state models of agricultural change, in particular the economic model of Friedrich List. This inter-continental research examines the documents of the Agriculture Department and the Education Department of the colonial government in Bengal, popular writings, records at institutions in England, technical publications of the scientists, trade journals, and the archives of printers and dyers in the Yorkshire region of England. Seeking inspiration from postcolonial theory the work plan includes an analysis of the imaginations of a 'local' modernity in the multiple spaces of the colonial order and their correspondence with influences emanating from extraterritorial nodes.

The international and interdisciplinary scope of this research activity will enable forging of various partnerships. Benefits are likely to accrue across research, teaching, and policy-making. The work fundamentally expands the analysis of western science in the under-analyzed non-western context. It will thus provide useful insights to policymakers and technologists invested in the task of transfer of science and technology from the industrialized West. The firm grounding of this research in the two separate fields of Science and Technology Studies and South Asian history opens possibilities for enlarging the infrastructure for research and teaching. The output from this work will expand the frontiers of knowledge and offer possibilities of collaboration to specialists working on European and Asian history. The resulting monograph will prove to be an important resource for teaching new courses melding the theoretical and empirical contents of history of science and South Asian history like the actor network theory, social construction of technology, frontier science, sociology of scientific knowledge, nationalism, postcolonial theory, and critical studies of modernity and globalization.