The enchantment of science in India

ISIS

Volumn 101, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 120-132

  Kapila, Shruti ^a  

^a University of Cambridge   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CULTURAL FACTOR; HISTORY; HUMAN; INDIA; MEDICAL RESEARCH; PERSONNEL; POLITICAL SYSTEM; POLITICS; PUBLIC OPINION; RELIGION; SCIENCE;

BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH; COLONIALISM; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INDIA; POLITICS; PUBLIC OPINION; RELIGION AND SCIENCE; RESEARCH PERSONNEL; SCIENCE;

EID: 77953996520     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/652700     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. On Le Corbusier's life and work, including Chandigarh, see Stanislaus von Moos, The Art of Architecture (London: Vitra Design Museum, 2007).
2. Consider the counterexample of modern Britain, which harks back to the imagined past as an architectural utopia for industrial and capitalist society. See Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale Univ. Press, 1997). Strikingly, Le Corbusier chose a low-rise building style for Chandigarh, unlike the high-rise concrete buildings that became dominant in postwar Europe.
3. For a robust and critical appraisal of Nehru's ideas about planning, science, and nationalism see Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2007).
4. For a critical appraisal of this issue and for the distinction between the "global" and the "universal" see Simon Schaffer, "Enlightened Knowledge and Global Pathways," paper presented at the British Academy for a conference on "Writing the History of the Global," 21-22 May 2009.
5. George Basalla, "The Spread of Science," Science, 1967, 156:611-622.
6. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006).
7. For two opposing positions see John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995)
8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
9. See, e.g., Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981).
10. On the debate about the "command" of science see Mark Harrison, "Science and the British Empire," Isis, 2005, 96:56-63.
11. But see Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
12. Shruti Kapila, "Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond," Modern Asian Studies, 2007, 41:471-510.
13. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994)
14. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).
15. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002)
16. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
17. While I am cognizant of the difficulties of the term, "pure" science is here simply a shorthand for disciplines such as physics, mathematics, and chemistry. For a critical appraisal see Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, "Science and Imperialism," Isis, 1993, 84:91-102.
18. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State, Medicine, and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1993).
19. On the nature of colonial power see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
20. On the perceived importance of biomedicine for European colonization of India see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (New Delhi/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
21. on the place of psychoanalysis and psychology see Shruti Kapila, "Freud and His Indian Friends: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Selfhood in Late Colonial India," in Psychiatry and Empire, ed. Megan Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
22. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).
23. Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 2003)
24. see esp. the essays by Pollock, Muzaffar Alam, and Sudipta Kaviraj.
25. Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
26. Akeel Bilgrami, "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment," Critical Inquiry, 2006, 32:381- 411.
27. Anon., "Secular Education in India," Bengalee, 4 Jan. 1907.
28. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis/London: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1997)
29. C. A. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World (London: Blackwell, 2004).
30. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008)
31. Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2009).
32. Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
33. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), for a critique of the global from a more recent philosophical tradition. For Zizek, the global is subordinated to the question of the human.
34. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).
35. Kapila, "Freud and His Indian Friends" (cit. n. 15).
36. More generally, see John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
37. C. Troll, Sir Sayyid Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (Delhi: Vikas, 1978).
38. Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770-1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
39. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
40. Kapila, "Race Matters" (cit. n. 10).
41. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998).
42. This is not to say that religion and science were not consistently opposed to each other but to emphasize the difference in the degree of relative conflict in the European as opposed to the Indian context. On this see Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987).
43. See, e.g., Swami Vivekanand, Hindu-dharm ke pakh mein [In Defense of Hinduism], 8th ed. (Benaras, 1921), which chastises practices such as mesmerism and astrology.
44. Shruti Kapila, "Self, Spencer, and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890-1920," Modern Intellectual History, 2007, 44:109 -127.
45. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999)
46. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1946).
47. C. A. Bayly, "Indian Thought in the Liberal Age," Wiles Lectures (2007), www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/wiles.html.
48. B. G. Tilak, Orion; or, The Arctic Home of the Vedas (Poona: Kesari, 1903).
49. On the emergence of Vedanta see Brian Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism or, Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
50. Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab (Delhi: Manohar, 1989).
51. On the racial "origins" of Hinduism see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race (London: Palgrave, 2001).
52. For a critical appraisal of Sir Sayyid see Faisal Devji, "Apologetic Modernity," Mod. Intellect. Hist., 2007, 4:61-76.
53. On the Deoband seminary see Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 1860-1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).