Kamlesh Mohan, Science and Technology in Colonial India London: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 176. ISBN 978-1-032-36479-7. £96.00 (hardback).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Despite the ambitious title, which invokes several significant works in the field, including David Arnold's Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (2000), Kamlesh Mohan's Science and Technology in Colonial India is more concisely focused on 'some aspects of the socio-political history of science and technology' (p. 1) through several case studies in colonial Punjab.This largely unchanged reprint of a 2014 edition published in India is part of an ongoing collaboration between Aakar Books (Delhi) and Routledge to release the former's publications to an international audience.The short book includes an introduction and four chapters, lightly edited from their original versions, which the author previously presented at different forums or published in various edited volumes and journals in the 1990s and early 2000s.Chapter 1 uses the history of ethnography in India as a window into the role played by colonial science in the British imperial shift towards governing their colonies 'not only politically but also epistemologically' (p. 6) by hierarchizing and taxonomizing religion, language and caste in the mid-to late nineteenth century.Like much of the work on anthropology in India, the key figure referred to is Herbert Hope Risley, the 'administrator-cum-ethnographer' (p.60) who embodied the consolidation of science and colonial rule.Whereas Chapter 1 articulates the motivation behind colonial science, the following two chapters engage more specifically with sites of scientific and technological indigenization and resistance in colonial Punjab, the university (Chapter 2) and the printing press (Chapter 3), followed by a fascinating biography of an under-studied but key nationalist figure in Indian and Punjabi science, Ruchi Ram Sahni (1863-1948) (Chapter 4).All three chapters highlight the tension between the diffusion of Western knowledge and practices in colonial Punjab by Indian scientists, often supported (and trained) by the colonial power, and the nationalist anti-colonial project that sought to both co-opt and refashion imperial science.One challenge for the reader is that the book, taken as a whole, lacks a coherent narrative.This is partly a consequence of assembling separate papers by the author, with few changes, into a book.Although the introduction attempts to ground the book in a conceptual exploration of colonial science and technology, the reader is left to identify the threads that link the different case studies.The first identifiable thread is geography.The book is largely focused on colonial Punjab as a site of study; however, it invites the reader to extrapolate from the region to understand much wider sociopolitical directions in science and technology in India.While a common, but not always ideal, approach to research on colonial India, the evidence and arguments set out in the more Punjab-oriented chapters (2 and 3 especially) are situated in a broader colonial context.
Author: Philip Jagessar
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403955263