Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (review)

Postcolonial and science studies are arguably two of the most critical and productive lines of intellectual inquiry at present. In recent times, as is evident in Sandra Harding’s work (Harding 1998) and in the special issues on postcolonial science studies in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, and more recently in the Economic and Political Weekly, there have been some efforts to identify the genealogy of postcolonial science studies even while possibilities of cross-fertilization of postcolonial and science studies are being explored. This double engagement, even though useful, has, however, created some confusion over what constitutes postcolonial science studies. For example, Joseph Needham’s work, which challenges European arrogance through its ecumenical stance rather than Eurocentrism in relation to modern science, has been cited as a part of postcolonial science studies and some writings of the proponents of alternative sciences have been (mis)appropriated as advocating for hybridity of knowledges and cultures and thereby exemplifying postcolonial concerns. Kavita Philip’s book, Civilizing Natures, is a pioneering contribution that offers to us an excellent example of what a postcolonial science study is or should be.

Philip, in this study, investigates discourses and practices of science, colonialism, religion, modernity, tradition, and capitalism in colonial India and shows how they were interpellated by each other. She deploys a multi-disciplinary approach to put into broad relief global linkages through which the Malabar, in South India, was being “civilized” under the colonial rule. Her aim, as she states at the outset, is to excavate “the intricate and mundane ways in which it [modern science] is etched into the daily routines of people, practices, and institutions” (9) in order to highlight how modern science drew its power and how it was intertwined with colonial, capitalist, and Christian proselytizing discourses and practices.

Chapter two takes us to the Nilgiri Hills of southwestern India during the colonial times when British officials likening this place to “English mud” started a civilizing process for the “natural” surroundings as well as the human inhabitants of this area. This civilizing process gained its meaning and strength not by constructing a simple opposition between nature and culture. Rather, “a reification of a pure or elevated nature, along with its pair, an elevated cultural sophistication, was accomplished through contrast with a corresponding nature-culture pair, namely, low or debased nature and low or primitive culture” (36). Further, the nature-culture pair of the natives was relegated to a lower order of progress by drawing a constitutive link between personhood and private property, which was absent among the native population. The eventual domination of the natives by the British does not make Philip presume that colonial discourses and practices had an overall hegemonic force. She shows how the Nilgiri tribes expressed their resistance through their own narratives.

Chapter three presents an analysis of colonial policies for preservation as well as commercial exploitation of forests. Philip shows how British Forest officials bought the debts of Nilgiri tribes such as Chenchus from tradesmen and moneylenders, thereby making these people bonded laborers for the purpose of commercial exploitation of forests. The expertise and knowledge of these tribes were continually utilized by the forest officials and yet the practices of these tribes that did not suit British colonial interests were branded as “evil and destructive of nature”. The economic interests of the Forest Department piggybacked on “a discourse of moral progress from savage to civilized” (68) and even though “colonial state policy at this time was dominated by the Utilitarians…the everyday workings of science and Christianity were in reality not radically opposed to one another” (69).

In the colonial civilizing of nature-culture in the Malabar, plantations constituted another integral component, which is the focus of the fourth chapter. Again the problematic for the British colonial planters was how to “civilize” the natives in order to make them productive and compliant labor force to serve the commercial interests of the planters. Colonial modernizing of the labor force...