Science and the Raj, 1857-1905 (review)

European colonizers were often brutally honest to friend and foe about the links between science and power. They recognized that science provided the labor, instruments, institutions, and knowledge to justify and control empires and to generate potentially vast amounts of wealth. Imperial surveyors mapped the military and mineralogical terrain to secure victory in combat and in the race for key minerals, particularly during the era of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century.

Recently, scholars have come to the same conclusions, probing the various connections between the scientific and colonial enterprises in the French South Pacific, southern Africa, and British India. The most provocative studies combine the challenges of postcolonial theoreticians with the hard evidence of the archives.

As a historian of British India, Deepak Kumar in Science and the Raj, 1857-1905 sets out to fulfill that intellectual marriage in his study of the ways in which science fostered and stunted the growth of imperial power. This is a study of colonial science as a social practice, and also as an ideology.

Kumar's chronological bookends are the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58 and the viceregal regime of Nathaniel Curzon. Colonial science in India reached a distinctive phase by the mid-nineteenth century. Initial encounters had matured to formal offices and projects, including the establishment of universities, scientific surveys, and railway and telegraph systems. The fin-de-siècle Raj was wrestled into shape by Lord Curzon's actions as viceroy: the creation of a regulatory Board of Scientific Advice and the bureaucratic advancement of a limited number of South Asian scientists.

Kumar's sources include official scientific reports, often refreshingly personal correspondence, organizational journals and proceedings, gov-ernment papers, and the works of prominent cultural theorists. These allow him to move beyond models and phases to suggest the dynamic, often contradictory way in which science lurched along in British India. As Curzon himself phrased it in 1902, imperial science developed in a manner that was "sporadic, chaotic and wholly lacking in co-ordination" (p. 105). Kumar's volume suggests that the viceroy's typical outburst reflected more than a little truth as scientists attempted to negotiate the often hazardous paths of the administratively and socially multilayered Raj. Science policy mirrored the contradictions and in-consistencies of colonial administration.

The development of scientific education, surveys, institutions, ad-ministrative posts, and publications illustrates British India's struggle to recover from the shock of the mutiny. Kumar argues that the official response was shaped by a hardening of racial attitudes and the increasing domination of science from above, most particularly by the imperial metropole. Scientific patriarchs, such as Sir Joseph Banks, no longer pushed the levers; they were now pulled by imperial administrators.

This is to some degree a tragic story in which bold aspirations often shared by British and South Asian scientists fell prey to excessive government control in the interest of order and wealth, the discriminatory practices of social Darwinism, and personal pettiness. Kumar's understanding of scientific successes and travails in the Raj reveals the deeper nuances of negotiating colonial science rather than the old story of hegemonization and counter-hegemonization.

Kumar begins by critiquing the secondary literature on the problem of colonial science; both students and scholars will find this review helpful. He emphasizes the importance of historical context in the relationship between knowledge and power to underscore the weakness of relying upon center-periphery tensions and overly schematized analyses. The scholar marks a distinction between result-oriented and curiosity-oriented scientific pursuits. Science in British India was shaped by the appetite for, and fear of, political, social, and economic results. Forest officials were treated like estate managers, their companions in the medical service as appendages of the Indian Army.

The author invites scholars to seek continuities in the British experience in India and the overseas development of Western science. Internal war...