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Victorian Studies 45.1 (2002) 149-151



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Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, by David Arnold; pp. xii + 234. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, £40.00, $60.00.

The study of science as an aspect of the history of British India was neglected until a decade or so ago, in part because of the cultural authority of the idea that scientific knowledge was free from political influences. Whereas imperial interests were easily identifiable in economic and political arrangements, the colonial element in the introduction of western science, technology, and medicine in the colony remained largely invisible to scholars of British India. This is not the case any more. In recent years, historians have increasingly turned their attention to the relationship between science and colonialism. A growing number of works have appeared, showing that science, technology, and medicine were central elements in Britain's engagement with India, and in the formation of Indian modernity.

The present volume by David Arnold, who has been one of the leading figures in this field, is a synthesis of the existing scholarship on the subject. It spans a vast period—from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries—but it is not a comprehensive, blow-by-blow account of the history of science in colonial India. Rather, the volume consists of a series of thematic chapters that use the optics of science, technology, and medicine to examine the complex relationship between Britain and India during the two centuries of colonial rule. This examination places science at the center of British rule in India; science appears closely involved in both the British practices to develop and rule India as a colony and the nationalist efforts to imagine and build it as a modern nation.

Arnold shows that science became intermeshed with British rule from the very beginning even though the East India Company's commitment to scientific knowledge was equivocal. Concerned above all to maintain and protect its commercial interests, the Company did not actively promote the pursuit of science. Yet, the history of the Company coincided with one of the most remarkable periods in the growth of modern science. This meant that even if the Company itself did not actively promote science, its control over India opened a rich field of inquiry to European scientists who gained a great deal of information, drawings, and specimens through their informal networks of contacts with military officers, doctors, and district officers-cum-amateur scientists in India. Without official sponsorship, these officers collected information on India's natural history according to their own personal interests during the course of conquering and administering India. The Company's hunger for revenue also spurred the collection of scientific information. As the Company surveyors traversed the conquered territory, they amassed data that was organized by the sciences of botany and geology. The crystallization of knowledge under these disciplines moved "Company science" away from the Sanskrit texts and Brahmin pundits dear to the Orientalists and rendered it more properly colonial insofar as the concerns and certitudes of Western science came to dominate its organization. [End Page 149]

What stands out in Arnold's account of the development of colonial science is the role played by the practices of rule and control. This is particularly clear in his account of Western medicine. Unlike botany and geology, medicine entailed direct government intervention in the culture and environment of India. Epidemiological research and regulations, the understanding of diseases and their cure, and the establishment and functioning of public health institutions brought the colonial government into direct contact and confrontation with Indian bodies, their scientific traditions, their culture, and their space. Colonial interests also underpinned the introduction of the technologies of the steam age. The construction of railroads and irrigation canals, the establishment of telegraph communication, and mines and metallurgical works were designed to engineer India into a modern, productive colony. It was the centrality of colonial interests in the introduction and application of Western scientific and technological practices that provoked the Indian nationalists to offer a vision of modernity of their own. This was a...

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