Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (review)

Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. By David Arnold (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000) 234 pp. $59.95

This book takes up a subject often neglected in comprehensive national surveys, that of science, with the ancillary fields of medicine and technology. Author of the pioneering study of colonial Indian medicine, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley, 1996), Arnold here extends his concerns to encompass science and technology, as well as bringing the account to the coming of Indian independence in 1947. The result is a most useful work of reference, and one full of suggestive insights. From the outset, Arnold is at pains to insist that India is not some kind of passive receptacle for Western science and technology. As he wrote with regard to technology, such transfers are "more likely to take the form of a 'dialogue' rather than a simple process of diffusion or imposition, and this was especially the case in India, which had a wide range of existing technologies and a physical and social environment far removed from that of Europe" (92). In similar fashion, Arnold argues that "colonial science," whether undertaken by Indians or by resident Europeans, should not be disparaged as a "fact gathering" exercise peripheral to metropolitan science, but rather as "a series of cross-cultural exchanges and interactions" (13--14, 211). When examined closely, however, the contributions of Indian "colonial" science to the larger enterprise appear, for the most part, limited in extent, and confined to the early, or Company, period, when Europeans were eagerly studying Indian plants, animals, and medicines.

The book's chapters range across an immense terrain, from pure science to textiles, forests, and railways. Although all are authoritative, and testify to Arnold's wide and careful reading, some offer more valuable insights than others. The chapter, "Western Medicine in an Indian Environment," for instance, moves little beyond what Arnold himself and others have already told us. The book most strikingly breaks new ground in its account of the ties between science and politics. Science in a colonial society like that of India, Arnold argues, where much funding came from the state, and scientists were directly responsible to government agencies, could never be wholly autonomous in its working. From the British side, this situation involved a preference for the study of subjects that would benefit the Raj, together with a continuing policy of racial privilege, which subordinated Indian doctors and researchers to British superiors. None of this is surprising. Most fascinating is Arnold's account of how Indian scientists endeavored to "transcend, through a dual dedication to science and nation, the prejudices and pettinesses of the colonial world" (155).

This "nationalizing" of science involved several often contradictory elements. One was an attempt to rehabilitate ancient "Hindu" science and, with it, ayurvedic medicine. These ancient texts and practices could be seen, so it was argued, as enriching present-day science. Such claims, as Arnold points out, were closely tied to the growth of Hindu nationalism, with its pursuit of cultural self-esteem, and never secured the hoped-for recognition from the larger scientific community. More promising, as a way for Indian scientists to escape a confining colonialism, was the directing of their energies toward such pure and laboratory sciences as mathematics, chemistry, and physics--in place of the observational natural sciences, such as botany and geology, that the British had favored in order to master India. In that way, they were able to make modern science their own, and secure international recognition, most notably with the award of the 1930 Nobel Physics Prize to Chandrasekhava V. Raman. By 1947, sustained by the powerful support of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian science came of age.

Arnold's Cambridge History joins a thoughtful set of reflections on science, colonialism, and modernity in India with a mass of valuable information. The volume will secure for the history of Indian science and technology a central place both in the larger history of science, and...