Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (review)

Gyan Prakash. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 304 pp.

Another Reason is an exploration of science's history as a sign of Indian modernity, of “science's cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). Gyan Prakash seeks to understand the work of science through the analytic of translation rather than, as is conventional, an emphasis on imposition, adaptation, or dialectic. In the process, he provides a thought-provoking and far-reaching analysis of Indian and colonial modernity.

As Prakash suggests, the question of science and scientific reason is a charged one in colonial situations. The new language of rule and knowledge that emerged in early-nineteenth-century colonial India—as the British produced encyclopedic histories, surveys, studies, and censuses—effectively constituted India through the empirical sciences. Another Reason focuses in particular on two intimately linked and yet very different ways of translating universal scientific reason onto the Indian stage: those of the British and those of the colonized elite.

For the British, the empirical sciences were a universal knowledge charged with the mission of dissolving and secularizing the religious worldviews of the native; in other words, they were supposed to rationalize native societies. In colonial practices, then, scientific reason was a despotism practiced in order to liberate the colonized. In an important departure from recent postcolonial scholarship, which has looked at museums and exhibitions as forms of colonial domination, Prakash points out that this dominant discourse of science led a “distorted life” (19). Colonial pedagogy sought to instruct natives “by exhibiting their own products and knowledge organized and authorized by the science of classification” (23).

But—and this was the abiding paradox—in order to communicate this science to the native, colonial officials felt the need to perform science as magic. Thus museums and exhibitions were staged as dramatic spectacles that, according to colonial accounts, aroused wonder and superstition. Prakash points out that this paradox was regarded by colonial officials as a case of normal European discourses being perverted in the process of tropicalization; it was this necessary failure by the natives to correctly recognize Western knowledge that justified colonial rule. But the implications of this paradox were more troubling than colonial officials admitted. Not only did the representation of Europe's originality hinge on the “native” double; more important, “as the British used barbarism to deal with the ‘barbarians,' . . . they also undercut the very ideals of civilization and progress that legitimized their power” (47). The working of colonial dominance thus undid its founding oppositions.

For Western-educated, elite Indians, in contrast, this necessary failure was very productive. Through it, they could appropriate colonialism's universal reason, and claim to be modern. Prakash argues that this other translation of universal reason (and here he understands translation as a renegotiation of the unequal relationship between Western and indigenous languages, as a process of dissemination which transformed both) transformed Western scientific truth. In many nineteenth-century Indian texts that invoke science, the superiority of Western knowledge is ascribed to conquest rather than to any intrinsic objectivity. Furthermore, scientific reason was not even presumed to originate with the West; instead, it was argued that ancient Hindus originated scientific knowledge, and that this justified the modern existence of Indians as a people. Involved in such arguments, Prakash suggests, was a distinctive hybridity. This was not the hybridity of cultural syncretism, mixture, or pluralism, where Hinduism and science adapted to each other; rather, hybridity here “refers to the undoing of dominance that is entailed in dominance's very establishment . . . . To situate science in the language of the other was to hybridize its authority, to displace its functioning as a sign of colonial power. Hybridization, therefore, served as a counter-hegemonic ground upon which the elite pressed their entitlement to modernity” (84).

This hybridization made for the distinctive nationalist form of appropriating science. Prakash refuses the...