Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India (review)

Images and Contexts is a collection of previously published essays that certainly deserve a wider audience than most of them probably received in their original form. It is also worth noting that the essays hold together better than most collections of this sort. In all, Dhruv Raina weaves together two broad themes: the historiography of Indian science, in which he highlights interactions between Indian and foreign scientists; and the common ground between social constructivism and postcolonial theory, in which he highlights the ways in which both types of analysis emphasize a contextual approach to epistemology.

Raina's examination of theory is well grounded in detailed historical evidence. In one essay, he examines the life of P. C. Ray, one of the founders of Indian chemistry in the early twentieth century. Ray was not only active in instituting chemical research in India; he was also involved in nationalist politics, while simultaneously researching the history of Indian science. These seemingly disparate studies came together in his mind. Science held the keys to emancipation from British domination, while historical research could explain the concrete, social reasons why Indian science had "declined" in the centuries before the advent of British rule. In tying together these strands of Ray's life, Raina succeeds in showing the ways in which a social history of science might influence positive outcomes in scientific research.

In exploring this and other episodes in the historiography of Indian science, Raina emphasizes the complexity of the interactions between Indians and Westerners. He examines the exchanges between P. C. Ray and Marcelin Berthelot over the historical relations between ancient Indian and Greek alchemists. He also writes about the exchanges between the Sri Lankan historian of art and religion A. K. Coomaraswamy and George Sarton. Such interactions lead Raina to reconfigure the relationship between the "Western core" and the "non-Western periphery," famously articulated by George Basalla in his influential essay, "The Spread of Western Science" (Science, 5 May 1967, 611-22). Basalla wrote that after Europe's Scientific Revolution, science diffused out from Europe to the rest of the world in three distinct stages. In one essay specifically addressed to Basalla's thesis, Raina demonstrates that we have plenty of evidence to show that relations between the core and the periphery were more complex than that, and also that we now have a more complex, sociological understanding of science. After twenty-odd years of STS scholarship on colonialism, much of this broader argument will seem old hat to specialists, but it may be helpful for those seeking an introduction to the field. Even so, Raina's main contribution is to show that modern Indian science was coproduced with modern historiography and with anticolonial politics.