This article draws attention to the framing of problems in the history and sociology of Indian science. It argues that physics in postcolonial India cannot be seen in isolation from the political context within which it was embedded and the international circuits within which its work circulated. Further, the article demonstrates how certain experi mental approaches, highly effective from a scientific point of view, depend upon a violent exclusion of all that is social and living from the scientific register. The article draws on the conceptual device of 'landscape', borrowed from critical work in art history, to make the link between different elements of the argument.