Science and Society in Modern South Asia

(Undergraduates, enroll in 296F. Graduates, enroll in 396F.) Modern science, technology and medicine are global phenomena, and yet scientific knowledge, as the product of human activity, reflects the social, political, economic and cultural contexts in which it is produced, mobilized and used. This course explores the dynamic relationship between science and society in South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking scientific practice as not the exclusive domain of the British colonial state, its European personnel or even South Asian scientists, this course explores the knowledge practices of a range of actors in South Asian societies. We will pursue two questions throughout: How and where did South Asians learn, receive, interpret, practice, and produce scientific knowledge? How did they mobilize this knowledge in their own political and social agendas? In these varied practical, social and cultural projects, science became a force for civilization and enlightenment, political domination and national liberation, and economic development and social transformation. In fact, a 'scientific temperament' has also come to be upheld as the appropriate civic attitude of postcolonial citizens. Through these themes, this course examines the making of the power and cultural authority of the sciences and their practitioners in modern South Asia.