Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

Gyan Prakash

Published by Princeton University Press 1999

Another Reason

Science and the Imagination of Modern India

Gyan Prakash

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691214214

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Contents

About this book

Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation.

Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination.

But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous.

Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.

Author / Editor information

Gyan Prakash is Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories, the editor of After Colonialism (Princeton), and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Reviews

"This is a pathbreaking work. It adds a new dimension to the study of colonialism by holding up the mirror of science to the Raj and reciprocally that of governmentality to science in a colonial condition. Caught up in this double reflection, the problem of modernity appears in a fresh but disturbing light. A truly brilliant achievement."—Ranajit Guha

"Prakash offers a fascinating analysis. . . . The meticulous research and the compelling narrative make this a highly recommended book."

"Another Reason is an intelligent, sophisticated and lucid work of scholarship, which fills a major gap in the historiography of India."---Zaheer Baber, Times Literary Supplement

"In this tour de force of historical scholarship and archival invention, Gyan Prakash focuses on the political culture of scientific thought as the crucible of emergent Indian nationalism. He produces a brilliant genealogy of 'colonial modernity,' agile and attentive to contemporary postcolonial questions: the contradictory desires for both science and tradition, 'newness' and orthodoxy, the secular and the sacred. Immersed in such complexities, Prakash retrieves the aspirational, progressive voices of the freedom movement to address contemporary Indian life. This is a superb work of historical revision by a writer of great insight and imagination."—Homi Bhabha, University of Chicago

"Gyan Prakash mounts a powerful and sustained argument in this book for treating the dissemination of science in colonial India not, as conventional historiography would have it, as the gradual supersession of backwardness and superstition and the spread of universal enlightenment, but as a case of hybrid growth. As is to be expected from Prakash, the research is meticulous and solid and his presentation is clear and forceful."—Partha Chatterjee, author of The Nation and Its Fragments

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
CHAPTER ONE. The Sign of Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
PART ONE. SCIENCE AND THE RELOCATION OF CULTURE
CHAPTER TWO. Staging Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
CHAPTER THREE. Translation and Power Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
CHAPTER FOUR. The Image of the Archaic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
PART TWO. SCIENCE, GOVERNMENTALITY, AND THE STATE
CHAPTER FIVE. Body and Governmentality Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
CHAPTER SIX. Technologies of Government Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
CHAPTER SEVEN. A Different Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
CHAPTER EIGHT. Divided Love Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295