IISER Pune, under the aegis of the British Council's Generation UK-India programme has organised:
A course on
Science and Culture in British India
Date: July 4-22, 2016
Venue: Room 201, HR-4 (Guest house-cum-Convention Centre), IISER Pune
This course charts the co-evolution of scientific (including medical and technological) and cultural thought through points of intersection in the period appertaining to British rule in India, 1757-1947. In this manner both British and Indian students learn through lectures and field visits what the syncretic results of such an encounter were between their discrete cultures. The learning outcome of such an endeavour is an increased understanding of the mutualistic effects that marked the colonial era in India and will be of particular interest to students in the sciences located in their historical and political contexts and likewise an appreciation of the evolution of the sciences in Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’ to students in the humanities and social sciences.
We employ two major points of departure, both at the turn to the nineteenth century: a) the formation of savant societies in Bengal, Bombay and Madras and b) the institution of statistical surveys, to enumerate, quantify and document the resources of the subcontinent (ranging from the heights of mountains to the conditions of the inhabitants). Through them, we examine the effects of seeking to understand ‘the other’ through the deployment of often-contested scientific principles and their diffusion in the body politic that was Eurocolonial India. How such principles came to bear upon the initiation of significant surveys – the Trigonometrical, Geological, Botanical, Zoological, Archaeological, Linguistic and Ethnographic, to name a few is a central feature of the course. Alongside, it examines the response on the part of both native and long-settled colonial officers in India to the effects of such centralising tendencies, particularly when viewed through the lens of Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, which set out to “create a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” a far cry from the original Orientalists who sought to understand the customs and faiths of a subject people as far as possible on their own terms.
Our site of intellectual and field activity will be parts of the former Bombay Presidency, particularly Poona (presently Pune) where classes will be held in IISER, and Bombay (today’s Mumbai), and where trips will be made to places including, among others, the Shaniwarwada (annexed from the ruling Peshwas by the British after the battle of Kirkee in 1817), the Kesari, the nationalistic paper founded by Lokmanya Tilak in 1881, the University of Poona which once housed the British Residency, the Aga Khan Palace where M. K. Gandhi was incarcerated from 1842-1844, all in Poona; and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum, opened 1922), the Bombay Natural History Society (instituted in 1883) and the Haffkine Institute (founded 1899), in Bombay, to get a sense of the cultural landscape of the region. At the same time a series of guest lectures casting light upon such diverse areas as literature, art, music, astronomy, architecture, technology, medicine and natural history, both in traditional form and as objects of colonial inquiry will be delivered by local specialists.
