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In Stockholm on 10 December 1930, C. V. Raman received the Nobel Prize for Physics for ‘the discovery of the effect named after him’. The prize had previously been awarded to such renowned physicists as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, but never before to a non-European. Ronald Ross won the Medicine Prize in 1902, and Rabindranath Tagore, the only other Indian to receive a Nobel Prize before 1947, the Literature Prize in 1913, but it had long been seen as a matter for regret, as one Indian observer put it in 1912, ‘that none of our country's scientists have up till now been awarded this much coveted prize’. He hoped that in the near future at least one of his compatriots would win ‘this blue ribbon in science’ and so achieve ‘the regard of the world’. That winter's afternoon in Stockholm in 1930 it seemed Indian science had finally won that ‘regard’. Along with the acclaim for Bose's work on electric waves in London in 1896 and the founding of the Indian Science Congress in 1914, Raman's Nobel Prize in 1930 could be seen as a symbolic milestone in the emergence of national science in India, the point at which it finally broke free from British tutelage and control. Certainly, by the 1920s and 1930s science in India had attained a new maturity and authority and Indian scientists had begun to acquire both international recognition and positions of intellectual and institutional leadership within India. And yet, in many respects, India's science remained constrained and conditioned by the continuing presence of colonial rule and troubled by uncertainties about status and identity in India's quest for nationhood and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicine occupied a central place in Western scientific thought and activity in nineteenth-century India. There were many reasons for this. Firstly, the Colonial Medical Service was one of the principal scientific agencies in India during the Company period and for several decades thereafter. Company surgeons and their successors under the Crown provided a large share of the botanists, geologists, zoologists, meteorologists, foresters and other specialists. Secondly, partly because of their wide-ranging scientific brief, medical personnel had a vital role in the European investigation of the Indian environment (including its topography, climate and diseases), and hence in understanding how nature fashioned the human condition in India. Thirdly, to a degree unparalleled in other scientific fields and matched by few aspects of technological change, medicine represented direct intervention in, and interaction with, the social, cultural and material lives of the Indian people. This dual engagement — with the environment and with culture — helped fashion not only the distinctive character and preoccupations of India's colonial medicine, but also the manner of its Indian reception and assimilation. Although medical and sanitary intervention was initially driven by the scientific interests of the colonial state, over the course of the century medicine began to serve other agendas and to inform a wider cultural and political dialogue. From the perspective of medical history, the demise of the East India Company in 1858 was not in itself particularly momentous, and it is more appropriate to see the nineteenth century as a whole. Some developments can usefully be traced through to the 1910s and 1920s, but this chapter is mainly concerned with the period up to the mid-1890s, when, in the wake of Robert Koch's identification of the cholera bacillus and Ronald Ross's discovery of the mode of malaria transmission and the outbreak of bubonic plague in India, there was a shift away from the environmental paradigm that had dominated nineteenth-century medical thought and the emergence of new scientific ideas, institutions and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The questions that can be asked about science in modern India are essentially those pertaining to the history and sociology of science elsewhere. What is the social character of scientific knowledge? Who produces science and why? How does science exercise authority within a society and across cultural divides? As historians and sociologists have begun to investigate science, less in terms of its self-declared aims and putatively objective interrogation of nature and more in terms of its internal ordering, social construction and cultural authority, it has become clear that science is ‘a highly social activity’, one that cannot be ‘sealed off from the values of the society in which it is practised’. It is increasingly recognised, too, if not yet universally accepted, that science, far from being monolithic, manifests itself across time and cultures in myriad forms, reflecting as much as informing a given society's cultural, economic and political modalities. Science thus ‘reveals itself as much more contingent and culturally specific’ than it was once assumed to be. Individuals and groups produce scientific knowledge not in isolation but ‘against the back-ground of their culture's inherited knowledge [and] their collectively situated purposes’ as well as through ‘the information they receive from natural reality’. The social character and cultural plurality of science has a particular bearing on the history of science, technology and medicine in India, which had a well-established scientific and technological tradition of its own long before being subjected to an extended period of European colonial rule. Although the history of science, technology and medicine continues to be presented in general histories as a record of Western discovery and dissemination, it has become more widely acknowledged than a generation or two ago that not all such histories can be conflated into a single story of European achievement or saga of European enterprise overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following two chapters examine a series of debates which took place among the British and Indians in the early nineteenth century concerning astronomy, medicine, language and geography. Indian kings had fostered these forms of knowledge because they bore directly on the health and good order of the body politic. For their part, the British believed they could demonstrate intellectual superiority in such disciplines, even while they were uneasily aware that European scientific opinion was itself uncertain and divided. By surveying these debates we can examine British information-gathering beyond the bounds of warfare and statecraft. We also encounter Indians adapting their styles of argument to the new media and using them to conduct polemics about the status of Indian and western learning. The intellectual associations and alliances which emerged from such encounters were harbingers of an Indian nation. Indian protagonists in colonial debates were forming connections across the whole subcontinent and appealing to a national intellectual tradition two generations before indigenous political associations began to emerge. The shape of the Indian astral sciences The Indian astral sciences were typical of the knowledges of the ecumene. They were fractious disciplines and also highly political ones because observation of the heavens determined the correct timing for worship, war, politics and agriculture. For their part, the British grappled with these sciences and interrogated their specialists for practical reasons but also because astronomy, since Halley and Newton, had been regarded as a domain of national intellectual triumph. We consider first the Indian inheritance and then the British critical onslaught. Hindu and Jain astronomy (jyotishastra) and their associated mathematics and astrology were designed to foretell auspicious times for rites, alliances and day-to-day transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]