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.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Prakash gives us a great wide-angle lens through which we can view the effects of Western science in India, specifically on British colonial practices, the emerge of a Western-educated Indian elite, the search for archaic Hindu science, colonial/national reform, Indian nationalism (and the conflict between Nehru and Gandhi), and state-led industrialization (both colonial and independent).
One of the more absorbing arguments in this book is the contradictory nature of how science was conceptualized in British India. On one hand, science was proclaimed by the British as universal knowledge derived from a culture of free inquiry. On the other, scientific statecraft was introduced into India by an authoritarian British colonial government in order to keep Indians subjugated. Indian nationalists and reformists understand science as having the potential to dispell superstition amongst the peasants and remake the Indian nation. However, for other nationalists, like Dutt and Gandhi, the introduction of science into India only further pushed India into poverty, since the British only invested in industries that would bring profit to Britons. Science's contradictoriness is a compelling theme throughout the book, and Prakash handles the issue very well.
Another gripping element of the book is the relationship between Indians and science and the questions that the use of modern science poses Indians: Is science "Western?" How did early Hindus experience and utilize scientific knowledge? Can an independent India incorporate science without being Western? Prakash shows how the Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century dealt with these questions, as well as how some constructed a vision of an "ancient" India that "invented" science. Nationalist constructions such as this, Prakash explains, helped Indian nationalists co-op, or de-Westernize, science.
Time-wise, the book generally discusses the events of the nineteenth century through to partition in 1947.
Recommended to anyone interested in histories of Indian modernity, Indian science, colonial science, British scientific practices, and decolonization and science.
Thank you, India. Interesting read. Slow read. Not a particularly compelling read. I thought the parts discussing the various nationalistic campaigns launched by Gandhi and Nehru were particularly interesting but it often dragged on talking about various volumes of history composed by Indian authors that tried to put medical and sanitation initiatives into a historical context. I mean, really? Not light reading. Interesting but dense. And honestly a bit over my humble head.