Kumar, Siva Prashant (Author)
Mukharji, Projit Bihari (Advisor)
This thesis is about how empire shaped the everyday practices of astronomy and mathematics, and how the methods of these sciences came to be used to make historical claims about mythic events and races. I study how British scientific institutions in India became sites for producing new linkages between upper caste Hindus and a technical modernity, which proclaimed itself both European and unprecedented. Colonial rule is sometimes understood in terms of a black-and-white distinction between dominant imperial actors and a dominated colonial population, whose sphere of action was limited to passive participation. My interest is in historical actors and kinds of knowledge which trouble this distinction, in which the methods and the interests of both Indians and imperials is detectable. British rule in India was sustained by European claims to intellectual and technical superiority, which were not seperate from, but intricately related to, projects of political and economic domination. Achievements in mathematics and astronomy were no small part of this claim. I account for the changing relationship between modern and antiquarian knowledge by following a number of British surveyors in the Bengal Delta in the eighteenth century, who attempted to recover mathematical knowledge from Sanskrit texts. Back in London, these texts were studied by East India Company administrators, in the early nineteenth century, and mined for information valuable to a universal history of mathematics. As the British established hegemony over the subcontinent, Sanskrit astronomy was seen as a joke, a mere superstitious vestige. Yet it also qualified the Brahmins hired in Company observatories to produce new data. I show that observatories and universal histories alike were made to work by incorporating upper-caste labor and knowledge into the larger matrix of imperial power. By the end of the nineteenth century, a number of Indians tried to ``engraft" modern mathematical and observatory techniques onto Sanskrit astronomy. In tracing the day to day activities of observation and data collection required to regulate the multiple timescales of an empire, I show that practices of timekeeping exerted pressure on the cosmologies of both colonized and colonizer.
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Article
Kim Plofker;
(2022)
Adaptation to early modern heliocentrism in technical vocabulary of Sanskrit mathematical astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB487780802/)
Chapter
Schaffer, Simon;
(2010)
Exact Sciences and Colonialism: Southern India in 1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001023235/)
Article
Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma;
(2021)
Who is the Native of the Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi?
(/isis/citation/CBB123032314/)
Book
Andrew J. Rotter;
(2019)
Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines
(/isis/citation/CBB861511745/)
Article
R.C. Kapoor;
Wayne Orchiston;
(2023)
Colonial astronomy as an element of Empire in British India
(/isis/citation/CBB770458313/)
Article
Mulich, Jeppe;
(2013)
Microregionalism and Intercolonial Relations: The Case of the Danish West Indies, 1730--1830
(/isis/citation/CBB001421522/)
Book
MacLeod, Roy;
(2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
(/isis/citation/CBB000110572/)
Chapter
Raina, Dhruv;
(2012)
The Naturalization of Modern Science in South Asia: A Historical Overview of the Processes of Domestication and Globalization
(/isis/citation/CBB001422693/)
Article
Sho Hirose;
(2016)
Two Versions of a Description of the Armillary Sphere in Parameśvara's Goladīpikā
(/isis/citation/CBB737286190/)
Book
Sen, Joydeep;
(2014)
Astronomy in India, 1784--1876
(/isis/citation/CBB001422483/)
Article
Noémie Verdon;
Michio Yano;
(2020)
Al-Bīrūnī’s India, Chapter 14:
(/isis/citation/CBB494234499/)
Article
Minakshi Menon;
(2022)
What’s in a name? William Jones, ‘philological empiricism’ and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India
(/isis/citation/CBB928582628/)
Article
Raj, Kapil;
(2000)
Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB000671218/)
Article
R. Champakalakshmi;
(2016)
In Search of the Beginnings and Growth of Knowledge Production in Tamil
(/isis/citation/CBB168865911/)
Article
Anuj Misra;
(2022)
Sanskrit Recension of Persian Astronomy: The computation of true declination in Nityānanda's Sarvasiddhāntarāja
(/isis/citation/CBB217469911/)
Article
Kerby C. Alvarez;
(2023)
Observing the heavens, marking time: The astronomical work of the Observatorio Meteorológico de Manila, later reorganized as the Philippine Weather Bureau, 1891–1945
(/isis/citation/CBB495169639/)
Article
Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan;
(2022)
Gomastahs, Peons, Police and Chowdranies: The Role of Indian Subordinate in the Functioning of the Lock Hospitals and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act, 1805 to 1889
(/isis/citation/CBB646215349/)
Article
Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara;
(2011)
Shabnumā-wa-Rūznumā: A Rare Astronomical Instrument Extant in Two Specimens
(/isis/citation/CBB001510330/)
Thesis
Reidy, Michael Sean;
(2000)
The flux and reflux of science: The study of the tides and the organization of early Victorian science (Great Britain, William Whewell)
(/isis/citation/CBB001560937/)
Chapter
Pollock, Sheldon;
(2011)
The Languages of Science in Early Modern India
(/isis/citation/CBB001251370/)
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