Thesis ID: CBB845659840

Colonizing Time: Caste, Colonial Rule, and the Exact Sciences in India, 1783–1874 (2021)

unapi

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.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB845659840/

Similar Citations

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/)

Book MacLeod, Roy; (2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (/isis/citation/CBB000110572/)

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 R. Champakalakshmi; (2016)
In Search of the Beginnings and Growth of Knowledge Production in Tamil (/isis/citation/CBB168865911/)

Article Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara; (2011)
Shabnumā-wa-Rūznumā: A Rare Astronomical Instrument Extant in Two Specimens (/isis/citation/CBB001510330/)

Chapter Pollock, Sheldon; (2011)
The Languages of Science in Early Modern India (/isis/citation/CBB001251370/)

Authors & Contributors
Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara
Misra, Anuj
Hirose, Sho
Gopalakrishnan, Divya Rama
R. Champakalakshmi
Verdon, Noémie
Concepts
Colonialism
Astronomy
Sanskrit
Imperialism
Great Britain, colonies
Mathematics
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
17th century
Early modern
Medieval
Places
India
Philippines
South Asia
West Indies
South Africa
Latin America
Institutions
Manila Observatory (Philippines)
Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science
East India Company (English)
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment