Location
German Historical Institute London
After Colonial Forms of Knowledge and Post-Colonial Technoscience: Revisiting the Historiography of Techniques and Technology – Dhruv Raina (JNU Delhi, retired)
Join us for the fourth lecture in our lecture series in cooperation with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire. Tickets are free, but limited. Please register via our website: www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures/thyssen-lectures
Several discourses about the non-European/non-Western world emerged out of the encounter between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and went on to play a formative role in the crystallization of the social science disciplines. As far as South Asia is concerned, Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov remind us that some of these discourses go back to the sixteenth century. This talk does not foray into that territory. Late twentieth-century scholarship has indicated that there is no purely European discourse on India and its knowledge forms. What we have instead are ever so many national discourses that differ among themselves in focus and framing. Nevertheless, despite important differences, there is a family resemblance in the description, naming, and troping of colonial forms of knowledge—characterized by metonyms and tropes such as decline, deficit, a lagging behind, and so on. Furthermore, as historians of science and empire have recognized, in the framing of the distinction between science and technology there are common aspects to stories of the history of techniques and technology in the Global North and South. In other words, the framing of the history of technology is anchored in certain hierarchies and is punctuated with ideological prejudices that are employed in descriptions of techniques and technology as much in Europe as elsewhere. Thus there are noticeable distinctions between the descriptions of the history of techniques and the history of sciences in South Asia, and probably elsewhere. For example, the agronomist J. A. Voelcker, consulting chemist to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, had a very different assessment of agricultural practices and techniques on the subcontinent. He pointed out in the late nineteenth century that agricultural practices and knowledge in certain terrains and regions of India were far more developed than those back in England and that there was much to learn from them. This fissure in the two accounts—one on the history of sciences and the other on the history of technology—opens up other ways of historicizing the evolution of techniques and technology in colonial South Asia, despite the capaciousness of the trope that machines became the measure of man in the nineteenth century. Arguing against the grain of technological obsolescence, an idea so firmly anchored in modernist theories of technological progress, the lecture seeks to explore the conceptual stages towards a more comprehensive history of techniques and technology. In so doing it draws upon some of the current debates on the global history of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dhruv Raina is a leading philosopher and historian of science and technology in India. He has recently retired as Professor at JNU, New Delhi. His research has focused upon the politics and cultures of scientific knowledge in South Asia in historical and contemporary contexts, as well as the history and historiography of mathematics. Important publications include Needham’s Indian Network (2015); co-edited with Feza Gunergun, Science between Europe and Asia (2010). His most recent publication is co-edited with Hans Harder, Disciplines and Movements. Conversations between India and the German-speaking World (2022).
This lecture will be repeated at the University of Warwick on 14 May 2024.