The Enchantment of Science

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The Enchantment of Science

in India By Shruti Kapila*

ABSTRACT

In critiquing methodologies of the “global” as a spatial unit of analysis or a receptacle for

influence across the planet, this essay positions India so as to assess the role and forms of science in the modern world. By taking the mid-nineteenth century as a moment of departure, it asks why, under what conditions, and to what effects Indians acceptedscience, but not biomedicine, in the high noon of colonialism. Existing imperial historiesof science that are primarily fixated on the eighteenth century cast science as a site of exchange and dialogue, thus replicating the narrative of European expansion overseas.Instead, the power of science is here understood in the context of the politics of religionand rationality. In a synoptic overview, the essay assesses the archaeology of science andthe blurred practices between religion and science, described here as “insurgent.” It arguesthat science in India was a form of enchantment, while religion had become a form of disenchanted but rational knowledge. Unlike in Europe, and contrary to orientalist posi-tions, science in India neither declared the death of God nor became “spiritualized” via

religion. Instead, science inflected religion; and religion, in turn, facilitated a rationalmediation between science and man. This specific relationship accounts for the “softlanding” of science in India and its usurpation in the service of an unapologetic nationalmodernity.

IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE WESTERN HIMALAYAS lies Chandigarh, the signa-

ture city of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architect, Le Corbusier. Situated as

it is on the site of a historical frontier, the city’s location is a confident announcement of

India’s national modernity.1 Searching for a capital for the partitioned Punjab, Jawaharlal

Nehru seized this opportunity physically to inscribe the potential of science and planningin the wake of the unprecedented violence and human suffering that had marked the

moment of decolonization. It is striking that several hundred villages were expropriated

* Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1RH, United Kingdom; [email protected] am grateful to Sujit Sivasundaram and other participants at the workshop held in Cambridge in May 2009

and especially to Simon Schaffer for his constructive comments on an earlier draft.1 On Le Corbusier’s life and work, including Chandigarh, see Stanislaus von Moos, The Art of Architecture

(London: Vitra Design Museum, 2007).

Isis, 2010, 101:120–132

©2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.

0021-1753/2010/10101-0007$10.00

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immediately after independence in this unabashed celebration of the baldly novel, with no

concession to the vernacular or the classical, the local or the historical. (See Figure 1.)

Given the powerful hold of historicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and

Nehru’s own fidelity to liberal historicism, the presence of Chandigarh as a living

metaphor for a postcolonial future requires explanation. As one of the richest cities in

contemporary India, it represents in its singularity a turning away from imperial pasts,toward the experience of freedom as a promise of scientific modernity. The architectural

style, which planned everything from streets to neighborhoods to the powerful seats of

learning and government—and indeed every pebble and plant—aimed for a disciplined

Figure 1. Jawaharlal Nehru addressing the audience at the dedication of the new city of Chandigarh, 1 January 1955. Photo by James Burke, Time-Life Pictures and Getty Images.Reproduced by permission of Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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utopia.2 In short, the city compels us to reflect not so much on the layering of precolonial,

colonial, and modern continuities but, rather, on how and why the “new” comes to be

accepted as part of the present.

Chandigarh exemplifies the problematic concerning the question of science, the nation

of India, and the interpretative purchase of the word “global” to be appraised here.3

Thisessay poses one fundamental question: Why, without much resistance, did Indians accept

science in the high noon of colonialism?

INHERITED QUESTIONS AND THE EVENTUALITY OF SCIENCE

The eighteenth century has long held the position of privilege in the historiography of

science, especially in relation to the life of science outside the “province” of Europe.

Whether expressed in James Cook’s voyages or in the painstaking collections of curios-

ities, herbariums, or insects of the European gentleman overseas, exploration, travel, and

encounter have formed the colorful canvas of the “global” nature of science. Imperial andnational history, together with the history of science, have “embalmed this chronology” as

an explanation and as evidence of the global nature of science itself.4

One of the main emphases of the more recent imperial histories of science has been to

critique and overthrow George Basalla’s tripartite model of the “diffusion” of science

from the West (or the core) to the East (or the periphery). Basalla’s model, informed by

modernization theory, further viewed non-European societies as passive recipients of

science, a circumstance that was explained in terms of a chronological lag. Moreover, the

enterprise of science in those societies was interpreted as a mutant of its “original”

European version.5 The critique of Basalla has taken three dominant directions. Pushing

the chronology back to the late eighteenth century, one method has privileged encounter,travel, and contact zones. The second approach of the new imperial and “global” histories

of science takes mobility, circulation, networks, and exchange as the central frame of

reference. In this approach, more often than not, cities (be they Calcutta or London) and

the “periphery” are singled out as sites of the making of science.6 These two are not

contradictory approaches but deeply related ones, since the focus of inquiry tends to be

either the clash of, or the accommodation between, “science” and cultural difference,

while the issues of governance and control are elided. In the shadow of Edward Said, the

acrimonious contours of debate in such studies revolve around the relative “agency” of

Europeans and others.7 Finally, the question of the instrumentality of science for empire

2 Consider the counterexample of modern Britain, which harks back to the imagined past as an architecturalutopia for industrial and capitalist society. See Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (NewHaven, Conn./London: Yale Univ. Press, 1997). Strikingly, Le Corbusier chose a low-rise building style forChandigarh, unlike the high-rise concrete buildings that became dominant in postwar Europe.

3 For a robust and critical appraisal of Nehru’s ideas about planning, science, and nationalism see Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2007).

4 For a critical appraisal of this issue and for the distinction between the “global” and the “universal” seeSimon Schaffer, “Enlightened Knowledge and Global Pathways,” paper presented at the British Academy for aconference on “Writing the History of the Global,” 21–22 May 2009.

5 George Basalla, “The Spread of Science,” Science, 1967, 156 :611–622.6

Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006).7 For two opposing positions see John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester:

Manchester Univ. Press, 1995); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation(London: Routledge, 1992).

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and the colonial state has been an enduring field of inquiry.8 In summary, the last two

decades have accounted for science in terms of its power— either minimal or at its

maximum—beyond Europe.

While much new material has been brought to bear here, there are several unresolved

problems in the current global narrative of science that privileges circulation and dialogicexchange while it seeks to counter narratives of science as histories of power. Exchange

and circulation are concepts that emanate from the examination and study of capital. It is

strange, then, to identify dizzy connections and nodal points in the traffic of ideas while

omitting the history of capital from consideration entirely.9 Moreover, it remains unclear

how networks and the exchange of ideas, knowledge, or science relate to the coterminous

centralization and statization of national and imperial politics within which science itself

became dominant. The “drift of time” surely cannot be an adequate explanation. It is

insufficient and teleological to posit the late eighteenth century as a period of exchange

that was followed by racial and colonial inequalities in the nineteenth century. On the

contrary, the late eighteenth century was—to take one example—marked by the system-

atization of race theory precisely in the context of the circulation of ideas, networks of

imperial institutions, and the inequity of power relations.10

The hold of the late eighteenth century on historical thinking has been salient because

it intersects with changing representations of the chronology of the nature of imperial

expansion overseas. This period has been interpreted as one of relative “openness” that

facilitated a context of exchange—whether of knowledge or of commerce—for a range of

actors, including scholar-officials, missionaries, and merchant-entrepreneurs who were

dependent on local informants and intermediaries. Conversely, the mid-nineteenth century

has been viewed as a time of the entrenchment of exclusive imperial policies that

overthrew earlier relations, with a view to recasting colonial societies along more strictly

European lines. In the British-Indian context, this transformation is associated with the

imperial ideological shift from “orientalism” to “Anglicism.”11 In this sense, recent

historians of science have simply restated and worked strictly within the existing chro-

nology of empire.

The synoptic survey offered here will focus instead on the mid-nineteenth century as a

critical moment of departure, with the aim of disrupting the given chronological frame-

work. There was a dramatic shift in political and economic contexts in this period. Since

at least the “reform” decade of the 1830s, the institutional relations of power in India were

fundamentally recast in favor of a distant government that stripped off the residual powers

of Indian intermediaries.12 Further, the Mutiny of 1857–1858 in India was the single

largest and most violent episode of anti-imperial resistance in that century. Beyond thepolitical landscape, social and economic processes bore little, if any, resemblance to those

8 See, e.g., Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the NineteenthCentury (New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981). On the debate about the “command” of science seeMark Harrison, “Science and the British Empire,” Isis, 2005, 96 :56–63.

9 But see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of theWorld (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

10 Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond,” Modern Asian Studies, 2007,41:471–510.

11

Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); and Jennifer Pitts, ATurn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,2005).

12 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London:Routledge, 2002); and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

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of the prior period. The 1840s witnessed an unprecedented worldwide crisis in the

economy. This crisis of “free trade”—indeed, of capitalism itself—both in the center and

in the colonial peripheries coincided with the disappearance of meta-organizing concepts

in imperial science and politics. If the beginning of the nineteenth century was mesmer-

ized by tropicality, exploration, travel, and Smithian political economy, then by the end of the same century race, evolution, and economic materialism had emerged as key orga-

nizing principles. The 1840s and 1850s, rather than the eighteenth century, offer a critical

juncture in the mutual enchantment of science and empire.

This intermediate period witnessed two divergent social and ideological processes in

the Indian context. While the colonial state became potent but distant from Indian society,

there was an explosion of the power of the printed word. The printing press, which arrived

late on the Indian scene, had become a powerful site for dissemination and debate in

various vernacular languages. The widening gap between the colonial state and the

“public” sphere from the mid-nineteenth century onward was reflected in the divergence

between the lives of biomedicine and of science in India. In short, the argument here is

that, in contrast to biomedicine, science held a considerable power of enchantment for

Indians.

Unlike biomedicine, science—in the sense of the abstract, experimental, or “pure”

sciences—was accepted without much resistance.13 The sphere of biomedicine—whether

it found expression in vaccination programs at the beginning of the nineteenth century or

in the sanitized practices of bubonic plague management at its end—became a site for the

eruption of social, cultural, and political contestation around the Indian body. From the

1830s, even Western-educated liberals rejected biomedicine; in the 1890s and 1900s, there

were riots against its application; Gandhi and many Indian public men up to the present

day have denounced it. Despite the fact that some Indian elites were sympathetic to

biomedicine and colonial officials propagated modern hygienic measures, biomedicine

failed to achieve hegemony, let alone dominance.14 This is not to assert that there was no

adaptation or internal debate within disciplines such as chemistry, physics, psychoanal-

ysis, and astronomy. Yet the critical point of distinction remains that these debates were

internal to bodies of scientific knowledge, which were already entirely accepted and

increasingly normalized within Indian public and academic life.

To clarify: there is a negative explanation for the divergent fortunes of science and

biomedicine in India that has been investigated thoroughly by historians in the last two

decades. It notes, first, that the entrenchment of the colonial state, both prior to and after

the mutiny of 1857–1858, required efforts to create a body politic by controlling the

productive and deviant aspects of the Indian body. Prior to the mutiny, the issue of “whitedeath” and the health of the East India Company army necessitated many biomedical

policy interventions to direct and segregate Indian bodies from those of the Europeans. An

equal concern was the prospect of European colonization of India—the success of which,

it was thought, could be guaranteed only through a vigorous implementation of colonial

biomedicine. This legacy was enduring, though its emphasis and theoretical foundations

13 While I am cognizant of the difficulties of the term, “pure” science is here simply a shorthand for disciplinessuch as physics, mathematics, and chemistry. For a critical appraisal see Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys,

“Science and Imperialism,” Isis, 1993, 84:91–102.14 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State, Medicine, and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India(Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1993). On the nature of colonial power see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,1997).

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were reoriented after 1857. That is, the discovery of the germ theory and a more

sure-footed colonial state together made the association between biomedicine and the

governmental increasingly imperative. As David Arnold has forcefully argued, the con-

nection between the colonial state and biomedicine created a context for cultural, insti-

tutional, national, and indeed physical resistance to the expansionist realm of colonialbiopolitics. In short, biomedicine was deeply associated with control and colonial gov-

ernmentality. The neighboring disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis illustrate the

division of the Indian reception of biomedicine and science. It is a striking historical fact

that the birth of psychiatry in India was coterminous with that of its British counterpart,

and the first institutional and legal measures in India paralleled British processes of

institutionalizing this new science. During the colonial era, Indians rejected psychiatry

altogether. Conversely, they were enchanted by psychoanalysis and psychology, inter-

vening in their intellectual construction and also, significantly, bringing these disciplines

into the public discourse of modernity.15

By contrast, the positive explanation for the acceptance of science, as opposed to

biomedicine, is related to the nature of knowledge and intellectual life in India itself. The

presence and persistence of a powerful and systematic rational tradition, both Hindu and

Muslim, facilitated the deepening and refashioning of India’s ecumenical tradition. In

other words, this was a tradition that was incorporative in its approach to new ideas.16 By

contrast, practices of exclusivity defined the boundary-drawing exercise of much scientific

and professional activity, which was then territorialized as separate scientific disciplines

in the West. Such exclusivity had few, if any, existing parallels in the Indian context,

where knowledge was accumulated and aggregated rather than hived off into competing

sections.17 By the mid-nineteenth century this ecumenical tradition was reformulated in

the public, though competitive, new world of the print media.18 This arena proved to be

productive for debating the fundamental nineteenth-century question of the relationship

between science and religion. However, the relations between religion and science in

Europe and India were mirror images of each other.

The emergence of science in Europe was an Event, in that it was a rupture in the

preexisting arrangements between knowledge, religion, and authority broadly construed as

the Enlightenment tradition. The Event of science was not constituted simply by its

ritualized contestations over disciplinary exclusivity; rather, the specific eventuality of

science in Europe was ultimately constituted by a confrontation between man and God.

Whether this involved his “death” or his “exile,” science had led, despite the dissenting

tradition within the Enlightenment, to a categorical disenchantment with God.19

By contrast, in India science was no Event. As a newspaper correspondent remarked in

15 On the perceived importance of biomedicine for European colonization of India see Mark Harrison,Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (NewDelhi/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); on the place of psychoanalysis and psychology see Shruti Kapila,“Freud and His Indian Friends: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Selfhood in Late Colonial India,” in Psychiatryand Empire, ed. Megan Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

16 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).

17 Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley/Los Angeles:

Univ. California Press, 2003); see esp. the essays by Pollock, Muzaffar Alam, and Sudipta Kaviraj.18 Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

19 Akeel Bilgrami, “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment,” Critical Inquiry, 2006, 32:381–411.

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1907, “In India, the discoveries of modern science never had to run the gauntlet of pious

prejudice.”20 The acceptance of science in India, in fact, defied the European terms of

reference. Neither the exile nor the death of God could ever be declared—that is to say,

it was never part of the possible. This is not to assert the orientalist position that has

posited the inherently spiritual nature of Indian civilization in contrast to the materialismof the West. Instead, the argument here is that the work of science was to reformulate

religion and to bring man back into converse with God, though on an entirely new footing.

In other words, while the exile or death of God may not have been inevitable, even in the

European world, the inevitability of science did not have the same political or religious

consequences outside Europe and, specifically, in India.

The perspective here is, of course, primarily that of, and from, India. I have chosen this

perspective on the “global” not merely because perspective must come from somewhere

(as opposed to everywhere and nowhere), but mainly because India has been pushed and

pulled into the globalizing world of empire and capital. Historians, sociologists, and

anthropologists, however, have sought to insert the global perspective as either a postna-

tional stage in human history or as a way of circumventing the imperial order of things.

Contrary to approaches advanced by Arjun Appadurai and C. A. Bayly, who have posited

the global as a dominant historical and cultural process, much of the recent literature has

taken the global as a unit of space and as a self-evident category.21

As opposed to the methodology of the global as a spatial rubric or as a receptacle for

the spread of influence, be it science or political thought, the argument here is that India

gave a specific salience to the global in that the two were historically and mutually

co-constitutive.22 While it is stating the obvious, it is nevertheless pertinent to remind

ourselves here that the long nineteenth century was the British imperial century, with India

as its centerpiece. Arguably, in the first instance, Britain was made complete by India. At

the economic level, historians such as Adam Tooze have recently argued that modern

economies were continental in scale and imagination, thus fueling imperial competition.23

To extend Tooze, a small island state such as Britain “needed” India to make a continental

empire—economically, conceptually, and, indeed, scientifically. From the works of the

early orientalists to latter-day nineteenth-century political and scientific writings, histor-

icism emerged as a central concept. Historicism made India into a civilization that

exemplified the range of humanity, whether to be decried or celebrated. More often than

not, though, this historicist preoccupation was recanted in the universal framework that

nourished the confidence and promise of science to transcend cultural difference. The

slippage between the global and the universal has proven to be notoriously difficult to

disentangle. Yet, as recent works have argued, the issue of cultural difference and itsreification emerged as an outcome of and operated within the historical logic of the

ascendancy of universalism and an expansive capitalism.24 As I will discuss, religion in

20 Anon., “Secular Education in India,” Bengalee, 4 Jan. 1907.21Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis/London: Univ.

Minnesota Press, 1997); and C. A. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World (London: Blackwell, 2004).22 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); and Ritu Birla,

Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.

Press, 2009).23 Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).

24 See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), for a critique of the global froma more recent philosophical tradition. For Zizek, the global is subordinated to the question of the human.

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India did not emerge as a site for the reprieve or critique of science, nor was it that science

was spiritualized. Rather, religion became the site of a disenchanted rationality.

The intermediate, mid-nineteenth-century conjunctural period of crises forced the

enchantment of all manner of relations anew and cast a long shadow well into the

twentieth century. The reenchantment of relations between Britain and India that was builtin the context of unprecedented economic extraction was transfixed by the revision of

religion and the promise of science.

THE BODY OF SCIENCE

Two illustrations of scientific disciplines in the colonial period will enable us to specify

the work of science in India. My aim, though, is not entirely to displace the normative

power of science, through either relativism or social constructivism. The object of

study—namely, science as an authoritative body of knowledge—must be held in firm

view; otherwise we run the risk of collapsing the history of science into cultural history.25

While historians have been focused on the power of science, less attention has been given

to the complex and variegated archaeology of knowledge that mediated the presence of

science in India. It is the set of relations between the normative or coercive and the

persuasive or consensual power of science in relation to society, culture, or politics that

require attention from historians. Examining distinct disciplines and their relationship to

religion will help address the question of the politics of rationality that engulfed the world

in the nineteenth century.

Astronomy and psychoanalysis are two disciplines at the furthest ends of the historical

arch of scientific enterprise. While astronomy was central to pre-European empires and

knowledge systems, psychoanalysis is very much a discipline born after the hegemony of European science and empires had begun to be challenged. Psychoanalysis is the quint-

essential twentieth-century discipline that, among other things, has had a vexed and

defensive career in terms of its status as a science. The relatively easy and uneventful

transition of astronomical knowledge between the precolonial, colonial, and national

epochs points both to the virtuosity of Indian intellectual life and, at the same time, to the

nature of social and cultural debate that such profound transformations necessarily

entailed. At the other end of the spectrum, Indian psychoanalysts and psychologists

engaged early, directly, and critically with these new disciplines of the mind. The effect

was that psychoanalysis and psychology became hermeneutic and public sites for a deep

and necessary reconnection between religion and science.

26

The relative abstraction of astronomical knowledge in terms of agreed mathematical

theorems and common astronomical observations meant that, at one level, a high degree

of consensus could be achieved between the Indo-Muslim gentry and the colonial prac-

titioners who were scouring India for precisely that kind of knowledge and information in

the mid-nineteenth century. Here, the example of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, the figurehead

of nineteenth-century Muslim reform who was himself drawn from a Delhi ashraf (gentry)

family versed in astronomy, is significant but by no means atypical.27 Equally, at Queen’s

25

Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1999).26 Kapila, “Freud and His Indian Friends” (cit. n. 15). More generally, see John Forrester, Dispatches from the

Freud Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).27 C. Troll, Sir Sayyid Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (Delhi: Vikas, 1978).

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College in Benaras in the 1850s–1860s there was a relatively easy convergence between

Sanskrit-trained pundits and their orientalist paymasters.28 The nature of this convergence

was determined by the existence of rational and testable hypotheses, on the one hand, and

an emergent Indian historicism, on the other. The latter made it possible for Indian

intellectual elites to claim priority in astronomical science in India. Prior knowledge wasa claim to authorship. The orientalist aim was to classicize and freeze this knowledge in

Oxbridge and London libraries. This, however, was an invitation to a heated debate

because of the nature of astronomy as a discipline dependent on observation in the

present.29 Equally, the claim to original and prior Indian authorship was proleptic and in

turn announced a claim to a rational future.

There was, however, another equally potent level on which astronomical knowledge

operated in the Indian world. This was the quotidian aspect in which marriages, births,

deaths, and indeed the anointing of kings and declarations of war and peace were

understood as announcements from the heavens. It was in this everyday arena, particularly

in the second half of the nineteenth century, that the expanded world of cheap print media

found its expression. In contrast to its more scholarly counterpart, this arena witnessed

conflict, contestation, and adaptation of the differing means for the validation of author-

itative astronomical knowledge. It is in this context that astrology, that shadowy and dark

twin of astronomy, reemerged as jyotish-shastra, or what I have called, following Michel

Foucault, an instance of “insurgent knowledge.”30

In the colonial public sphere of print, it was not only an ambivalent attitude to science

that informed jyotish, samudrik , and other such practices, but the fact that these practices

were also widely deployed to forge a relationship between the realms of spirituality

(adhyatm) and science (vigyan). An eclecticism of approach informed these popular

reinterpretations of established debates. Indeed, this reconfiguration at times collided

directly with elite or established disciplines. Such knowledges, and the practices that stood

between science and religion, were not ordered into particular disciplines, nor were they

institutionalized. Critically, they belonged to the popular politics of rationalism and the

making of modern identity. They could not easily be incorporated into either the domain

of science or that of religious reform. On the contrary, these practices were fundamentally

unstructured and thus posed a challenge for liberal and reform-minded publicists and

elites. They were insurgent precisely because that term captures the range of ideas that

were related to, but could not easily be disciplined into, the established and normalizing

domains of science, religion, or nation. These practices interrupted and intersected all

these domains but were imperatively not constitutive of them. Moreover, reformist and

liberal thought alike had an ambiguous if not hostile relationship to them. Not only werethey popular; at the same time these practices traversed and shared the agenda of a rational

modernity. Insurgent practices, then, did not merely coexist with reformist and scientific

ideas but shadowed them and, like quicksilver, spilled into domains not necessarily

contained by them.

The main argument at stake here is not that Europe failed to experience a like

fascination with such blurred disciplines as mesmerism, astrology, and, indeed, theosophy

28

Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007).29 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India,

1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).30 Kapila, “Race Matters” (cit. n. 10).

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itself. It is instead that the difference remained at the level of the perspective of the

intellectual and scientific elite, which in Europe by this time had generally come to despise

or denigrate these so-called pseudo-sciences.31 It is significant that in the Indian context

the dismissal and disavowal of these insurgent forms of knowledge came predominantly

from leading religious reformers rather than from the emergent Indian scientific elite.To reiterate, in this sense the assumption of modern science in Indian public and

domestic life was seamless and indeed Event-less compared with the raging controversies

seen in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Schematically speaking, the reestablish-

ment of astronomy, for instance, under scientific modernity did not kill off astrology in

India or drive it underground. Rather, astrology and other insurgent knowledges exploded

within the print media, much to the consternation of religious reformers, including the

iconic Vivekanand, who wanted to disassociate from them and purge modern Hinduism

of such practices.32 Instead, for Vivekanand and other religious ideologues, the rational

temperament of science became the cornerstone for the reform of religious practices.

Science was to nourish and condition the transformation of religion, an agenda that was

effected through vigorous propaganda in the latter half of the nineteenth century and

beyond.

RELIGION REDUX; OR, THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

Between the endpoints of astronomy and psychoanalysis on the arch of the scientific

enterprise lay the very wide ground of evolutionary theory. I will briefly discuss the uses

of Darwin and Spencer in Indian public debate in the late nineteenth century. Spencer

(especially) and Darwin (often only by allusion) became central to social and political

debates about civilization and nationality in the Indian context. Evolutionism was highlyhospitable to late nineteenth-century Indian social, religious, and political thought. In

accepting evolution, Indian public intellectuals generally played down or ignored the idea

of natural selection, creating thereby a kind of Comtean Darwin. This explains the

importance of the thought of Herbert Spencer for both conservatives and radicals. Spen-

cer’s notion of organic evolution from the simple to the complex could be used to

reengage religion with science and also to appropriate and domesticate science as a

dimension of Indian civilization.33

The selective mining and appropriation of the Sanskrit classical tradition in the search

for “origins” of science was a peculiarly later nineteenth-century phenomenon that has

been dubbed “Hindu science” by David Arnold and the play of “another reason” by GyanPrakash. These interpretative moves and the “turn to the classical” emerged from a deeper

desire to encompass and domesticate or even “provincialize” Europe. The aim in seeking

prior originality or earlier status was, in effect, to stake a claim to the future—a future that

was to realize an Indian and national hegemony. We should not be surprised, then, that

31 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998).This is not to say that religion and science were not consistently opposed to each other but to emphasize thedifference in the degree of relative conflict in the European as opposed to the Indian context. On this see BernardLightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987).32 See, e.g., Swami Vivekanand, Hindu-dharm ke pakh mein [In Defense of Hinduism], 8th ed. (Benaras,1921), which chastises practices such as mesmerism and astrology.

33 Shruti Kapila, “Self, Spencer, and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920,” Modern Intellectual History, 2007, 44:109–127.

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national modernity both befriended science and made it purposive as an emancipatory

ideology for society and the state under Nehru.34

The fascination with the classical as part of a deep historicist claim is not so much about

the original content and veracity of science; rather, as C. A. Bayly has recently argued,

historicism was the modus vivendi by which a specifically Indian language of politicsemerged.35 Above all, historicism was deployed to great effect in cultural nativistic claims

and cultural nationalism. Yet the liberal disavowal of cultural nativism took the form of

an emphasis on the universality of the Human. This viewpoint focused on analogous

traditions of civilizational knowledge in which Western science was not so much a threat

as it was the latest entrant in a long series of forms of authoritative knowledge. It is in this

context of historicism that science was understood as a new but necessary form of

knowledge. In short, while they fully recognized attendant issues of inequity and the loss

of control, for the colonized intelligentsia in India these knowledge systems—Sanskrit,

Persian, Arabic, and Western—were established as analogies in a broader historicist

context. Nehru’s Discovery of India was thus a celebration of this historicism that lookedforward rather than backward and paved the way for the nationalist embrace of science.

The real problem for the absorption of evolutionism and historicism within the religious

context was the abandonment of a personal savior and atonement necessitated by the

theory of natural selection. But Indians, by downplaying natural selection, found it easy

to accommodate the idea of God as an evolving omnipresent Being. It is precisely in this

context, as it has been argued, that Vedanta emerged as the central message and form of

neo-Hinduism, pointing as it did to the Universal. This development did not lead to a

simple divide between the orthodox and the reformist because radical nationalists (B. G.

Tilak, to take one example) employed evolutionary thought to position Hinduism within

the natural and scientific unfolding of the history of mankind itself.36 The acceptance of

science under imperial rule was easily transformed into a political consensus around

science in the nationalist era, encompassing liberals, radicals, and neoconservatives alike.

The “soft landing” that science experienced in the high noon of colonialism in India had

specific consequences for the life of religion. One simple implication is that neither the

divorce of God from man nor the death of God was necessary for the hegemony of science

in India. This is not to say that science did not emerge as hegemonic. The dominant

emerging religious traditions might appear to be forms of romantic spiritualism and

legatees of orientalist scholarship; yet my claim here is that the dominant emerging

religious forms in both Islam and Hinduism became highly rational. They became overtlytextualized, were made predictive, and were disciplinary and exclusivist in their prac-

tices.37 To a considerable extent this was a world of disenchanted religions. Keep in mind

that the Arya Samaj, the key reformist rationalist “religious” movement, reduced the

variety of Hindu practices to a starkly simple ceremony around a single flame, a Bunsen

burner in the laboratory of religion. Meanwhile, in the stridently reformist Hindu canon of

34 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999); and JawaharlalNehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1946).

35 C. A. Bayly, “Indian Thought in the Liberal Age,” Wiles Lectures (2007), www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/

wiles.html.36 B. G. Tilak, Orion; or, The Arctic Home of the Vedas (Poona: Kesari, 1903). On the emergence of Vedantasee Brian Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism; or, Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from EarlyColonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

37 Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab (Delhi: Manohar, 1989).

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the Arya Samaj, science was completely absorbed into the notion of an originary spiritual

“big bang.”38

Equally, the dominant Deoband school, as Barbara Metcalf has shown, effectively

purged Islam’s mystical dimension, stressing instead the rationality of the Koran. Thus the

argument is deeply antiorientalist. Rather than science becoming a spiritualized religion orfaith in India, Indian religions became forms of disenchanted or scientific knowledge. To

return to the earlier figure of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan: we know that Sir Sayyid had an

overtly reformist—some would argue a “liberal”—agenda for Islam. This took the form

of his ambition to create a uniquely modern scientific institution—modeled on Trinity

College, Cambridge—in the agrarian heartland of northern India at Aligarh. The aim was

to educate young Muslims in the dominant scholarship of Western scientific practices in

the English language. Ironically, but quite tellingly, Sir Sayyid failed to win a social

mandate for such a curriculum from his co-religionists. By contrast, the emerging and

supposedly conservative ulama (jurists) of the Deoband seminary a few miles away from

Aligarh had no difficulty in integrating a rigorous scientific education into their curricu-

lum, though the material was taught in Urdu and Arabic.39

CONCLUSION: POSITIONS OF POSTCOLONIALITY

This essay has sought to decenter the late eighteenth century as the moment of the arrival

of science in India. While it is undeniable that science and empire were mutually

co-constitutive, the emphasis here has been to ask why, under what conditions, and to

what effects science came to be absorbed within the Indian context. By the end of the

nineteenth century, it has been argued, science serviced religion by effecting a wholesale

transformation of practices and dispositions. Thus science became the mode of enchant-ment for an Indian modernity without banishing God. This was not, as orientalists had

proclaimed, because India was “spiritual” rather than rationalist but, rather, because

religion itself became disenchanted. Gandhi and Nehru, the best-known icons of

Indian modernity, point to the divergent receptions of biomedicine and science.

Gandhi, as we know, made the Indian body the center of his political project of

anticolonial and antistate resistance. This stance has been caricatured and subsumed

as his supposedly wholesale rejection of science and of modernity itself. In fact,

Gandhi made the body into the fundamental resistance trope both against the Raj and

against what he saw as the inhuman civilization of science that he believed the empire

embodied. This was the central message of his seminal tract Hind Swaraj (1909).Yet

nationalist and postcolonial Indians followed Gandhi only up to a point. In general,

Indians have remained skeptical of the hegemony of biomedical science. At the same

time, however, they have remained enchanted by the promise of science, rejecting in

their turn Gandhi’s characterization of it as “inhuman.”

During the interwar period, Nehru commandeered science in the service of the

national state. It was an element in a developmental project for the emancipation of

India’s history both from political enslavement and from “backwardness” in general.

Gandhi aimed to rupture history, whereas Nehru remained faithful to the liberal

38 On the racial “origins” of Hinduism see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race (London: Palgrave, 2001).39 For a critical appraisal of Sir Sayyid see Faisal Devji, “Apologetic Modernity,” Mod. Intellect. Hist., 2007,

4:61–76. On the Deoband seminary see Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 1860–1900 (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).

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historicism of the nineteenth century. Nehru took science as a tutelary discipline for

the newly free citizenry of the Republic of India. As such, the city of Chandigarh

displays the arrogance of an unapologetic national modernity. Nehru’s acceptance of

science was part of the continued, non-Eventful, and ever-renewable acceptance of

science in India that has been going on since at least the early nineteenth century. Inmore recent decades, however, science in India has become a spectacular Event. The

display of scientific prowess—whether in space missions, in secret nuclear chambers,

or through the newly empowered Silicon Valley “nabobs”—is but an announcement

of the competitive and confrontational epistemes and practices that now enchant not

just India, but the Global.

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Documents

The Enchantment of Science