Abstract Summary
This paper brings together histories of science, print, nationalism and empire through the case study of a popular science monthly established by Indian intellectuals in early twentieth century north India. In April 1915, a new monthly called Vigyan appeared in the Hindi public sphere. It was brought out by a voluntary society, the Vigyan Parishad, which had been established in 1913 in Allahabad to spread scientific knowledge among Hindi readers through the production, translation, and publication of scientific works. Vigyan was advertised as the ‘one and only illustrated scientific monthly journal in Hindi’, and carried articles on both technical and popular subjects as diverse as magnetism, evolution, electricity, as well as the need for science education in Hindi. This paper focuses on Vigyan to bring to light an important historical source for the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in print which has been equally ignored by literary historians and historians of science of South Asia. It engages with the self-description of the monthly as a ‘science periodical’ and ‘science’ in the periodical as an actors’ category to raise questions about the nature of the journal and the knowledge contained and presented within its pages. Finally, the paper reflects on the historical significance of “popularisation” in a multilingual colonial context, marked by hierarchies of knowledge, power, as well as languages; especially in an era of anticolonial nationalism and linguistic mobilization, when calls to serve the language, nation, and science were often deeply entangled.
