Science and Its Local Readers in British India

This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in colonial South Asia. It brings together rich empirical histories of the process of selecting, translating, and publishing the sciences by indigenous elites for Indian readers in regional languages. These papers are based on printed materials in Urdu, Bengali and Hindi – three regional languages widely used across the subcontinent and often associated with distinct communities of religion and knowledge, Muslims and Hindus. Together these papers provide dense case-studies of the reception, translation and reconfiguration of scientific knowledge in a multilingual colonial context with pre-existing knowledge communities and longstanding intellectual traditions. The panel engages with an existing geography within the historiography of science in the British empire, which has London and Calcutta as its centers, by situating its inquiries in the cities of Aligarh, Allahabad and Hyderabad, and their attendant cultures of knowledge. These case-studies aim to demonstrate the cultural embeddedness of knowledge production; the interactions between categories of science and religion; and the importance of language and translation to the global circulations of scientific discourse.