In 1848, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) published an article in which he defended the theory of a motionless Earth. By 1865, he had changed his position and argued that the Earth did revolve around the sun. Curiously enough, his defense of this idea is presented in his bilingual publication The Muhammadan Commentary on The Holy Bible (1865). As a historical figure, Sayyid Ahmad is frequently characterized as a forefather of Muslim nationalism in India and a reformer of both Islam and education. Throughout his life, he established several educational institutions, publications and societies. Most famous is the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, established in 1875, now called Aligarh Muslim University. However, his attempts to popularize science in colonial India are overlooked. This paper focuses on three distinct areas where Sayyid engaged with scientific discourse in print. Bringing together the fields of the history of science and religion, print culture, and science popularization, I argue that Sayyid Ahmad was not simply translating or transmitting “Western” knowledge. In fact, he was drawing on ideas already present in India alongside new theories in his popularization efforts. The publications include the translations of The Scientific Society (est. 1864), The Commentary on the Bible and select articles from the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (A Refinement of Manners), established in 1870. Of particular interest is the role of translating concepts in Urdu. What terms were used and how were concepts translated or combined? Overall, can we as historians label Sayyid Ahmad a popularizer of science?

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.

Partha Chatterjee in 'Texts of Power' emphasizes the need to track institutional practices while tracing the emergence of disciplines in colonial Bengal. In his account of the processes of hybridization of the natural sciences however, the role of popular periodicals is limited to merely translating science for the common public. In my paper I argue that instead of using the antiquated model of “dissemination” to understand the work of popular science, an examination of the textual universe of periodicals like 'Tattvabodhini Patrika' and 'Aryadarshan' reveals the ways in which choices of genre and practices of translation themselves were preparing readers to ‘read’ disciplines in particular ways. I shall study a set of writings narrating the “history of” and “usefulness of” chemistry in the early 1870s - soon after the subject was introduced in undergraduate colleges in Bengal and nearly a decade before the making of the first professional Bengali chemists. Earlier impersonal descriptions of chemical laws and substances give way during the 70s to genres and narrative voices firmly located in the present colonial context. These perceive chemistry as an expanding field rooted in a history (part world-, part nationalist-) and wielding significance in everyday lives of readers. I argue that these vernacular writers’ disputes over chemistry’s origins or their call to readers to recognize it as a “useful” science must be read as interventions into the life led by the discipline within institutional sites in the colony.