Book Review

Asia

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the role of science in the history of European colonialism. With this has come greater attention to the place of science as motive and agency of empire. Nowhere has this attention been more intense than in relation to British India. As Gyan Prakash observes, the emergence of modern India is inseparable from the history of science. Over the last decade, a growing and industrious group of Indian historians, among whom Irfan Habib, V. V. Krishna, Deepak Kumar, Dhruv Raina, Kapil Raj, and Satpal Sangwan are among the best known, have been mining rich treasures in the archives of London and Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. Their work has reordered our understanding of British intentions and achievemetns on the subcontinent. Combined with the magisterial studies of David Arnold, Mark Harrison, Christopher Bayly, and Matthew Edney, and commanding the insights of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, Homi Bhabha, Tony Bennett and Carol Breckenridge, we have now not only a growing body of critical literature on "imperial" and colonial science in British India but also enough differences to spark debate. To this literature, Prakash has been a distinguished contributor. In revisiting the period and place, his new book confirms his standing among the leading scholars on the history of science and culture in British India.	1
With the practices of science, the British constituted India as a laboratory for modernity. But the signature of modernity was ultimately to rest in Indian hands. Prakash applies and extends the vocabulary of postmodern studies to a set of key categories of knowledge—notably, the history of museums, language, public health and medicine, and the apparatus of bureaucracy, industrialism, and planning—and traces the passages by which Indian nationalism came to occupy ground once held by British colonialism. It was in the nature of colonial governments to look to the "sign of Science," the cultural authority of rationality, as the talisman of political legitimacy. The state "staged science" as a reflection of both temporal power and moral authority. Here, for example, the Western-influenced museum became an instrument of authority, creating and representing "objective" values, while at the same time treating India, and Indians, as classifiable objects, a people to be "civilized." So too, with Western medicalization came the colonization of the "body" and the culture of difference, underwritten by science.	2
As Prakash rightly observes, colonialism has always amplified the importance of practices of classification. To know is to name; to name is to control. The colonial state found science a willing tool. "Governmentality," in the Foucauldian sense of pastoral power, saw the ineluctable extension throughout India of Western methods of "surveying" the land, collecting statistics, regulating trade, taxation, public health, railways, and supplying the infrastructure and apparatus of the modern state.	3
It is a powerful story. Occasionally, the manner of telling—"The irruption of this dislocation unleashed another, uncertain dynamic of translation" (p. 8)—may be challenging to the pre-postmodern reader. But Prakash is more transparent, and certainly at his best, in his description of the ways in which colonial science and government both estranged and united the intellectuals of India, fostering a hybridization of ideas, a negotiation of boundaries, that would ultimately produce a space shared between European universalism and an emerging national culture. The introduction of the "museum idea," a European invetnion, at first bestowed colonial power but then challenged native elites to meet and understand their own communities. From this process, slowly and tentatively, emerged a nation state—in Jawarhalal Nehru's words, "a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads"—nuanced into modernity by aspiration and struggle and by the methods of science.	. . .