Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

This book by Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is about the influence of Western science on India during the British colonial period. The book is not on the history of science. Rather it is about how ideas from the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that the British brought to India affected the Indian elite and how that elite attempted to adapt the Western ideas to its own culture and tradition to create an ideology of nationalism. This book is mainly based on the work of others rather than on primary source material gathered by Prakash. The book is divided into two parts; science and technology, respectively. Prakash first deals with the museums and exhibitions where the British “staged science to impress on the natives that the British had power because of their knowledge of science. They also used the museums to study the people, plants, animals, and minerals in their colonial territory to better understand, exploit, and control it. Rakash then goes on to the translation of Western scientific ideas into the Indian idiom for the Indian elite, many of whom showed a great enthusiasm for them. Some of the elite studied their own tradition in the light of the new ideas and reaffirmed the traditions while seeing the need to reform practices that they saw as corruptions of pristine, ancient traditions. The second part describes the application of technology by the government in public health, irrigation, railways, and other infrastructure and the desire of the nationalists to take over the machinery of the British colonial state to create a “different modernity” from that envisioned by the British. There are several topics missing from this book. Muslims constituted a third of the population of British India, and a Muslim elite had governed India for seven centuries before British rule. Yet Prakash has neglected a discussion of how Indian Muslims dealt with Western ideas; he has focused almost exclusively on Indian Hindus. All nowEuropean people had to come to terms with Western power arising from the development of modem science and technology in Europe, including Japan, which never fell under colonial domination, and China, which saw some of its temtory ruled by Europeans. A comparison between other nowEuropean societies and India would have been very instructive and is a serious omission in a book of historical analysis. There is also a pervasive use of postmodernist terminology, and I recommend this book only to those with a special affinity for that kind of discourse.