Introduction

Abstract

Histories of science in India are revisitations of the colonial question. Science is ideology to be unraveled and exposed--as modernity and progress making or violence and oppression making--depending on where you stand on the interpretive spectrum. It has been seen as ideologically driven practice, as a mode of knowledge production whose history is inseparable from the social and political uses to which it is tethered. In the colonial as well as the postcolonial context, science and technology have been seen as the "ideology of empire," "tools of empire," "tentacles of progress," and "reasons of state." Yet science and technology are practices and bodies of knowledge that inhabitants of the subcontinent have engaged with enthusiasm, that they have used to invent themselves in their global, national, and individual lives. We know remarkably little about the histories of these complex engagements. A departure from current historiographical preoccupations is called for to map and explain the lives, institutions, practices, and stories of science on the subcontinent as they connect with, and where they break away from, the world at large.

‘Science for social revolution’: People’s Science Movements and democratizing science in India

“…Despite the adjectives like 'non-West,' 'another reason,' 'alternative science,' and 'hybrid science', 'colonial science', by the postcolonial scholars, as Phalkey [2013] observes, "science and technology are practices and bodies of knowledge that inhabitants of the subcontinent have engaged with enthusiasm, that they have used to invent themselves in their global, national, and individual lives." Far from outright rejection of development and modernity, "idioms that gave meaning to the developmental rationale of modern India" are used by the new social movements "as a point of departure for a critique of the actual direction of development, which has exploited, excluded and marginalised popular classes" [Nilsen, 2007].…”

Decolonizing Botany: Indonesia, UNESCO, and the Making of a Global Science

“…Decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s thus created political opportunities for designing new national science policies in Asia. Politically this was driven by an effort to leverage science for technologically driven development (Phalkey 2013 ; Phalkey and Wang 2016 ; Moon 1998 ). The involved scientists intended for these policies to generate national scientific achievements with international visibility.…”