Princeton History of Science Seminar

October 24, 2003

 

PLURALITY AND TRANSITION: KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY INDIA

DAVID ARNOLD

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

 

 

In thinking about scientific knowledge in 19^th-century India, we are thinking about a complex society with a multiplicity of different systems or traditions of knowledge. Indian society was characterized horizontally by widely different cultural layers (from varieties of ‘folk’ knowledge to a philosophically-minded brahmanical elite) and compounded, as colonialism took hold, by an ‘indigenous’/‘colonial’ or ‘Indian’/ ‘Western’ divide. It was divided laterally between regional cultures (which found expression in languages as diverse as Urdu, Tamil and Bengali), by religious-based distinctions (as between Sanskritic and Persianate literate cultures), and by rural/urban differences. And Indian society was further marked temporally by great enormous shifts in the form, content and modes of delivery of scientific knowledge over the course of the period. To seek to bring these almost kaleidoscopic multiplicities together within a single interpretive schema (without sacrificing the subtly nuanced picture that recent scholarship has helped bring to light) is thus no easy task.

 

1.  Seeing ‘Systems’

A useful place to begin might be with the idea of ‘systems’ itself. One of the ways in which scholars, especially in the history and anthropology of medicine, sought to engage with the problem of plural knowledges in 19^th- and early 20^th-century India was to think in terms of different ‘systems.’ In this Charles Leslie’s pioneering work, in a volume unabashedly entitled Asian Medical Systems, served as an important exemplar (Leslie 1976). This suggested that one could look analytically and comparatively at Western medicine alongside the three ‘great’ medical systems of China (Traditional Chinese Medicine), India (Ayurveda) and the Middle East (Unani tibb) as historical and cultural equivalents. The point was not to make a judgment about their relative efficacy or to interrogate their intellectual, physiological and therapeutic claims in the harsh light of Western scientific medicine; but to recognize that many millions of people across Asia subscribed to these systems, that they had long and largely independent lineages, supported by ancient textual authority in the relevant classicial languages (Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic/Persian), and were deeply embedded in their respective cultural traditions. They had a distinct body of specialist practitioners (vaidyas, hakims etc.), and possessed, as systems, a high degree of internal coherence and logical consistency. As if to underscore their equivalence, all seemed to shared a basic humoral system of physiology and diagnostics, as did Hippocratic/Galenic medicine in the West until the rise of modern ‘biomedicine,’ and all three had managed to survive, or variously adapt, to the increasing dominance of their Western (or ‘cosmopolitan’) rival (Leslie and Young 1992: 4-6).

It is highly significant that this relativist position, recognizing rather than appraising the different cultural traditions and internal rationalities of Asian medical ‘systems,’ grew out anthropology and the discussion of medicine (rather than some other field of scientific knowledge). However, it was not, in fact, a new idea as far as India was concerned. Indeed, the idea of a Hindu (or Ayurvedic) ‘system’ of medicine was explicit in a number of early 19^th-century European texts, notably J. F. Royle’s Antiquity of Hindoo Medicine (1837) and T. A. Wise’s Commentary on the Hindu System of Medicine, first published in 1845. While pandits might be consulted with respect to their own inherited knowledge and munshis used to translate and interpret texts, it was the texts themselves that were seen to embody this knowledge system (in part because the science of Ayurveda was seen to have declined since its ancient apogee). Thus Wise aimed to reveal the ‘Hindu science of medicine’ through the translation and analysis of the relevant Sanskrit texts or shastras while at the same time (note the utilitarian and judgmental strain) reducing ‘the medical knowledge of the ancient Hindus to what I suppose to be the best order for exhibiting its real value’ (Wise 1860: iii). Royle’s grasp of Indian languages might have been less secure than Wise’s, but he was nonetheless concerned on the basis of both texts and what could be observed of contemporary bazaar medicines to make the case for the antiquity of Ayurveda and its likely influence upon the later Greek and Arabic medical ‘systems.’

In the early 19^th century the idea of ‘systems’ was applicable to other fields of scientific knowledge besides medicine. Indeed, the use of the term ‘system’ (and the modes of thinking it implied) as applied to medicine explicitly drew upon the model of Western botanical science, especially the Linnaean, and later the Natural, ‘systems’ of plant taxonomy (Royle 1837: 5-6; O’Shaugnessy 1844: v). In this way it became possible for European Orientalists (not a few of whom had a medical and botanical training) to think of ‘Hindu science’ as having a distinct history (mostly conceptualized in terms of remarkable early achievement and long subsequent decline) and an internal coherence and rationality of its own. Although thought of as a ‘Hindu’ system of medicine, drawing its ultimate authority from the gods and the Vedas, Ayurveda was seen in its uncorrupted form to be a largely secular body of medical ideas and practices. Nonetheless, given the prevailing Orientalist representation of Indian history as a triptych made up of three periods and three corresponding political and cultural regimes – ancient/Hindu: medieval/Muslim: modern/European – there was a tendency not only to equate Ayurveda with Hindu but also, as if only for the sake of completeness and comparability, to extend a similar description to ‘Muslim’ science (thus representing Unani tibb as ‘Muslim’ medicine and Muslim hakims as the counterparts of Hindu vaidyas) as well, though significantly Europeans were extremely chary about seeing their own scientific systems as correspondingly ‘Christian,’ though some Indian critics were quick to make that connection.

Given the political (and religio-communal) orientation of much thinking in and about South Asia over the past century, and especially since Independence and Partition in 1947, this division into three fundamental systems of thought has had a powerful effect upon the way in which science, especially in South Asia itself, has been analyzed and represented. The ‘systems’ approach has now become fundamental to the way in which many scholars, across several disciplines, address issues of knowledge in early modern and colonial India.^[1] It remains implicitly at variance with the idea that scientific ‘truth’ must be universal and not relativist, but few anthropologists or historians see it as their task to engage with this issue. It can perhaps be said without too much exaggeration that, in this context, ‘knowledge’ is a statement of someone else’s culturally grounded belief.  

Even apart from any wish to subject such ‘knowledges’ to what is considered to be ‘scientific’ testing, there are several problems with the ‘systems’ approach. One is the difficulty of establishing equivalence. For example, while the identification of Ayurveda with Hinduism can be shown to be historically and culturally viable, to represent Unani tibb as ‘Muslim medicine’ is misleading, if not frankly erroneous. As its name indicates it was, in origin, ‘Greek’ or ‘Ionian’ medicine: its practitioners in 19^th and early 20^th century South Asia may have been mainly (but not exclusively?) Muslims, but the system drew its authority from Hippocrates, Avicenna and Galen, not from the Prophet or ancient Arabia, and it was seldom seen as being integral to Islamic identity in South Asia. Although Unani tibb had to some extent evolved symbiotically with Ayurveda (and with India’s physical and cultural environment) over several centuries, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries its practitioners and spokesmen saw much in common between itself and Western medicine at an earlier stage: it had lagged behind the West’s medicine rather than being intrinsically different. The need to erect it into a ‘system’ owed much to the political contingencies and anti-colonial rhetoric of the nationalist period in which Unani was to be for Muslims the ‘indigenous medicine’ equivalent of Ayurveda for the Hindus (the epitome of this was the report of the Madras Committee on the Indigenous Systems of Medicine – note the plural – in 1923: see Arnold 2000: 183-5).

A second difficulty in the ‘systems’ approach is that of determining internal coherence. It has become possible retrospectively to assign an internal coherence to each ‘system’ of medicine, but across time and space that coherence is open to question. In the 19^th century Ayurveda, before it became ‘nationalized’ through a series of all-India conferences and the recognition of a canonic set of Ayurvedic texts, seems to have drawn upon a wide variety of different regional practices and, to some extent, regional literatures (though most ‘classical’ Ayurvedic works were in Sanskrit, many texts circulated in vernacular translations or compendia, or were produced in such regional languages as Bengali and Telugu). And while it might be convenient at one level to identify Indian medical (and wider scientific) ‘systems’ as being neatly divisible by three, like nationalisms they tend to divide and subdivide almost indefinitely. For instance, does one identify south Indian Siddha medicine as an offshoot and regional variant of Ayurveda or as a ‘system’ in its own right? Can one talk about the coherence of ‘Western medicine’ in 19^th-century India when one of its most popular and influential manifestations was the wanton heterodoxy of homoeopathy?

A third difficulty is the problematic status of ‘science’ in relation to these ‘systems’. Much of what can be identified and extracted as ‘science’ is embodied in forms that appear to make the science integral or subordinate to wider cultural cosmologies rather than ‘systems’ in their own right. Siddha, for instance, is difficult to extract from the poetical and saintly idioms in which it has traditionally been couched. Unani medicine as understood and practiced in the 19^th century ranged widely from Hippocratic humoralism to poetic aphorisms, astrology, aphrodisiacs, elixirs, dietary prescriptions, talismanic devices and exorcism: how much of this falls within a ‘system’? In other words, these ‘medical systems’ might not (except in our eyes) be ‘systems’ in and of themselves, but part-systems, whose meanings and presumed efficacy depended upon their immersion within a much wider set of cultural norms, beliefs and expressions.    

The heuristic problem of ‘systems’ is not easily resolved, if only because we need to call these things something and to recognize that at some level of perception and action they do have elements of coherence and meaning we can’t deny. Perhaps one response is to adopt a more fluid approach and rather than talk in terms of seeming rigid and self-contained ‘systems’ to see practitioners and patients only as functioning within certain ‘traditions.’ These might be one source of the practitioners’ authority without necessarily obliging them to subscribe to all and every part of what outsiders might look for as being the characteristics of that ‘system.’ This also allows for the possibility that traditions can be ‘invented’, made or remade, consciously or otherwise, in order to suit changing circumstances.

A further response might be to differentiate between the grand idea of a system – as an overarching, theoretical construct – and the way in which individuals (practitioners or patients) think and operate locally or on a day-to-day basis. Thus a practitioner of Ayurveda might see himself as emphatically belonging to that tradition or ‘system,’ while actually employing an eclectic mix of diagnostic and therapeutic devices including those drawn from orthodox Western medicine, homoeopathy, etc., without, in his own eyes or those of his patients, losing his Ayurvedic status and identity.^[2] Equally, a patient might not see a ‘system’ at all, only a practitioner renowned for certain kinds of healing or perhaps merely the cheapest or sole remaining option. 

 

2.  A Colonial Schism?

A second cluster of issues, not unrelated to the first, surrounds the issue of the consequences of colonialism for 19^th-century India. Two divergent, but seldom clear-cut, alternatives present themselves. One is to see Western science, technology and medicine, primarily introduced and disseminated via the British, as effecting a deep disjuncture from whatever went before it and as having a profound and enduring influence on Indian society at virtually every level. Although this understanding was prefigured in colonial rhetoric, it has only really impacted on the historiography of India in the past twenty years. Where once historians toiled over the minutiae of revenue systems or immersed themselves in matters of ‘high’ state policy, they now see science is as highly emblematic of, and instrumental in, the making of the colonial order. As Gyan Prakash has recently remarked (1999: 3): ‘Standing as a metaphor for the triumph of universal reason over enchanting myths, science appears pivotal to the imagination and institution of India, a defining parts of its history and its emergence as an independent nation.’ In some scholarly scenarios this was an essentially about Western imposition and coercive intervention, most obviously with respect to medicine and public health campaigns, and closely linked to the growing power of the colonial (and incipient nation) state. But in its less coercive manifestations, on which more recent scholarship has tended to focus, it is seen as operating through a more hegemonic mode of operation (to cite the other half of the Gramscian dyad), through the impact of Western education, through the lure of scientific, technological and medical employment, or through the cultural authority modern science acquired, especially in the changing perceptions and through the ‘modern’ lifestyles of the Indian elites.

In no small part thanks to Michel Foucault and Edward Said, the idea of ‘colonial knowledge’, often contrasted with ‘indigenous knowledge, is central to this approach (cf Cohn 1996). It is, in theory at least, as applicable whether we are talking about a scientific ‘knowledge’ of rocks, plants and animals or a more evidently politically and culturally determined ethnology of ‘native’ society, since they alike reflect on common notions of superiority, difference, authority and, perhaps, in consequence resistance. ‘Knowledge’ in this colonial version of Foucault exists symbiotically with ‘power.’ If Indians became in any experiential and behavioral sense ‘colonial subjects,’ then the authority of Western science over Indian minds and bodies was critically important. The actual or implied corollary of this was the elimination or marginalization of ‘indigenous’ science, technology and medicine of those who were, or had been, its main practitioners.

            The converse of this idea of the radical nature and transforming power of ‘colonial knowledge’ is to argue (as an increasing number of historians as well as anthropologists have done) that the ‘impact’ (itself a suspect word) of colonialism and hence of ‘colonial science’ has been greatly exaggerated. The argument instead is that India’s scientific traditions remained active and vibrant, despite the partial loss of state and elite patronage due to the British takeover. Already a society in motion in early modern times, before the rise of the East India Company as the dominant territorial power in South Asia, Indians adapted to the challenge of new forms of knowledge under colonialism – whether by seeking to incorporate them into their own scientific traditions or by seeking to interpret and, where possible, to critique Western science (if only to establish their own anteriority or superior modes of reasoning). Moreover, the British themselves (including many in the service of the colonial state as well as those outside it or on its outer margins), far from being intent upon the radical extirpation of indigenous science, were far more ambivalent, recognizing the deficiencies in their own science and welcoming the opportunity to learn, empirically and intellectually, from India and Indians.

So-called ‘colonial knowledge’ was not, therefore, a monolith. Some among the British, from pragmatic motives perhaps, acknowledged the limitations of their own presence as aliens to India and the need to secure Indian collaboration or consent through a tolerant attitude towards others’ practices and beliefs (relativism as political necessity?). Others, from curiosity or respect for what was clearly an complex and ancient civilization with a sophisticated set of non-Western knowledges not unlike those of classical Greece and Rome (relativism as cultural humility?), sought to patronize, comprehend and even, selectively, to revitalize indigenous learning and to bring it into fruitful and reciprocal association with Western epistemologies (as exemplified by the case of J. R. Ballantyne, Principal of the Benares Sanskrit College 1845-62, discussed in Bayly 1996: 224-29 and in a recent Cambridge PhD by Michael Dodson). Thus, India’s sciences underwent only partial decline in the 19^th century, and continued to function, at times with considerable intellectual vigor, where colonial power and authority were weak (as in some of the residual princely states) or at core sites like Benares where indigenous traditions of learning remained strong.

Moreover, knowledge in a colonial context was not a Western monopoly but relied heavily on indigenous inputs and agency. Latterly, from the late 19^th century, if not earlier, in an age of religious revivalism and growing nationalism, Indians, especially elite and Western-educated Indians, began to revisit their own cultural and intellectual inheritance. Some sought, from a basically antagonistic stance, to recast and re-valorize ‘traditional,’ especially ‘Hindu,’ science and to portray it as the equal of or indigenous alternative to Western science: here again Ayurveda, and the sciences associated with it, was prominently to the fore. Others sought, from within the emergent Indian scientific community, to deploy  ‘indigenous’ knowledge more to complement Western science in ways that would support their own claims to cultural and political authority within the realms of cosmopolitan science. The career of the Bengali scientist Jagdish Chandra Bose, especially in his controversial explorations of ‘plant physiology’, shows both the strengths and pitfalls of this strategy (Arnold 1999; 2000: 162-8).   

            To some extent, and given the enormous amount and variety of material (in several different languages) and the complexity of the scientific fields involved, the position one takes in relation to colonialism is instinctively judgmental, predetermined by political stance. Was colonialism an evil, all-devouring monster, a relatively benign regime, or a merely superficial presence? Did colonialism and its attendant sciences bludgeon India into unwanted change, or merely provide the stimulus, in an already rich and vibrant environment, for a new era of intellectual creativity? Did the British treat Indian science, technology and medicine with racist contempt and overweening imperial arrogance, or were there real opportunities for intellectual exchange and transnational symbiosis?

The current trend of South Asian scholarship would seem to be rather more towards the latter than the former position (though much actual scholarship mediates in some way or other between the two), away from what are seen, post-Said, as crude colonial/indigenous, West/East, ruler/subject binaries, towards varieties of interchange and interaction, often enacted on a small scale and in local arenas, rather than monumental acts of coercion and confrontation. But much must dependent on the period of time under consideration (particularly the ‘Orientalist’ era of the early nineteenth century as against the ‘high imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century), the nature of the scientific or technical field examined (botany might, for instance, present a different case to astronomy, or medicine to engineering), the scale of the scholarly investigation (and hence what is taken to exemplify the larger picture), and the nature of the actors and agencies involved (does one deal in individual lives in science and institutional nexuses or in state policies and broad discursive formations?). For such an investigation, India has many advantages.

The long period of colonial rule in India (almost two centuries under first the East India Company and then the Crown) makes it an attractive locale for looking at processes of change over time and for assessing not only what happened in India between indigenous and Western ‘knowledges,’ but also in the long-term relationship between colony and metropole. The strength and diversity of India’s cultural traditions make it a fascinating example of the role of science in any encounter between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Certainly, by comparison with its previous scholarly neglect, the scholarly research of the past twenty years has demonstrated for India, as for many other parts of the former colonial world, the importance of science within the colonial process, whether understood in terms of ideology, instrumental agency or a capacity for social and environmental change. In the following sections, as a way of giving closer scrutiny to some of these issues, I want to take up three areas where ideas of colonial and indigenous knowledge seem in different and significant ways to intersect or diverge – natural science, medicine, and science as spectacle.

 

3.  Natural Science

Although much research can be done (and no doubt will be done) with respect to such fields as physics and chemistry in 19^th-century India, most scholarly work to date has concentrated either on medicine or on the natural and environmental sciences. The reasons for this are not hard to see. It is often through present-day environmental concerns (and hence colonial environmental history) that many scholars have engaged with 19^th-century science in general and in such applied fields as forestry, irrigation and climatology. While some writing in this area has stressed the coercive, interventionist and misguided nature of colonial science, other work has identified a creative role for India and Indians in the construction of that science. Indeed, one can see here the ambivalence involved in the term ‘colonial science’ itself – possibly meaning (1) the forms of science exported, with very little modification, from Europe to its colonies; (2) the practice of Western science in the colonies as overseas observatories and laboratories, which might thus feed new information back to Europe; (3) science as practiced by Europeans (and latterly Indians) in India, but with locally evolved insights and innovations that made it to some degree different from science as practiced in the metropole; and (4) science as practiced by Indians and Europeans but reflecting the transcultural interaction between Indian and European scientific ‘knowledges.’ Or, just possibly, all of these concurrently! Rather than the seemingly fixed model of ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery,’ some historians would prefer to speak of ‘webs’ or ‘networks’, of a constant moving of ideas and information between one part of the world and another, regardless of what was ‘colonial’ and what was not (Ballantyne 2002: 14-16).     

If we look at a field like botany it is hard not to see it as essentially driven by colonial (in the sense of European rather than transcultural) science and that the degree of creative interaction with indigenous forms of knowledge was limited. Certainly, the case has, however, been made (by Richard Grove and others) that early European engagement with Indian plant knowledge and environmental thought demonstrated the extent to which Europe significantly borrowed, and learned from, India. The key texts here are taken to be the Colloquies of the 16^th-century Goa-based Portuguese physician, Garcia d’ Orta, and the Dutchman Henrick van Rheede’s 17^th-century Hortus Malabaricus: these texts, it is averred, were, firstly, much indebted to local Indian medical and botanical knowledge, and, secondly, through these important sources, non-Western knowledge was transferred to Europe and not only incorporated into European knowledge of exotic drugs and plant species but also informed evolving ideas of plant taxonomy (Grove 1995, 1996). Whatever the reliability of this claim for the 16^th and 17^th centuries, it is much more difficult to sustain such an argument for the 19^th century. Although reference was often made to the Hortus Malabaricus in late 18^th- and early 19^th- century works, and though seen as a remarkable work for its time, it was regarded as a pioneering but outdated work that botanists, like the Scot Francis Buchanan or the Frenchman Victor Jacquemont, sought to update and superceded in the light of ‘modern,’ post-Linnaean scientific knowledge. There were few, if any, Indian botanical texts, whether in Sanskrit or the regional languages, that enjoyed anything like the authority that certain Ayurvedic medical texts were beginning to enjoy, nor in the 19^th century was there a group of clearly identifiable practitioners (comparable to the vaidyas) able to present indigenous plant knowledge in a challenging or systematic way.

It is certainly true that, as part of the early Orientalist project of the 1780s and 90s, Sir William Jones sought to investigate Sanskrit texts and to interrogate pandits concerning their plant knowledge, party in order to establish correspondences between plants (such as the ‘spikenard of the ancients’) named in Hindu texts, classical literature, and Linnaean botany, and partly in the practical service of medical science and its urgent need to know poisonous from healing plants. Jones was a recreational rather than professional botanist, though it suited his Orientalist agenda to take up this work. However, he generally disappointed in what he found, which more often took the form of lists rather than evidence of a scientific system of classification or a reliable guide to plants’ toxicity or health-conferring properties (Teignmouth 1799 V). But even such a limited programmatic was relatively short-lived. Western medicine in India did, it is true, look intermittently at Ayurvedic (and to a lesser extent Unani) medicine during the 19^th century but essentially pragmatically as a source of ‘useful’ plant medicines and possible local substitutes for expensive imported drugs.^[3] It was an unequal engagement, understood from the British side to be between superior and inferior, and the practical interest in Indian pharmacopoeia was not matched by any corresponding interest in Indian ideas of physiology, which were seen to be either outdated or patently wrong. 

Although Buchanan took some pride in his own Oriental knowledge and advocated a knowledge of Sanskrit as a basis for plant identification and nomenclature, he like most of his early 19^th-century contemporaries was impatient of the inconsistency in local plant names and looked instead to the more ‘objective’ European observation of the plants and habitats themselves. (One might add that the scientific romanticism of the period, especially in botany but also in other Humboldtian sciences, also fostered a direct relationship between the observing naturalist, employing his own sensibilities and emotions, and the landscape in prospect, in ways that tended to exclude or marginalize the indigenous middleman.) By the late 1840s and early1850s, British botanists like Joseph Hooker (admittedly an outsider to India’s scientific establishment) and his collaborator, Thomas Thomson (a member of the Bengal Medical Service as well as an accomplished botanist), were critical of the unreliability and crudeness (as they saw it) of indigenous plant-naming practices and shunned them almost entirely in their published work (Hooker and Thomson 1855: 44). While Jones might look for texts, most botanists of the Company period looked less to shastras and pandits than to those lower down the hierarchy of knowledge – woodsmen, artisans, itinerant traders – who might have a more practical kind of knowledge to offer. And while the British, through a process one might awkwardly describe as demunshification, might still look to Indian informants of this lesser kind for practical information, such orally-received information was increasingly subordinated to a scientifically approved knowledge based on direct observation and experimentation (especially via the Company’s several botanic gardens) and on the known properties of plants introduced to India from elsewhere (like cinchona) or not previously exploited in that country for agricultural and commercial purposes (such as tea).

The Indian input into botany in the 19^th-century was thus a kind of second-order (or even anecdotal) knowledge, or might better be described as ‘information’ rather than ‘knowledge.’^[4] By the 1830s and 40s it was rarely drawn from any textual source, though Royle (1837: 25-6) made some use of ‘competent Hakeems and Munshis’ to supplement what he observed firsthand about plants sold as medicines in north Indian bazaars. Information otherwise came from guides, porters and plant-collecting assistants – typically, a local name (often with several language variants), some familiarity with its uses and properties (especially medicinal), and perhaps a general awareness of its range and distribution. Traveling botanists like Hooker in northeast India and the Himalayas in the late 1840s duly pocketed this information, while retaining a certain detachment or skepticism about its knowledge value (‘the villagers say that …’). Seldom (to the righteous indignation of later historians) did they make any references in their published work as to how and from whom this information was acquired, though for someone like Hooker it is often evident from unpublished journal entries.^[5] Hooker prided himself on being a ‘philosophical naturalist’ rather than a mere plant-collector, though in practice he had little difficulty (as his interest in rhododendrons and orchids attest) in combining both roles.

In an age of increasing professionalization in the sciences, most botanists of the period did not regard popular knowledge as valid scientific ‘evidence’ until they had seen a plant growing in situ (or at least, at one remove, in a botanic garden), examined it through an eye-glass or under a microscope, consulted their reference books, and classified it accordingly. For them, the real scientific knowledge lay in situating a plant in a European scientific schema (or claiming credit for its novelty in terms of species or genus), and if possible recording their ‘discovery’ in print, not in what villager X or porter Y had to say about it. To take this to an almost ludicrous extreme, Hooker did not accept what his local informants told him about a particularly virulent Himalayan nettle until he picked a specimen for himself and suffered for hours afterwards the painful consequences of his own scientific empiricism. Before the emergence of botany as a university subject (more a 20^th- than a 19^th-century phenomenon in India), Indians were rarely recognized, or named, as botanists rather than mere plant-collectors.^[6] (for one exception see Madden).

This kind of second-order Indian knowledge and subordinate agency can be further illustrated with respect to botanical and zoological illustration. From the late 18^th century onwards, many European naturalists (especially those in the Company’s medical service) paid Indian artists to depict the plants and animals they found. In some cases, as with the botanist Robert Wight in south India and the zoologist Brian Hodgson in Nepal, they went to some pains to train their artists to depict plant and animal species in the approved and ‘scientific’ European fashion. Drawing directly from fresh specimens and with the benefit of local knowledge about significant variations (for example, in migrant species, seasonal plumage or between juvenile, adult or male and female birds) was perceived to be part of the value, as Hodgson vigorously but rather fruitlessly argued, of doing science on the spot rather than from isolated and desiccated specimens in the museums of Europe. But, for all the money, time and labor expended (and their value in today’s international art market), these illustrations were rarely accepted by metropolitan savants and publishers as being sufficiently reliable for European scientific taste. Much as he freely bestowed the names of colleagues, friends and patrons upon the new plants he ‘discovered’ in India and Sikkim, so Hooker had the Himalayan plant illustrations commissioned in Darjeeling by the civil servant J. F. Cathcart redrawn by the Hookers’ favorite plant illustrator, W. H. Fitch, before publishing them in London (Hooker 1855).

This is not, however, to say that India (as opposed to Indians) was not influential and instrumental in European science. Not only did India reveal new species to botanists like Buchanan, Wight and Hooker; it also provided a laboratory for the investigation of plant characteristics and properties (as in the work on plant structure and microscopy carried out by William Griffith of the Madras Medical Service in the early 1840s) and into their commercial uses (especially by J. F. Royle as superintendent of the Saharanpur botanic garden in north India and later as advisor on economic botany to the East India Company in London). India did more than allow Hooker to explore the rich flora of the northeast: it also enabled him to observe the complex relationship between ‘tropical,’ ‘temperate,’ and ‘arctic’ flora and their physical surroundings, and to raise questions, of keen interest to his friend Charles Darwin in his quest for ‘the origin of species’, about the factors underlying the distribution and variation of plant species (Hooker 1852, 1854). But this was a science founded on the interaction between itinerant metropolitan scientist and South Asian environment: there was very little here by way of Indian agency or scientific mediation. If this were the case with botany and zoology, it was even more so of geology where Indian informants and Indian science had almost no place at all.

India did not challenge the universality of Western science either by presenting an alternative view of the natural world or by presenting challenges that could not readily be incorporated into or reconciled with Western ‘laws’ and ‘models.’ Its plant life might differ in certain illuminating respects, its Himalayan mountain-building and peninsular lava-flows might be particularly spectacular examples of their kind, but they did not force a radical rethinking of the principles of Western science. Indeed, in being able to speak for the ‘tropics’ as well as for the ‘temperate’ world, as he was through his botanical travels and observations, Hooker exemplified the aspiring universality of 19^th-century Western science.        

At a more general level, it might be argued that European scientific ideas of ‘the environment’ (before such a concept actually existed in Western science) were informed by Indian ideas and sensibilities, whether in such matters as tree-planting, animal conservation, or in identifying the characteristic forms of the Indian landscape. Certainly, until about the late1840s there was a kind of Orientalist invocation of Indian mythology and popular culture to give accounts of the Indian landscape (and its associated plants and animals) a local context and significance – for instance, with respect to ‘sacred’ trees like the peepul (ficus religiosa), or to account for the sanctity attributed to particular rivers or mountain-tops or that of certain animals (e.g., Madden 1848). Equally, colonial science drew upon indigenous tropes and precedents where and when it suited it to do so, but that does not signify much actual transcultural engagement. Tree-planting and other conservation measures were adopted because they made economic or environmental sense to the British, not because they were beholden to Indian logic or aesthetics. Words like ‘jungle’ were taken up and incorporated into the rich language of Anglo-Indian topography and climate (along with ‘monsoon’, ‘ghat’, ‘tope’, ‘nullah’ etc.) because they were a convenient way of referring to certain readily observable features and had a certain undemanding exoticism about them (of the kind that travel writers as well as medical topographers enjoyed in giving local color and apparent authority to their work). But the way in which ‘jungle’ (originally a barren waste, not a place of dense and luxuriant vegetation) and ‘monsoon’ (a seasonal wind rather than the rainy season itself) steadily shifted their meaning through anglicized use was indicative of their changing identity once they entered colonial service or became incorporated into scientific literature.  

 

4.  Medicine

 Medicine represents a rather different kind of case study in this colonial encounter in India, one in which a far greater degree of Indian agency, engagement and cultural reciprocity was involved. I think there are several reasons for this. Firstly, health, especially the health of its European soldiers and civil servants, was a pressing concern for the British in 19^th-century India, especially in the early decades of the century when they appeared to be under constant siege from cholera, malaria and dysentery, and when the revenue (and even security) interests of the state where seriously threatened by epidemic and endemic disease. Secondly, in this most practical of fields, medicine could clearly be judged by its effectiveness and, given the obvious fallibility of most European surgical and therapeutic measures at the time, there appeared, at least until about the 1840s, to be much that might be learned from observing and conversing with Indian medical practitioners (themselves a readily identifiable body of individuals, armed with medical texts and traditions of their own). Thirdly, medicine was, all too obviously, closely implicated in a whole world of cultural thought and existence: smallpox, for instance, was intimately bound up not only with such existing practices as variolation (and hence its rivalry with vaccination) but also with Hindu disease deities and the rites and rituals associated with the goddess Sitala. Interventionist measures against such a disease were bound to produce a reaction of some sort, whether appreciative or antagonistic (Arnold 1993). And, finally, in an age when the effects of specific drugs and therapies were so difficult to anticipate or explain, medicine lent itself to a kind of relativism, to an openness of interpretation as to cause and cure, that was less possible in, say, describing the properties or reactions of chemicals.

Despite its empiricism, medicine could also be politicized in ways that botany or geology generally could not: it lent itself to a polemical linking of the individual to a wider body of thought and social action – of religious community, of society at large, of the colonial state. Guns were fired in celebration at Fort William in Calcutta in 1836 when Indians performed their first human autopsy (in modern times); no such public celebration accompanied the discovery of the Siwalik fossils (momentous though they were), or the identification of Mt Everest as the world’s highest peak. As medicine, over the course of the 19^th century, expanded into public health and the attempt to change or control people’s lives – to vaccinate them, sanitize homes and workplaces, confine them in lock hospitals or plague camps. While medicine had been one of the most developed of all Indian scientific fields, there had been no real precedents for the idea and practice of public health. It involved a direct relationship between state and self that was by the 1890s and over much of British India hard to avoid or ignore: what place did it leave for Indian medicine and an Indian (or Hindu, or Muslim) conception of the body, of society and state? In such a context it was hard not to think of rival ‘systems’ or ‘traditions’ of medicine (Hume 1977).  

            The nature of this encounter between, crudely speaking, Western and Indian medicine can be understood as occurring differently at different times and in different cultural and social spaces and any more sophisticated analysis (than this brief account can possibly hope to be) would need to disaggregate accordingly.^[7] I can only here offer a few indicative themes.

 

The Power of Localism. In the complex world of 19^th medical thought and practice, it was difficult to ignore what was locally specific, while yet holding onto a belief in universality. The Hippocratic corpus (to which both European and Unani medicine were indebted), as well as the Ayurvedic tradition, encouraged the physician to pay close attention to local conditions, and the ‘airs, waters and places’ of India were not only very different from one part of India to another but might be seen to diverge collectively from those of Europe itself. The seasons, for example, were significantly different from Europe’s, and there was much debate over how European ‘constitutions’ (or, in later 19^th century thought, racial identities) might materially different from those of Indians, or those of rice-eating Bengalis, living in a hot, wet delta region, might differ from those of wheat- and meat-eating Punjabis in the drier, more temperate plains of north India. It was not unknown for colonial medical authorities in India to assert, as Charles Morehead did in mid-century Bombay, that disease in India was not the same as disease in Europe, and debates over the etiology of cholera reflected much the same idea of the local specificity of disease causation and transmission (Arnold 2000: 81-6). While some of these differences were eroded by advances in medical thought and practice over the course of the century, others seemed to emergence to reinforce old ideas of climatic and environmental difference, even if they did not purport to undermine claims for the universality of Western medical science.

One example of this, and of how medical ‘systems’ might ‘talk’ to each other can be found in the idea of the tropics in medicine. This idea had become prominent in Western medicine in India by the 1830s and 40s, and it was reinforced by the rise of tropical medicine (thanks especially to Patrick Manson) as a medical specialty that had established itself politically and professionally in Britain by the 1900s. The power of the idea of a distinctive ‘tropical world,’ with its own diseases, vectors, pathologies and experts was not lost on many advocates of the Ayurvedic revival of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, who argued that Indians had ‘tropical’ bodies that needed remedies drawn from and appropriate to their own climate, diet and physical surroundings, not imported from the alien cultural and material environment of temperate Europe.    

 

The Appeal of the Alternative. Because medical ideas and practices were both extremely intimate and integrated into a wide array of cultural practices, Indian bodies could not easily be detached from their social matrix and ‘improved’ or ‘transformed’ in the ways that the advocates of Western medicine and public health might have wished. Disease was not just disease: it was no less about belief in the sanctity of disease-causing deities or the inherent evil of an alien regime that willfully propagated disease, broke caste, or tormented Indian bodies. And at almost all levels of society and in almost every region of the subcontinent there were alternatives to Western medicine that might be preferred because they were practiced by Indians rather than Europeans, because they prescribed familiar or more culturally appropriate medicines, or were sanctioned by religion and tradition, or, quite simply, appeared more efficacious. In the early 19^th century, it was possible for the British to believe that indigenous medicine would simply wither away (the ice of superstition melting in the warm sun of scientific enlightenment), and to make the derogatory claim that there was no meaningful distinction between folk medicine and the formal traditions of Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha medicine. But in actuality, the alternatives to Western medicine did not go away, nor did they lose much of their popular support. On the contrary, the non-Western ‘systems’ grew in stature as the century drew to a close and the nationalist reaction to colonialism (and the medical imperialism identified with it) mounted. Ayurveda and its allies did not have the political strength or even the cultural authority to supplant Western medicine, and in certain respects they borrowed heavily from the novel forms of the West (for instance, in establishing medical colleges and awarding degrees). But they remained a highly visible and articulate alternative, supported by those who eloquently and authoritatively argued for their distinctiveness and efficacy.

 

The Pragmatics of Medical Practice. As pointed out earlier, one of the strengths of indigenous medicine, especially in the early 19^th century, was a recognition of the deficiencies of Western medicine and the possibility that India, and its medical lore, possessed drugs and practices that the West could usefully borrow or learn from. This gave rise to extensive investigation by colonial physicians (like Ainslie 1826 and O’Shaughnessy 1844), who compiled long list of Indian or ‘bazaar’ medicines and made some attempt to identify their nature and properties. The argument that Indian medicine still had many valuable but uninvestigated medicinal substances to offer remained throughout the 19^th century, though it was an argument increasingly employed by the practitioners and advocates of indigenous rather than Western medicine.

It is sometimes assumed that in the early, Orientalist, part of this period, that Western interest was genuine and appreciative and that state support as well as personal curiosity betokened a real (if all too fleeting) era of understanding between East and West. But a closer reading of the Orientalist/Anglicist debates of the 1820s and 30s suggests otherwise (Baber 1996:198-9; Zastoupil and Moir 1999). Even in that apparent heyday of transcultural collaboration the British believed their own ‘system’ to be intrinsically superior: the Orientalist investigation of, and patronage for, Indian medicine (as at Calcutta’s Native Medical Institution) was intended to wean Indians (especially the sons of practicing vaidyas) away from traditional beliefs and practices and, through their own languages and the use of translated texts, make them converts (of the kind so urgently needed by the army and perhaps by society at large) to the Western system. The Anglicists, on the other hand, had no time even for this gradualism, and, deeming it a waste of scarce resources (if not an actual insult to the intelligence) to countenance indigenous medicine (and science more generally), successfully swept away such state support as indigenous medicine had hitherto enjoyed.

But the pragmatism of the situation continued to assert itself. Indigenous medicine and Indian agency might be cheaper, more widely available, and more publicly acceptable than expensive and still half-exotic Western medicine. And as Indian politicians gradually gained status (and influential platforms like the colonial legislatures and local self-government bodies) and as, in the face of an increasingly militant nationalist movement, the British desperately sought to maintain their Indian allies or undermine their bitterest opponents, so they found it pragmatically necessary, on purely political grounds, to accommodate indigenous medicine, even occasionally to extol it, even though they were deeply skeptical in private about its scientific status and practical worth. 

 

Mutual Admiration and Infiltration. While the differences between Western and indigenous medicine were often clearly stated, and more often implied or assumed to be self-evident, there was always a kind of middle ground in which individuals from either side saw certain virtues in the other side, without wishing to so immerse themselves in it as to sacrifice their own identity. For instance, early in the century James Johnston, a naval surgeon visiting Bengal, argued that Europeans would do well, for the good of their health in a hot and humid tropical climate, to follow a more ‘temperate’ lifestyle, to adopt the vegetarian diet of the Hindu, to abstain from alcohol in the manner of higher-caste Hindus and Muslims and to emulate Indians by bathing frequently in cold water. Johnston did not thereby expect the British to ‘Indianize’ themselves, but he did believe that they had much to learn, if they wished to preserve their health, from local custom and experience. Some praise was also bestowed, in these early century encounters, on the Indian system of variolation (before vaccination became widespread) or Indian physicians’ treatment of malarial fever, or such surgical measures as couching for cataracts or rhinoplasty. As the century wore on, such favorable notices became rarer, at least from the British side, though they never vanished entirely.   

5.  Science as Spectacle

In this final section, I want to move away from the natural sciences and medicine and turn instead to technology as the more visible face of science and hence a significant site of scientific display and interaction in India’s colonial society. It was is a not uncommon trope in the travel writing and other non-technical literature of the first two-thirds of the century to describe how Indians reacted to seeing new technologies (particularly those associated with steam power) or to Europeans’ use of the instruments of surveying and measurement. By the later decades of the century such accounts were less frequent (as the technology had grown more familiar and its capacity to transform Indian society more uncertain). The accounts here reflect only European ideas of Indians’ reactions – but that’s part of their interest.

            In order to give the full flavor of these descriptions, let me quote a few, hopefully more broadly illustrative, examples. In April 1827 Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, wrote to his wife about novel sight of the steam vessel Enterprise maneuvering offshore ‘for the gratification of the public.’ Vast crowds of Indians lined the town’s beach to see this spectacle. Munro appeared less impressed by the steamship than by the number and kinds of Indians who turned out. They included a large number of ‘respectable’ (i.e., high-status) women, whom Munro imagined

never appeared among Europeans before, and many of whom, I am sure, you would have thought beautiful, and certainly graceful, beyond anything in Europe. I scarcely looked at the steam-vessel: all that it can do may be seen in five minutes; but I wish that I could have made a panorama of the living scene to send you (Gleig 1831 II: 310-11).   

 

Nine years later, in March 1836, Lt Thomas Bacon of the Bengal Horse Artillery was returning from a lengthy excursion to north India and the Himalayas. At Allahabad, en route to Calcutta, he boarded one of the small steamers that had recently begun to ply the lower course of the Ganges. He recorded (as almost the final and concluding episode in his lengthy memoir):

Some of my servants on board had never before seen such a thing as a steamer, and their wonder and admiration were infinite, as was their curiosity to have explained to them the means by which the augun-jehaz (fire-ship) was made to go against the stream of the might Gunga, without sail or paddle. This I endeavored, as well as I could, to explain; and I further told them of steam-carriages, and also of balloons.

‘Nay, sir, now you are laughing at your slaves;’ replied Sahaduk, ‘we are credulous; it is our nature; but we are not without reason. That the augun-jehaz goes by steam we have proof, and it is therefore easy to believe that a carriage may be made in the same manner; but when you tell us of a boat flying in the air, we know that you do but make sport of our credulity (Bacon 1837 II: 433).

 

The third account comes from A. H. E. Boileau, a lieutenant of the Bengal Engineers and a first assistant of the trigonometrical survey. While surveying in Rajasthan in 1835 he visited Bikaner and there observed the curious but quiet behavior of the Indians who gathered to watch his work and who

gazed in silent wonder at the necromancer-like operations of taking meridian altitudes of the sun; in a similar manner they crowded round us in the city, ‘opening the eyes of curiosity and the mouth of astonishment,’ but still they were silent and respectful in their demeanor, though clustering like bees near the theodolite, that was occasionally set up upon their ramparts.

An English mob would probably have acted very differently under similar circumstances, and should a foreign adventurer … attempt to take and angle or an altitude in the streets of a country town, he would perhaps have his compass jostled, or a brick bat flung at his false-horizon: here the case is very different, and the spectators, after waiting patiently until the spectacle is over, think themselves highly honored if two or three of their number are permitted to peep through an inverting telescope, and see a camel or other animal walking with its feet upwards. There are some among the natives who can appreciate the value of European science, and I was happy to have found an opportunity at Beekaner of exhibiting to [an] intelligent vakeel [a scribe, named Hindoo Mul]… an example of the exceeding perfection of our astronomical tables. A large refracting telescope and a chronometer were arranged one evening previous to the expected emersion of one of Jupiter’s satellites, in order to ascertain the longitude of the place. Hindoo Mul happened to be present at the time the eclipse drew near, and seeing him interested in the phenomenon, I explained to him the nature of the planet and its moons; he looked through the telescope and saw three of the satellites distinctly, the fourth still being in shadow; and when the rim of the emersion came, as foretold by the nautical ephemeris, and he saw that the time indicated on the chronometer agreed exactly with the actual appearance of the bright little moon, he was aware of the perfection of that science, which enabled a far-distant people to predict years before-hand, the exact time of so singular a phenomenon, even in the very heart of Beekaner (Boileau 1837: 16-17)  

 

There are many points that could be made about these passages and the wider body of observation and comment from which they are drawn. Historians have commonly interpreted these and similar observations as either evidence of the actual transformation of British India by means of new technologies like steamships and railways (e.g., Headrick 1981, 1988), or as indicative of the assertion of Western, and more specifically British, dominance over India and part of the hegemonic function of science in a colonial situation (e.g., Adas 1989). I would not wish to quarrel with these overall arguments, but I think there are additional points to be made. Firstly, these passages stand in apparent contrast with those in which Indians attacked or resisted Western science and technology – assaulting survey parties and destroying their instruments, demolishing telegraph lines and bridgeworks during the opening stages of the Mutiny, or fleeing from itinerant vaccinators. Thus, in 1837-38, only two years after Boileau’s visit to Bikaner, peasants in Gwalior demolished the timber sighting towers erected by the Trigonometric Survey, blaming surveyors for the current drought and famine (Bernstein 1960: 54; cf Edney 1997: 325-30). But here all is ‘silent,’ if perhaps equally uncomprehending, ‘wonder.’ As Boileau pertinently observes, a considerably more violent reaction to surveying might have been expected in Britain than in India. In these episodes, Indians look on in seemingly respectful silence or more positively exhibit their ‘wonder and admiration.’

Secondly, although the British appear in no doubt as to the superiority of their science and technology, it is important to them that their superior achievements and abilities are publicly displayed – ostensibly for the public’s ‘gratification’ but in reality no less for their own. In this sense, admiring wonder and uncomprehending resistance are not so far apart – they represent the response of supposedly less sophisticated minds, though often the childlike whimsy and wonderment attributed to Indians at such times seems to be more in the minds of the European beholders than in the words or actions of the Indians themselves.^[8] At times, the British, individually or collectively, seem to go to extraordinary pains to make a public display of their science and, moreover, as in Boileau’s case, to elicit an appreciative response. Europe’s authority needs to be reflected in India’s compliant mirror: it must not pass unnoticed. Given the smallness of the European presence (especially in areas like princely Rajasthan) and the small numbers of literate Indians able to receive and transmit the message of European scientific and technological superiority, perhaps even given the Hindu notion of darshan (the power of seeing and being in the presence of a deity, person or object) and Indians’ fondness for a tamasha (a show or spectacle), there was perhaps felt to be a particular need to show science to the public. But significantly, it is not just a gawping crowd of illiterate onlookers who provide the audience for this spectacle, but also an intelligent, educated vakil like Hindu Mul: India has a literate culture and sophisticated civilization from which Western science also needs to elicit an appreciative response.

Thirdly, the British can be fairly blasé about their own, often fairly novel, technology (though, in their asides to a European audience, they can confess that they are not quite so that they do understand it or can explain its workings), but what attracts their attention is the Indian response and the visible impact Western science and technology makes on Indians. Thus, the vast numbers that turn out to see the Enterprise at Madras, especially the large number of women, whose high-status and beauty, as well as their normal seclusion, accumulate in Munro’s account as additional tributes to the commanding power of steamship technology, as if this spectacle were in itself the harbinger of a social (as much as a scientific or industrial) revolution.^[9] But perhaps, paradoxically, the spectacle of the Indian crowd, buzzing with festive excitement, reveling in the tamasha, full of beautiful faces, colorful costumes, and enthused with strange beliefs and exotic customs, was the real spectacle for the British. The picturesque and the Oriental were perhaps more appealing than the manifestations of a technological progress that many Britons, especially by the late nineteenth century, felt were inappropriate or harmful to a graceful, timeless India rich in pre-industrial artisanal skills (see Arnold 2000: 124-27).       

 

Towards a Conclusion

How did ‘knowledge systems’ change in 19^th-century India? They surely did so, not by the simple displacement of indigenous knowledge by its Western counterpart, but by a kind of continuing engagement and exchange between unequals. In many respects Western science, technology and medicine were remarkably successful – far beyond the formal limits of the colonial state. And yet Western science, in all its diverse and varied manifestations, always had to share part of the stage with Indian science. In some areas – engineering, say – this presence might be relatively small (though even there not absent), while in others – medicine being the prime example – it remained a more formidable rival and challenger. In part this duality reflected the complex pluralism of Indian society itself, but it was also that Indians remained deeply attached to their own traditions, sufficiently so to want to rework them in the face of the Western scientific onslaught. Equally, the British attitude to indigenous science, at times utterly scornful and dismissive, was at others (for reasons as diverse as intellectual curiosity and political pragmatism) was far more appreciative and accommodating.

To ignore the strength of local cultural and political (as well as environmental) factors in the shaping of colonial science in India and the kinds of responses it elicited would be to recklessly ignore the cultural and social history of the vast majority of the population. The history of science in India cannot meaningfully be about the articulation and dissemination of Western science alone as if it were occurring in the midst of a cultural void.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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