Authors: Y C Kamala
Abstract: The century between the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the founding of the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras (1857) is usually treated as a prehistory of modern science in India, a period of surveys and collections before the age of the laboratory. This paper argues that these years laid down institutional foundations that shaped how physics would later be taught and practised in the subcontinent. Drawing on published educational records and the historiography of colonial science, it examines three clusters of institutions: the state’s instruments of measurement and communication (the observatory, the Great Trigonometrical Survey and the electric telegraph); the policy debates that decided whether, in what language and for whom natural philosophy would be taught; and the colleges and translation bodies through which Indian students first met mechanics, optics and higher mathematics. The analysis shows that the physical sciences entered colonial India chiefly as practice in the service of the state, in the form of precision measurement, geodesy, meteorology and telegraphy, while formal teaching of natural philosophy remained thin, uneven and dependent on Indian initiative. The examining universities of 1857 consolidated this pattern by rewarding the reproduction of knowledge rather than its creation. The paper concludes that the later struggle to build research-led physics in India was, in large part, a struggle against the institutional settlement of this first colonial century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23472477
