Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (review)

Abstract

Another Reason is an exploration of science’s history as a sign of Indian modernity, of “science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). Gyan Prakash seeks to understand the work of science through the analytic of translation rather than, as is conventional, an emphasis on imposition, adaptation, or dialectic. In the process, he provides a thought-provoking and far-reaching analysis of Indian and colonial modernity. As Prakash suggests, the question of science and scientific reason is a charged one in colonial situations. The new language of rule and knowledge that emerged in early-nineteenth-century colonial India—as theBritish produced encyclopedic histories, surveys, studies, and censuses— effectively constituted India through the empirical sciences. Another Reason focuses in particular on two intimately linked and yet very different ways of translating universal scientific reason onto the Indian stage: those of the British and those of the colonized elite. For the British, the empirical sciences were a universal knowledge charged with the mission of dissolving and secularizing the religious worldviews of the native; in other words, they were supposed to rationalize native societies. In colonial practices, then, scientific reason was a despotism practiced in order to liberate the colonized. In an important departure from recent postcolonial scholarship, which has looked at museums and exhibitions as forms of colonial domination, Prakash points out that this dominant discourse of science led a “distorted life” (19). Colonial pedagogy sought to instruct natives “by exhibiting their own products and knowledge organized and authorized by the science of classification” (23).