"[Science and the Raj] explores the link between science, technology, and the process of colonization in the context of British India."--Dust jacket.

This book explores the links between science, technology and the process of colonization in the context of Victorian India. It begins with a study of the concept of colonial science and then moves on to early exploratory activities in this area; problems in science administration; science education; scientific researches; and Indian responses to all these activities. Colonial scientists had a dual mandate - to serve the state and to serve science. But as the colonial arteries hardened, science became a form of official knowledge, with official hierarchies and rituals. The evolution and progress of colonial science in India reveal a pattern which can be discerned. Science had an ideology, a string of institutions, and a set of committed people to serve very specific colonial ends. The questions asked are: what were the colonial postures in science? To what extent were scientific knowledge and discourses used to achieve political and cultural goals? How did the recipient culture appropriate or redefine the metropolitan ideology of science?

Relocating Modern Science challenges the belief that modern science was created uniquely in the West and was subsequently diffused elsewhere. Through a detailed analysis of key moments in the history of science, it demonstrates the crucial roles of circulation and intercultural encounter for their emergence.

To what extent were colonial scientific knowledge or discourses used to achieve political and cultural goals? How did the recipient culture appropriate or redefine the metropolitan ideology of science? This book investigates some key questions related to British scientific encounters with India, exploring the link between science technology and the process of colonisation in the context of British India.

India is mutating – and its Science Fiction with it. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj is a critical catalogue of contemporary India’s anglophone SF, a path-breaking work that flits between texts, vantage points and frameworks. An alternative to a Eurocentric perspective of SF, this study avoids essentialising definitions and delves into how the world of SF (text) intersects with that of the writer/reader. Fusing paradigms of Science Fiction Studies, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies, among others, the book explicates how India and its SF negotiate one another. It evolves a ‘transMIT thesis’ to analyse how mythology (M), ideology (I) and technology (T) contour Indian SF and its fictional reimaginings. This study identifies the manifestations of divine beings within SF as differing epistemological categories, locates the modes of marginalisation within Indian popular imagination as altars of alterity, before proceeding to analyse how newer technologies engage with socio-political anxieties in and through SF. Interested in learning about Science Fiction and South Asia? Click on the link below to read Mithila Review interview with Sami Ahmad Khan where he discusses his upcoming volume Star Warriors of the Modern Raj. https://mithilareview.com/ahmad_03_21/

In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

Interest in the science, technology and medicine of India under British rule has grown in recent years and has played an ever-increasing part in the reinterpretation of modern South Asian history. Spanning the period from the establishment of East India Company rule through to Independence, David Arnold's wide-ranging and analytical survey demonstrates the importance of examining the role of science, technology and medicine in conjunction with the development of the British engagement in India and in the formation of Indian responses to western intervention. One of the first works to analyse the colonial era as a whole from the perspective of science, the book investigates the relationship between Indian and western science, the nature of science, technology and medicine under the Company, the creation of state-scientific services, 'imperial science' and the rise of an Indian scientific community, the impact of scientific and medical research and the dilemmas of nationalist science.