In this essay commissioned by Associate Editor Fa-ti Fan, Andrew Amstutz reviews “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia,” a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture (Volume 13, Issue 1, Routledge, 2022). With the readership of EASTS in mind, this essay offers an excellent review with a special focus on historiographical and methodological issues relevant in the field of STS. It provides us with a much-needed update of recent scholarship on STS in South Asia.
—EASTS Editorial Office
Over the past few years, scholars of South Asia have taken up the “entangled fabric of science and society,” in Banu Subramaniam’s eloquent terms (Citation2019: 36). A special issue, “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia,” which was published in 2022 in South Asian History and Culture, draws on impressive archival, ethnographic, and linguistic work to follow the many threads running through this “entangled fabric.” Specifically, the special issue tackles three long-standing themes in the study of science and medicine in South Asia: the interface between European categories of scientific knowledge and existing categories in India during British colonization, the question of how different languages shaped the production of scientific and medical knowledge, and the examination of how Indian knowledge cultures were radically transformed under British rule and were also the sites of significant continuities. In addressing these connective threads, the authors move between different textual genres and sites in the Indian subcontinent. While the articles are centered on the period of British colonial dominance from the late eighteenth century until the 1940s, the authors also address what comes before and after.
