Astronomy in India, 1784-1876

By Joydeep Sen

Indian scientific achievements in the early twentieth century are well known, with a number of heralded individuals making globally recognized strides in the field of astrophysics. Covering the period from the foundation of the Asiatick Society in 1784 to the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, Sen explores the relationship between Indian astronomers and the colonial British. He shows that from the mid-nineteenth century, Indians were not passive receivers of European knowledge, but active participants in modern scientific observational astronomy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822981657

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ASTRONOMY IN INDIA, 1784–1876

SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Series Editor: Bernard Lightman

TITLES IN THIS SERIES

1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858

James Elwick

2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science

Rebekah Higgitt

3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain

Jessica Ratcliff

4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences

Victoria Carroll

5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877

Nigel Richardson

6 Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head

L. S. Jacyna

7 Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914

Graeme Gooday

8 James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age

David Philip Miller

9 Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland

Diarmid A. Finnegan

10 Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Juliana Adelman

11 Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England

Simon Naylor

12 The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak

Ian Hesketh

13 Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot’s Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887

Josep Simon

14 The British Arboretum: Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels

15 Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons

Martin Willis

16 Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910

Joe Kember, John Plunkett and Jill A. Sullivan (eds)

17 Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870–1910

Roger Smith

18 The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871

Efram Sera-Shriar

19 Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700–1880

James Sumner

20 Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main

Ayako Sakurai

21 The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920: Uniting Local, National and Global Histories of Disease

James F. Stark

22 The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870–1914

Claire L. Jones

23 Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800–1914

Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’ Connor (eds)

24 The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and his Contemporaries

Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (eds)

ASTRONOMY IN INDIA, 1784–1876

BY

Joydeep Sen

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2016, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-8165-7   Hardback: 978-1-84893-456-6

ISBN 10: 0-8229-8165-3

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Abbreviations

Introduction

1  Researching the Past, 1784–c. 1830

2  Astronomy in the Observatories, c. 1800–c. 1860

3  Constructing Knowledge, c. 1830–c. 1860

4  Astronomy in the Colleges, c. 1800–c. 1860

5  Backwards and Forwards, c. 1860–1876

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Astronomy in India, 1784–1876 is adapted from my PhD thesis, the research for which was undertaken between 2007 and 2010 with the support of a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), linking the University of Warwick with the Science Museum. I would like to express thanks to Prof. David Arnold at the University of Warwick and Dr Peter Morris at the Science Museum, who were my PhD supervisors, and to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by both the AHRC and the Science Museum for special study visits in India and the UK during my doctoral studies. Over the course of those studies, I of course benefitted from the help of archivists, curators, researchers and students at numerous institutions, and though they are too numerous to mention, I am deeply appreciative of their contributions.

After receiving my PhD in 2011, I took up a Research Associateship at the University of Kent in 2013. I would like to thank Dr Pratik Chakrabarti, the principal investigator of the new project on geology in colonial India in which I am involved, for his advice and encouragement regarding the publication of this monograph.

Lastly, I would of course like to thank Pickering & Chatto for accepting this work for publication. In particular, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their comments, to the series editor Bernard Lightman and to the publishing director Mark Pollard for their efforts.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: ‘The Observatory at Delhi’, 1815

Figure 2.2: ‘Observatory, Colaba: Bombay’, 1844

Figure 3.1: Madras Observatory interior, 1821

Figure 3.2: ‘Plan of the Ground and Buildings of the Bombay Observatory’, 1847

Figure 5.1: ‘Sketch of the Bombay Observatory from the Electrometer Tower, Looking S. S. W.’, 1877

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The historical literature on science in colonial India is a rich and expanding field. However, while astronomy in earlier periods of Indian history has interested Indologists and Nehruvian scholars for some time, astronomy in the colonial period has attracted relatively modest attention, and indeed fostered little consensus. The existing literature on astronomy in colonial India includes works that see astronomical endeavour as part of the imperatives of the English East India Company, the principal agency of British rule in India until 1858. However, the historical literature also includes works that identify an interaction of traditional (Indian) and modern (Western) astronomical knowledge, again within the context of colonialism. In general, earlier authors seeking to chart the advent of modern astronomy in India described the spread of Western science. However, later authors stressed that astronomy in the colonial period could be about a coalescence of Indian and Western scientific ideas, and as such, representative of a dialogue within the colonial encounter. So, from a reading of this historical literature on astronomy in colonial India, it becomes clear that there are some fundamental, and as yet unresolved, questions. These relate to how Europeans and Indians engaged with astronomy in colonial India, and how this changed over the period, and whether modern astronomy was just representative of diffusive Western science, or whether there was greater scope within its practice for a cognitive interface between Europeans and Indians.

Astronomy in Indian History

The most substantive corpus of literature on astronomy in India in fact relates to pre-colonial history, and one notable approach has been that of Indology. Sanskrit scholars such as David E. Pingree have delved into the details of the Jyotisavedanga (c. 500 BC) (the oldest extant astronomical text in India) and the Siddhantas (later astronomical treatises on reckoning time, computing celestial positions and other phenomena).¹ Furthermore, the study of ancient manuscripts, many of which were copied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has led to an emphasis on the transcultural nature of astronomy. There have been reflections on the interaction between Indian, Babylonian, Greco-Babylonian, Greek and Islamic methods, with elucidation of the receptivity of Indian astronomy to non-Sanskritic knowledge and even the influence of Indian astronomy on early modern Europe.² The developments within these earlier periods of history occurred within somewhat slower-moving geographical and social time; this, and the rigorous methods of ancient-language scholarship, has enabled the transmission of ideas to be explored in such a manner.

There have been several more general expositions of pre-colonial Indian astronomy, with scholars often making use of S. B. Dikshit’s Bharatiya Jyotish Sastra (1896) and its information regarding notable Indian astronomers – Aryabhata (476–550), Varahamihira (505–87) and numerous others – and their texts. These histories have explored methods of reckoning time and computing celestial positions – perhaps the central concerns of traditional Indian astronomy since Vedic and Siddhantic times – as well as the development of astronomical instruments in India.³ There has also been elucidation of the importance of compendia other than the Siddhantas in Indian tradition. Indeed, there has been consideration of the Karanas (expositions containing mean longitudes for celestial bodies) and Kosthakas (tables for determining planetary position).⁴ The Sanskrit jyotihsastra in fact has connotations of both ‘astronomy’ and ‘astrology’, as the terms have come to be understood, encompassing ganita (mathematical astronomy) as well as samhita (omens) and hora (horoscopy).⁵ Indeed, Christopher A. Bayly notes that ‘even purist astronomical schools’ in India, associated with the observational astronomy of the Siddhantas, ‘established a modus vivendi with astrology’.⁶ Scholars have hence remained aware of the need to talk about both ‘astronomy’ and ‘astrology’, when studying the history of astronomy in India. Indeed, astrologers continued to have a salient presence in interior parts of India through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Another means of investigating astronomy in Indian history has been rooted in Nehruvian approaches to science. While much of this scholarship took place after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, its principles reflected his beliefs about India’s past, present and future. Nehru submitted that so long as he thought in terms of facts and dates, disassociated from his life’s course, ‘history had little significance for me’. Indeed, he claimed that ‘Science and the problems of to-day and of our present life attracted me far more’. However, Nehru’s urge to ‘experience life through action’ encouraged him to understand the present more deeply. For him, that meant looking to the roots of the present in the past. Nehru’s selfstyled discovery of India revealed the eclectic nature of its history and culture, with India forever ‘changing and progressing all the time’. Indeed, there were contacts with several cultures, and India ‘influenced them and was influenced by them’. Nehru also submitted that ‘Europe, which had long been backward in many matters, took the lead in technical progress’ and that ‘Behind this technical progress was the spirit of science’. Yet even if ‘Science has dominated the western world’, the ‘west is still far from having developed the real temper of science’.⁷ Though more recent Indology has stressed pluralism in India’s scientific history, Nehru in his time was also emphasizing the importance of pluralism to India’s present and future scientific development. India had to catch up with the West, but also bring its legacy of genuine scientific temper to the service of modern science. While observational astronomy was known to be one of Nehru’s passions, there was significant patronage for astrophysics and space technologies in the newly independent India. At the same time, understanding the place of astronomy in Indian history, including the relative influences of India and Europe, was a means of looking to the future.

As part of the effort to elucidate the place of astronomy in Indian history, followers of Nehru’s secular approach sought to consider how European Orientalists conceived of Indian astronomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Orientalist scholarship was complex in its methods and motivations, but broadly speaking its proponents were interested in philological studies of Indian history and culture (encompassing what we would recognize as scientific themes); Nehruvian histories of science in fact sought to fill the gaps left in the narrative they produced, demonstrating India’s age-old scientific pedigree and thereby serving a nationalist cause. Dhruv Raina explains that in 1959, the National Institute of Sciences of India (NISI), now the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), established a board to think about the task of writing a history of sciences in India. In 1964, the Ministry for Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs arranged a meeting of scholars, deciding that NISI would work towards setting up a National Commission for the Compilation of History of Sciences. There was at length no single, grand history of Indian science. However, an important product of this period was the foundation of the Indian Journal of History of Science in 1966. Raina draws attention to the dominant presence in the journal of historians writing about mathematics and astronomy. Yet the focus was on Indian antiquity, and the impression was that the history of science in India was about antiquarian studies.⁸ The sixth volume of O. P. Jaggi’s monumental History of Science, Technology and Medicine in India (1969–84), another example of the Nehruvian approach, traced Indian astronomy from its ancient origins to the colonial period. There was exposition of the Vedic roots of astronomy in India, and mention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist assessments of Indian scientific tradition.⁹ So, in spite of the ostensible emphasis on plurality in Nehruvian histories, the sense of transcultural engagement was more reflected in the surveys of earlier periods of Indian history, in keeping with Nehru’s own thoughts about India’s recent decline. The Nehruvian project encapsulated the sense that modern science in India – including astronomy – was the fruit of European learning, and there was an implicit sense that Indians in the colonial period were simply passive inheritors of Western science.

The Colonial Problematic

With respect to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a handful of narrative histories – most of which are associable with the organs of Nehruvian scholarship – have considered the manner in which modern Western astronomy was instituted in India in the form of observatories. Yet, there has been little sense of transcultural engagement or Indian agency. These studies have sought to exploit extensive source material in relation to the establishment of these observatories, but they have tended to be most concerned with identifying notable European astronomers and describing the instruments that they used. S. M. R. Ansari, for example, discussed the foundation of observatories at Madras under colonial officialdom and at Lucknow and Trivandrum under Indian princes, also touching on colonial efforts to establish observatories at Calcutta and Poona.¹⁰ More works in this vein followed, most notably from Rajesh Kochhar and Jayant V. Narlikar. There was further discussion of the context in which modern astronomy came to India, with reference to the demands of colonial navigation and surveying.¹¹ Some consideration of modern astronomy in colonial India is also to be found in earlier contributions on surveying. As part of an extensive project spanning decades, R. H. Phillimore produced the epic Historical Records of the Survey of India (1945–54), largely a collection of biographical information and extracts from source materials.¹² In the nineteenth century itself, there was a similar focus on modern astronomy in the context of its service to surveying in Clements R. Markham’s A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (1871); this has been an important point of reference for subsequent histories.¹³

A significant theme in this strand of literature has indeed been the association of modern Western astronomy in colonial India with Eurocentric diffusionist models of science; some depictions have even suggested that Western science was unilaterally imposed in India. Matthew H. Edney considered trigonometrical surveying, in the service of which astronomy was invoked, as being ‘rooted in non-Indian mathematics’. He asserted that cartography was ‘quintessentially at once a scientific and a British activity’, representing the dominance of Enlightenment rationalism.¹⁴ Ian J. Barrow argued that maps were generated for European audiences and addressed expressly colonial needs in a distinct ideological setting. Hence cartography reconfigured Indian history, as well as Indian land, into British history and British territory.¹⁵ Eurocentric diffusionist perspectives characterize modern science as either being forced on a tabula rasa or supplanting local knowledge. Moreover, as with the shortcomings of the Nehruvian project, Indians are rendered little more than junior partners in modern science. As I seek to emphasize here, an exploration into astronomy in colonial India reveals a different picture; it is possible to conceive of greater agency for Indians in modern science.

It seems evident that there needs to be greater exploration of how Indians responded to modern Western astronomy in India in the colonial period. There have been some efforts to approach science in colonial India from this perspective, though the concomitant engagement between Europeans and Indians has been understood more as a process of philosophical rationalization reconciling old and new forms of knowledge.¹⁶ In spite of its endurance, the ‘Orientalist triptych’ – recognizing the achievements of Hindus, stagnation under Muslims and progress of the West – has come under increasing pressure. As David Arnold notes, most scholars are now reluctant to see Western science impacting on a stagnant India.¹⁷ In the context of astronomy, more recent historiographical interventions have stressed cross-cultural negotiation within Indian responses to Western science, both in the pre-colonial and colonial period. Christopher Z. Minkowski, for example, has elucidated the efforts of pandits (elites learned in Sanskrit) to modify cosmologies from the Puranas (post-Vedic narratives) and Siddhantas in the light of the Copernican model of Western astronomy.¹⁸ There has indeed been increasing stress on the role of pandits in producing knowledge regarding astronomy, with other scholars continuing to consider the cosmological accommodations of the nineteenth century and drawing further attention to the developing culture of the Sanskrit literati in older intellectual centres such as Benares.¹⁹

Some notable but brief characterizations of negotiation regarding astronomy in colonial India have demonstrated that Indian elites in fact used the encounter of modern Western astronomy and traditional Siddhantic astronomy to express early national consciousness. The focus here has been on developments under the Indian princes, with particular attention to Lucknow and Sehore, and largely centred on the issue of cosmologies that has emerged out of Sanskrit scholarship. Bayly noted that out of the eclectic engagement between Europeans and Indians, there could be a reassertion of pride in Indian traditions.²⁰ Gyan Prakash argued that there could be a renegotiation of power associated with Western ideas through pointing to their anticipation in indigenous traditions.²¹ It is clear, then, that the most challenging possibilities for interpreting the history of astronomy in the colonial period lie with the characterizations emphasizing dialogue. However, it is noticeable that the emphasis has tended to be on a philosophical engagement, with Indians seeking to rationalize the encounter between traditional and modern science. These characterizations do capture an important phenomenon, and there is scope to build on them in the light of further exploration of the source materials. Yet I also seek to demonstrate the extent to which Europeans and Indians engaged with modern Western astronomy on a more practical level, in and around the institutions conventionally associated with diffusive Western science.

Among the ways in which the engagement – whether philosophical or practical – in and around the institutions of modern astronomy might be characterized, possibilities include the sorts of arguments regarding ‘hybridity’ presented by Prakash. So, modern astronomy might be seen as being reconfigured to suit local needs. In postcolonial studies, this hybridity has been explained by scholars such as Homi K. Bhabha as a ‘problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority’. It is also associated with ‘The menace of mimicry’, which in ‘disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’.²² As for somewhat less subversive theoretical models, John Lourdusamy, for example, has elucidated the careers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengali scientists who showed how new knowledge correlated with old knowledge as a means of preparing for modern science with self-confidence. Among these scientists, there was a process of double-identification with the West and India.²³ Pratik Chakrabarti has also explored the effort to redefine and integrate colonial science in India. Amid conflicts and negotiations, Indians sought to locate modern science in the ‘cultural, social and political fabric of nationalist India’.²⁴

Further possibilities for characterizing the encounter in and around the institutions of modern astronomy include seeing disengagement, rather than engagement, and most controversially perhaps, seeing Europeans appropriating Indian knowledge. The concept of disengagement relates to characterizations of recalcitrance among Indian elites in the face of Western science, with Asish Nandy notably claiming that, amid the difficulties of legitimately reconciling Indian culture with modern science, Indian scientists sought (but failed) to offer an alternative.²⁵ On the other hand, there has been the suggestion that Indians tended to avoid fields of intellectual exploration that the British dominated because those areas never represented a ‘universal domain of free discourse’. Partha Chatterjee argues that a space was carved out for pure tradition, which could be reorganized as modern.²⁶ Such scholars have therefore searched for authentically ‘Indian’ elements to the science of Indian elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their efforts resonating with postcolonial histories that seek ‘to reclaim the undistorted self’.²⁷ Similar approaches to science and technology in colonial India have argued for the hegemonic imposition of a colonial episteme and eclipsing of pre-colonial achievements. The emphasis has been on repressive large-scale technologies or on the cultural discourses associated with science.²⁸ As for appropriation, some scholars have gone as far as indicating that science in colonial India was about Europeans depicting Indian knowledge as their own. Sujit Sivasundaram implies that Indians could reclaim scientific knowledge which was in fact built on their efforts.²⁹ The idea of European dependence on local knowledge has been explored further. Kapil Raj, for example, seems to locate modern science – he avoids any reference to ‘Western’ science – in a syncretism of Western and non-Western paradigms.³⁰

In existing histories of science in colonial India, including those that have considered astronomy, there has been a critical shift away from simply seeing Western science as being diffused from Europe to India. Instead, there is interest in exploring the manner in which Indians responded to the challenge of Western science. However, there arises the question as to whether the efforts of Indians in relation to modern astronomy can only be understood as a process of philosophical rationalization focusing on the relationship between ostensibly traditional and modern knowledge. Furthermore, there is the issue of whether modern astronomy can only be redeemed if there is an identifiable syncretism of Western and non-Western paradigms within its practice (paradigms being defined by Thomas S. Kuhn as accepted exemplars of scientific practice offering models for scientific communities).³¹ So, there is clearly a struggle to square notions of multidirectional and crosscutting scientific ideas with the recognizable pressures of a colonial situation. Taking stock of the insights explored in the foregoing discussion, I aim to explore further the possibilities for characterizing the engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to astronomy in colonial India.

New Departures

In the light of the historical literature on science in colonial India to date, the aim of this study is to make a contribution to debates about the nature of the cognitive interface between Europeans and Indians in science. Though astronomy has been considered to some extent in the literature, there is scope for further investigation, especially with regards to the institutions of modern astronomy established in and around the coastal metropolises. The periodization and geographical scope must of course be demarcated, in order to bring precise enough evidence to bear on those debates. Furthermore, there are a number of vistas and a range of sources which need to be interrogated. In so far as the history of science is concerned, the basis for any investigation must be source-critical empiricism. However, more recent departures in the history of science in general have adverted to the importance of sociological approaches, which have stressed a more constructivist view of science. It emerges that a more self-consciously interdisciplinary approach is of significant potential. Using such an approach, at least in part, promises to offer a more textured and contextualized account of astronomy in colonial India, reflecting the nuances of engagement between Europeans and Indians in astronomy while elucidating the impact of colonial politics on that interface.

With regards to periodization, the nineteenth century has attracted relatively modest attention in histories of astronomy in India. While the more narrative histories have considered the establishment of observatories during that period, mentioning astronomers and listing instruments, more interpretive accounts of the context in which Western astronomy came to India are possible. The period of Orientalist scholarship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the approach of Orientalists to Indian astronomy, has come under focus since the time of Nehruvian histories. However, there has been a disconnection between histories considering the significance of that scholarly engagement with Indian astronomy and histories involving more descriptive studies of the institutionalization of modern Western astronomy in colonial India. Hence this work will revisit the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalist engagement with Indian astronomy, in order to consider the relationship between that scholarship and the establishment of observatories under colonial officialdom in India. So, I take as our nominal starting point the foundation of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta in 1784. As for the later nineteenth century, the nature of modern Western astronomy itself began to change with the rising prevalence of spectroscopic and photographic techniques. The end date of 1876 reflects this shift, as well as bearing significance in the history of science in India for marking the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS).

As for location, it is of great surprise that Bombay and Calcutta, two of the three most important cities to the East India Company, have received scant attention in existing histories of astronomy in colonial India. This is in fact a significant lacuna, the redressing of which promises to elucidate the nature of colonial science and also the engagement between Europeans and Indians in around the institutions of modern astronomy in India. The existing narrative histories have offered significant details regarding the East India Company’s foundation of an observatory at Madras in 1786, as well as exploring the observatories established at Lucknow and Trivandrum in the 1830s under Indian princes. Furthermore, there has been some mention of observatories at Calcutta and Poona. Yet there is more to be said about Calcutta, and the absence of Bombay altogether is an important omission. While Bombay is understood as the site of a magnetic and meteorological observatory from the 1840s, the historical experiences associated with the astronomical observatory prior to that demand exploration. Bombay (the presidency also encompassing Poona after 1817) and Bengal (the presidency also encompassing Benares up to 1833, when Bengal was split into the presidency of Bengal and the province of Agra, with the latter being renamed the North-Western Provinces in 1836) hence represent the main focus throughout this work. However, no study into astronomy in nineteenth-century India can ignore the significance of Madras, or the princely states of Awadh and Travancore with their observatories at Lucknow and Trivandrum, and occasional concentration on these areas will serve to put matters in Bombay and Bengal into comparative perspective. Furthermore, there is important evidence to be considered from other parts of the subcontinent in elucidating astronomy in nineteenth-century India, and so, the geographical scope of the enquiry ought not to be overly circumscribed.

In relation to the vistas which must be explored, it is important to transcend the confines of existing histories of astronomy in colonial India. To understand the engagement between Europeans and Indians, there needs to be consideration of a number of themes. Though the philosophical type of engagement focusing on the encounter between traditional and modern astronomy has been discussed to some extent in existing histories, it is important to revisit some of those themes, with more nuances to explore. However, there is an even greater need to devote attention to the knowledge interface between Europeans and Indians regarding the practice of modern astronomy in and around the institutions established for it in the coastal metropolises. While scholars have touched on the relationship between European astronomers and Indian princes, Calcutta and Bombay (as well as Madras) have been neglected as sites of meaningful interaction. There is a need to question whether Indian assistants in observatories were just menial labourers, or whether there was something more significant involved in their endeavours. This also leads to a more extensive view of the role of astronomy in education in colonial India. Though scholars have discussed the nineteenth-century pedagogic ventures making use of Siddhantic and Western paradigms, the focus has tended to be on the older centres of Sanskrit scholarship, rather than the colleges of the coastal metropolises.

The exploration of these various themes associated with astronomy in colonial India demands a wide-ranging use of historical sources, and there are different types of official and personal material which might be brought to bear. The journals of the learned societies of Bengal and Bombay contained numerous contributions on astronomy (and astrology). In addition, there is a need to explore the (multiple) meanings of physical objects associated with Indian and Western traditions, variously created and preserved by different historical actors, and there was also a plethora of calendars and almanacs produced in this period. With regards to the institutionalization of modern Western astronomy, the existing narrative histories have sought to draw on East India Company records, with regards to Madras in particular. Yet while compendia of observations have attracted attention, there has been less focus on the fine grain of official correspondence and reports, and their discursive practices. There is more to be understood about the reasons for which observatories in Bombay and Calcutta were founded, staffed and equipped. In addition, there is more to be said about the practical engagement between Europeans and Indians in and around these observatories. The existing literature has tended to ignore the experiential texture of astronomy. However, personalized accounts can be gleaned from this official material, as well as from contemporary articles and publications. The focus on education brings a logical extension of the use of this sort of source. The spotlight falls on material elucidating the establishment of colleges in which astronomy was taught, as well as on significant texts used in them.

Being anchored in the discipline of history, this present work naturally seeks to put astronomy in colonial India into its appropriate context through exploration of the identified themes; the history of science is, of course, all about understanding the setting in which scientific knowledge is generated. However, as a discipline, sociology, with its focus on the collective aspects of human conduct, has tended to interrogate scientific contexts with even greater intricacy. This has been reflected in the more recent thrust of science and technology studies (STS). In traditional sociology of knowledge, there was interest in how far social factors impacted upon the processes by which scientific knowledge was produced, and such concerns have been evident in histories of science for some time. But the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has gone even further, looking to show that scientific knowledge itself was social in its constitution.³²

In emphasizing the social and cultural factors associated with scientific practice, the ‘Strong Programme’ of the Edinburgh School usefully considered the ‘structure’ of scientific communities and the ‘interests’ of the people within those communities (Kuhn’s internalism discounted the significance of social contexts). The stress on structure and interest reflected the importance of ‘macrosocial’ factors in the making of scientific knowledge.³³ More recently, ideas of ‘co-production’ have continued to reflect the sense that the production of scientific knowledge is inextricably linked with social phenomena; in other words, science is made by societal forces and in turn is the making of forms of social life.³⁴ In treating evidence associated with observatories and colleges, it is important to bear in mind such insights. There has to be elucidation of the societal forces and macro-social factors associated with those institutions.

Yet, some scholars identifiable with the broad spectrum of SSK approaches have focused even more closely on the actual content of science. They have indeed sought to interrogate the cognitive forces and ‘micro social’ factors involved in the construction of knowledge.³⁵ The various conclusions of the sociologist Bruno Latour, focusing on experimental practice in laboratories and in the field, have been controversial, but it is his sort of methods that are most illuminating.³⁶ Indeed, Latour is widely known for demonstrating the ethnomethodologist’s focus on ‘the range of small face-to-face interactions’ in grassroots scientific practice.³⁷ The constructivist view of science promises to reshape the manner in which engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to modern astronomy in the colonial period can be conceived. The stress on knowledge as something forever being made as a human product, rather than just ‘existing’, is something that histories of science in colonial India have in large part neglected. Kapil Raj has usefully drawn attention to the importance of SSK and made claims to using its approaches.³⁸ However, it is arguable that his implication of Europeans appropriating Indian scientific knowledge does not quite adhere to its principles. There have also been efforts to approach the history of science with the support of distinctly anthropological methods. For example, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has sought to explore Victorian solar eclipse expeditions with reference to the ‘emotional texture of science’, reflecting its ‘postconstructivist’ element.³⁹ In such histories, the effort to offer thick descriptions overrides the importance of complex epistemological issues. However, while acknowledging the value of placing emphasis on the human experiences behind science, there is still more to be meaningfully understood about the constructivist element.

These interdisciplinary perspectives, notwithstanding some conceptual problems, promise to help in characterizing the engagement between Europeans and Indians in astronomy in this period, in particular with regards to the practical engagement in and around the institutions of modern Western astronomy. When considering the evidence associated with the observatories and colleges, it is important, in the manner of ethnomethodologists, to try and capture the small and mundane details of scientific practice whenever possible. In histories of science in colonial India, there is now some consensus behind the notion that ‘there was no simple, one-directional process of scientific and technological transfer, but rather a series of cross-cultural exchanges and interactions’.⁴⁰ There are an increasing number of interpretive works seeking to trace the transition between the pre-colonial and colonial periods, and authors stress the problem with seeing an alien science displacing an indigenous one.⁴¹ However, the means of characterizing the manner in which Europeans and Indians engaged in relation to modern Western astronomy remains a challenge. The various models of hybridity or appropriation in existing histories of science in colonial India might be deemed insufficient in themselves, and sociological departures might help to address any shortcomings, in particular with regards to the more practical rather than philosophical types of engagement.

At the same time, there needs to be awareness of the significance of colonialism, both with respect to the overall development of astronomy in colonial India and the construction of scientific knowledge. There is the issue of hierarchies and hegemonies with regards to colonial and scientific modernity.⁴² Moreover, the picture of connectedness in the making of scientific knowledge has its limits; there needs to be an understanding, alongside ‘situated universality’, of how ‘politics intrudes into the process of knowledge production’.⁴³ Ultimately, then, it is crucial to situate the subtleties of the engagement in astronomy in India within the context of colonialism’s power inequalities.

So, the aim of this book is to explore the changing forms of engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to astronomy in India between 1784 and 1876. In the light of debates about colonial scientific knowledge, I seek to trace the evolving contexts in which knowledge of astronomy was developed in India and to provide a nuanced characterization of the resultant cognitive interface between Europeans and Indians in the colonial period. The defining features of this period – from the foundation of the Asiatick Society in 1784 to the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876 – saw Europeans exploring the history of Indian astronomy to assess its value to modern science, before establishing observatories and colleges to foster modern (Western) astronomy, while Indians turned to rethink how the history of Indian astronomy (and astrology) fitted with modern science. Yet my main contention is that while recent historiographical interventions have drawn attention to the more philosophical forms of engagement (through which Europeans and Indians sought to assess the position of modern science vis-à-vis Indian culture), such a concentration has elided a much more practical engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to modern astronomy in India (with actors from various backgrounds proving their competencies in a more pragmatic working culture). This latter form of engagement was not about a constant process of Indians rationalizing participation in modern science, or looking backwards while moving forwards. In addition, it was premised more on collaborative and experiential constructions of knowledge, without express awareness of fixed ‘Western’ or ‘Indian’ paradigms in astronomy. There was evidence of such engagement in the observatory and in the field, as well as in certain college settings, and in some parts of India more than others. However, racialized colonial institutions and attenuated educational schemas could at length hinder such possibilities, leaving the spotlight on the more philosophical forms of engagement.

The chapters elucidate these key themes, while progressing in a broadly chronological fashion. Firstly, Chapter 1 demonstrates how Orientalist scholars began interacting with traditional Indian astronomy (and astrology) in the late eighteenth century, setting in motion a philosophical engagement between European and Indian scientific knowledge and raising the possibility of a practical engagement with the skills of Indian astronomers. Chapter 2 then considers how, even as scholarship based largely on astronomical texts defined