Science and Technology in Modern South Asia

Undergraduate / Graduate

Is modern science an imperial project? How did people who lived under colonial rule reshape and remake imperial scientific projects? And might scientific and technological trajectories that are often associated with the "West" also have relied on knowledge from elsewhere? In this course, we explore these questions and others in the context of modern South Asian history. Themes explored in the course include imperial ecological impacts, the intersections of European and South Asian medical traditions, and the impact of caste and gender-hierarchies on scientific and technological knowledge production. We especially emphasize the varied South Asian social and cultural contexts in which science and technology were produced and used, asking how local meaning was assigned to knowledge that circulated globally.