Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century

How might one tell the histories of China and India – two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants? How might one tell of how they look to the world and to each other? In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. We bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India. We bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them. We use China and India as a method of exploring new historiographical questions of science. We are invested in extending the relevance of studying China and India to the world at large through connections, references and juxtaposition, and by raising questions that, on the one hand, expose the limits of the EuroAmerican experience and, on the other, open up the intellectual and historiographical space for narratives and theoretical frameworks that are not tied to geopolitical significance. This paper sets out these issues and introduces the papers of the collection. Not very long ago, Jack Goody, the anthropologist, posed a question: ‘How is it that China and India, apparently without the development of “capitalism”, which was Western, are now challenging the West for supremacy in so many fields?’1 * India Institute, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS, UK. Email: jahnavi.phalkey@kcl.ac.uk. ** University of Toronto, 100 St George Street, Sidney Smith Hall, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada. Email: tong.lam@utoronto.ca. The papers in the issue are a product of collaboration and conversation over four years generously funded by the Indian European Advanced Research Network, Nantes. The first workshop was funded by York University and the Situating Science Strategic Knowledge Cluster, Canada. We acknowledge the generous intellectual support we have received from Jon Agar, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Ludmilla Jordanova, Samuel Jube, Sunil Khilnani, John Krige, Bill Leslie, Bernard Lightman, Joachim Nettelbeck, Srinath Raghavan, Dominic Sachsenmaier, Tansen Sen, Grace Yen Shen, Wang Hui, Jon Wilson and Roland Wittje. Finally, we thank the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where we (Lam and Phalkey) were fellows in 2013–2014. Wewould like to thankthe following institutions forhostingourworkshops:DepartmentofHumanities,Bethune College,YorkUniversity, Canada (2011); India Institute, King’sCollege London,UK (2012); Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study inHumanities and Social Sciences, Beijing, China (2013); and finally theCentre forContemporary Studies, Indian Instituteof Science,Bangalore, India (2015).Manythanks toPaulineBoudant,BitastaDas,Matthieu Forlodou and Nilanjan Sarkar for their support in keeping the project together. 1 Jack Goody, ‘Asia and Europe’, History and Anthropology (2015) 26, pp. 263–307, 263. BJHS: Themes 1: 1–11, 2016. © British Society for the History of Science 2016. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use. doi:10.1017/bjt.2016.12 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2016.12 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Pendlebury Library of Music, on 01 Feb 2018 at 11:33:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, Not everyone is convinced of the challenge. Even when China and India are seen as emerging powers, there are many different ways in which this challenge is described and explained. Goody finds an explanation for the rise of at least China in the sameness and overlap of Eurasian history in the early modern period.2 Others locate the beginnings of this rise in the struggle for political and intellectual independence during the middle decades of the twentieth century.3 Magazines such as Science andNature have dedicated sections to China and India in the last decade to help their readers make sense of the socalled rising science powers. The Royal Society published a report making clear that the production of scientific knowledge had now gone global, and China and India were places to watch.4 Historians of science responded too. Bernard Lightman, editor of the history-of-science journal Isis, commissioned two Focus sections on China and India. The journal did not carry any other country-focused section.5 We wish to seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. The middle decades of the last century witnessed an intensity of transformation and a focus on industrialization and economic growth that set both on the path to what has been called catching up. Their own stories of the mid-twentieth-century origins of their current formation, the silences on some aspects and the attentiveness to others, are of primary interest to us. In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two giants. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We unravel histories and networks of science and engineering through diverse practices, and we locate historical energies that produced the modern in the two countries but on an international plane. Writers at The Economist appear convinced of the long road that China must travel before leading the world, but they enlist the projects that show why Goody can frame China and India as challenges to the West: The world’s largest single-aperture radio telescope, being built in Guizhou province, is due to open in September. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (Tianyan, in Chinese) dwarfs all other such instruments ... And it is expanding 25-fold its dark-matter2 For a more up-to-date analysis of how China and Europe contributed to the rise of capitalism see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 3 Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Penguin, 2003. Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern Asia, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014. 4 Among others see ‘Science in India’, special in Nature, 13 May 2015, at www.nature.com/news/india-1. 17456. ‘The Chinese research paradigm: addressing global science issues’, sponsored supplement of Science (19 December 2014) 346(6216). The Royal Society, Knowledge, Networks, and Nation: Global Scientific Collaboration in the Twenty First Century, London: Royal Society, 2011, available at https://royalsociety. org/∼/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2011/4294976134.pdf. All accessed 4 June 2016. 5 ‘Focus: science and modern China’, Isis (2007) 98(3), pp. 517–596; and ‘Focus: science, history, and modern India’, Isis (2013) 104(2), pp. 330–380. The journal carried a region-focused section: ‘Focus: global currents in national histories of science: the “global turn” and the history of science in Latin America’, Isis (2013) 104(4), pp. 773–817. See also China, India, and the United States, special issue of Technology in Society (2008) 30(3–4). 2 Jahnavi Phalkey and Tong Lam available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2016.12 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Pendlebury Library of Music, on 01 Feb 2018 at 11:33:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, investigating Jinping underground laboratory, in Sichuan province, making that the world’s largest subterranean lab.6 India’s strength apparently lies elsewhere: India has already had one technology revolution. In the 1980s middle-class engineers from a dirt-poor socialist India somehow persuaded Western firms to outsource their back-office functions and bits of their IT operations to the subcontinent. Thus began a three-decade-long boom ... The cultural impact of all this has been huge.7 This was only a couple of years earlier when they covered the Indian Mars mission: ‘Its Mars mission may be cheap by American (or Chinese) standards, at just $74 m, but India’s overall space programme costs roughly $1 billion a year. That is more than spare change, even for a near $2-trillion economy.’8 How might one tell the histories of these two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants, of how they look to the world and to each other? How do we bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India? How do we bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them? We hope to use China and India as a method to explore new historiographical questions of science. We seek to rethink India through China, China through India, and aspects of global history through China and India.9 This is the leitmotif of our collaboration. Histories of both China and India as our generation of historians of science have understood them – and we are no different – are mostly mediated throughWestern scholarship on the two, often in the English language. We came to this collaborative exercise with that awareness and with substantial archival research behind us. Apart from the rich