History of Science in South Asia A journal for the history of all forms of scientific thought and action, ancient and modern, in all regions of South Asia  Review of: Dhruv Raina, Needham  s Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950-1970) (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2015) Francesca Bray  style citation form: Francesca Bray (2016),   Review of: Dhruv Raina, Needham  s Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950-1970) (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2015),   History of Science in South Asia 4 (2016): r1  r6. MLA  Online version available at: http://hssa-journal.org  HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN SOUTH ASIA A journal for the history of all forms of scientific thought and action, ancient and modern, in all regions of South Asia, published online at http://hssa-journal.org  ISSN 2369-775X  Editorial Board:              Dominik Wujastyk, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Kim Plofker, Union College, Schenectady, United States Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma, formerly Aligarh Muslim University, Düsseldorf, Germany Fabrizio Speziale, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle    CNRS, Paris, France Michio Yano, Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto, Japan  Principal Contact: Dominik Wujastyk, Editor, University of Alberta Email:  wujastyk@ualberta.ca  Mailing Address: History of Science in South Asia, Department of History and Classics, 2  81 HM Tory Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2H4 Canada This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Copyrights of all the articles rest with the respective authors and published under the provisions of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. The electronic versions were generated from sources marked up in LATEX in a computer running gnu/linux operating system. pdf was typeset using X TEX from TEXLive. The base font used for Latin script and oldstyle numerals was TEX Gyre Pagella developed by gust, the Polish TEX Users Group.  r1  Dhruv Raina, Needham  s Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950-1970) (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2015), 135 pp. | 250. ISBN 9382579-11-7. hruv Raina  s meticulous study of the fortunes and misfortunes of history of science in newly independent India will be of particular interest to the readership of History of Science in South Asia both for the challenging questions it raises about the conditions of possibility for history of science as a field and as a discipline, and for the detailed intellectual and political portraits Raina paints of such founding fathers as D. D. Kosambi, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, S. N. Sen, A. Rahman and Irfan Habib. Drawing on the rich notes and correspondence in the Needham archive, Raina  s brief study is also a treasure-trove for all of us interested in Joseph Needham  s complex intellectual and social contributions to building a post-imperial history of science. There is no need to remind the readers of History of Science in South Asia just how iconoclastic Needham  s views were considered at the time of India  s independence. Until the 1930s most deemed it unthinkable that any non-Western society could lay claim to a history of science of its own. But in the course of the 1930s Needham and his Cambridge colleagues, notably J. D. Bernal, were among the influential practising scientists who began to argue, in eloquent and accessible works, that science was a universal human activity. It was thus the task of ethically responsible historians of science to pursue what in today  s terms has been termed   cognitive justice,   that is, to recover and acknowledge the scientific activities and contributions of all human societies, past and present. Modern science was not the product of intrinsically superior Western rationality, rather, it represented a confluence of ideas from different societies that over time had converged, like rivers flowing into the sea of what Needham labeled   oecumenical science.   Countries that had been treated under colonial rule as blank slates of ignorance upon which Westerners generously inscribed their scientific knowledge could now re-imagine themselves as the proud possessors not only of a scientific history, but also of scientifically apt mindsets. In the late 1940s, as the colonial powers at last conceded that independence could be granted to suitably evolved and deserving (or successfully resistant) territories, Needham was engaged in two great enterprises in this vein. The first was the unesco project of a world history of science (the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind), in which,   European civilization should not be considered the model, neither in the past nor in the future, for all civilizations   (p. 12). The second was Needham  s personal research project, Science and Civilisation in China, which drew upon pre-modern China  s extraordinarily rich documentary  D  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  r2 and material record to document a spectacular array of scientific and technological achievements. Although the first volume of SCC was not published until 1954, Needham was known to be hard at work on this enterprise even before he resigned from unesco in 1948. To anti-colonialist statesmen, operating in a world where scientific achievement was the great civilisational validator, joining what was now more widely understood as an internationally open club of scientifically capable nations was a prime goal in the pursuit of development. Nehru argued the need for newly independent India to develop both   scientific expertise   and   the scientific temper.   As Nehru put it (cited on p. 7): Science and technology know no frontiers. Nobody ought to talk about English science, French science, American science, Chinese science. Science is something that is bigger than countries. There ought to be no such thing as Indian science. Yet, paradoxically perhaps, an Indian (or Chinese, English or French) history of science was a very helpful validating exercise, demonstrating that traditions of scientific rationality were not alien, modern superimpositions. For scientists in many new nations, the appeal of developing a national history of science was immediate, meshing closely with other nation-building tasks like the consolidation of national scientific research institutions, or curricula in science education. It is no coincidence, then, that the International Union of the History of Science was formed in 1947, the year of Indian independence. As part of the policy to develop scientific literacy and   the scientific temper,   S. N. Sen, a physicist and the registrar of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences, was sent to Paris in 1947 to work in the unesco Programme on the Social Implications and the Popularisation of Science. There he became close friends with Needham, who encouraged his interest in the history of science. Needham also became acquainted with A. Rahman, who urged him to visit India and to meet Pandit Nehru and various leading scientists, in order to persuade them that history of science in India should be integral to national policies of scientific development. Raina traces Needham  s critical impact on the development of history of science in India, as inspiration, friend, interlocutor, mediator, critic and institutional supporter. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the individuals already mentioned, together with the engagement of a number of scientists with more enthusiasm than historical training, by the late 1950s history of science was established in India as a field of research. Ambitious projects for a multi-volume Science and Civilisation in India were drawn up. And yet the field was not a discipline: only a few members of the field were historiographically trained. Raina records an embarrassing occasion when Needham was invited to comment on a collection of colloquium papers, many of which he criticised for making quite  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  r3 outrageous claims about periodisation and priority. Happy as Needham was to challenge Greece as the sole cradle of civilisation, he was not willing to accept wild assertions about ancient Indian anteriority, especially if based on myth rather than documentation. Needless to say, this critique did not endear Needham to all his Indian colleagues, but the true historians soldiered on. Raina details many of the outstanding works that they contributed to the field of precolonial as well as colonial history of science. While the best of these works took a specific period and/or thematic as their subject, the totalising concept of a Science and Civilisation in India continued to cast a shadow on the field, and doubtless hindered the emergence of a discipline. As late as 1986 Chattopadhyaya published an edited volume, History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings with a foreword by Joseph Needham. The book received a scathing review from Kapil Raj, an Indian post-colonial historian of science working in France. Raj dismissed the volume as just the latest in a continuous stream of general histories whose lack of historiographical professionalism in pursuit of political agendas (Hindu versus Muslim, for instance) deprived the field of history of science in India of   much of its credibility.  1 The tension between nationalistic   civilisational studies   and the historical realities of a complex, often politically fragmented and culturally fissured subcontinent is surely one factor in the failure of history of science in India to find a comfortable institutional home. As Raina notes, even today there are no university programmes in the history of science outside Delhi. Another obstacle to successful institutional integration is the tension between the universalist agenda of the original Needham programme and most professional history of science as it is practised today. Needham tended to select those aspects of pre-modern sciences or practices which can be retrospectively validated by modern scientific testing or explanation. Furthermore, Needham  s concept of oecumenical science posits modern scientific materialist rationality as the logical historical outcome of intellectual progress. This teleology displaces attention from the organic composition of   scientific cultures,   however alien their goals, presuppositions and knowledge-clusters may seem today, to the potentiality of old forms of knowledge to mutate into modern science.2 France, Germany, Britain and the United States are sufficiently confident in their long traditions of scientific prowess to employ and give grants to researchers working on Newton  s interests in astrology. In China (and no doubt in India), most funding bodies would still be reluct1 Raj, 1990: 152. See also Raj, 2016 on   rescuing science from civilisation.   2 See Rocha (2016), who notes for instance that when they were completing the manuscript of Celestial Lancets in the late 1970s Needham and  his co-author Lu Gwei-Djen expressed their confidence that proper   scientific   proof of how acupuncture works would very soon be forthcoming, thus allowing acupuncture into the fold of valid scientific medical therapy.  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  r4 ant to support investigations into a national hero  s   superstitious   feet of clay. In the 1950s   research into the history of science in India was seen as an effort towards the legitimation of science as cultural activity   (p. 43). Surprising as it may seem today, despite Nehru  s drive to develop India as a scientific power, many Indian scientists immediately post-Independence felt themselves to be a beleaguered and alienated minority. This was not an alienation from the political    scientists had never had it so good as they did in the Nehruvian era. The alienation was a product of their ideological commitment to science that was ambushed by their infinitesimal numbers within Indian society at the time    clearly a question of cultures and values! (p. 93.) One way to address this, proponents of history of science in India believed, was to produce an equivalent of Science and Civilisation in China to persuade the Indian public that   science is us      and in the process to deliver a post-colonial cognitive justice. Yet in the longer term the Science and Civilisation in India project appears to have faltered if not failed. Today India is ackowledged as a world leader in many fields of scientific research, yet Raina argues that, in the current reign of technocratic values, real history of science, as opposed to nationalist   triumphalist versions, survives only   in the insterstices,   while   scientists   history of science   predominates (p. 107). Again, this may be a question of national self-confidence. It also reflects the amount of money and other resources that a society is prepared to invest in the humanities. The kind of research in history of science that seriously investigates pre-modern scientific cultures rather than promoting nationalist agendas typically requires bringing together a number of recondite specialist skills: philology, religious studies, anthropology, history of law or musicology, for instance, as well as specific natural sciences and philosophy. The majority of training centres and of rewarding jobs are still located in the United States or Western Europe    indeed many of the best historians of science in India today work outside India. Does it matter where they work? Well, perhaps more than we might imagine. One reason that Joseph Needham decided to study China and to work with Chinese collaborators was because of the differences, sometimes striking, sometimes subtle, from all that he was ruefully conscious of taking for granted in European ways of thinking or framing questions. We should not underestimate the power of the naturalised assumptions, explicit or implicit, that still underpin local schools of history of science, including those of the great metropoles of the United States, of Munich or Paris, even in our enlightened post-colonial era. Fifteen years ago a group of historians from Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey joined together to form a network called step: Science and Technology on the European Periphery. step flourishes because it  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  r5 meets a need that is felt by many outside the charmed circle. As the step website explains (STEP, 2016): The historiographical canon of science, technology and medicine is still shaped by a central focus on French, British, German, and increasingly US national narratives (  the big four  ). The shift to local studies experienced in the last decades in our discipline has not weakened this selective prioritizing of contexts. As a result, the canon is still biased toward French, British, German, and increasingly American actors. step seeks to revise this bias by expanding the spectrum of geographical and cultural contexts of research and proposing new questions, themes and tools of analysis. Strong, original, critically confident history of science outside the Northern metropoles is essential to the future of the field. Whether in Latvia or India the challenge remains, however, how to build it an institutional and intellectual home.  RE F ER ENC E S Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad (1986). History of Science and Technology in Ancient India. The Beginnings. Foreword by Joseph Needham. Calcutta: Firma KLM. isbn: 9788171020539. Lu, Gwei-djen, Joseph Needham, and Vivienne Lo (2001). Celestial Lancets: a History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa. Needham Research Institute Series. British Library ; Cambridge ; Durham ; School of Oriental &amp; African Studies (SOAS) ; Trinity College Dublin ; Warwick ; Wellcome Library: Curzon. isbn: 0700714588. Needham, Joseph et al. (1954  ). Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. isbn: 9780521057998. Raj, Kapil (1990).   The Present in the Past  . In: History and Technology 7.2, pp. 149   56. doi: 10.1080/07341519008581771.    (2016).   Rescuing Science from Civilisation: On Joseph Needham  s   Asiatic Mode of (Knowledge) Production    . In: The Bright Dark Ages: Comparative and Connective Dimensions. Ed. by Arun Bala and Prasenajit Duara. Leiden: Brill, pp. 255  80. isbn: 9789004264182.  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  r6 Rocha, Leon Antonio (2016).   How Deep Is Love? The Engagement with India in Joseph Needham  s Historiography of China. 9  . In: BJHS Themes 1, pp. 13  41. doi: 10.1017/bjt.2016.5. STEP, An International Research Group on History of Science, Medicine and Technology (2016). STEP    Science and Technology in the European Periphery. url: http://step2.hicido.uv.es/?q=node/3 (visited on 09/25/2016). Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom  history of science in south asia 4 (2016): r1  r6  Please write to  wujastyk@ualberta.ca  to file bugs/problem reports, feature requests and to get involved. The History of Science in South Asia   Department of History and Classics, 2  81 HM Tory Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2H4, Canada.