Progress of Science in Colonial India

Progress of Science in Colonial India

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• From the 16th century onwards, Europe began to outdistance India in scientific and material advancement. The rise of modern science in Europe strengthened European economic domination over colonies where education, science, and research were deliberately kept backward.
• After the establishment of British supremacy over the Indian subcontinent, the colonisers were eager to collect the maximum possible information about India, its people, and its resources — a new empire was in the making and being consolidated.
  • They faithfully reported what was best in India’s technological traditions and natural resources, and what could be most advantageous to their employers.
  • The rulers quickly realised that knowledge of the geography, geology, and botany of the areas being conquered was essential, and they fully recognised the role and importance of science in empire-building.

Science and Empire-Building in Early Colonial India

Features of Early Colonial Science

• Colonial scientists tended to work across several fields simultaneously — each one was, in effect, a botanist, geologist, geographer, and educator rolled into one.
  • As data-gatherers, individual scientists were efficient; but for analysis and drawing conclusions, they depended on scientific institutions in Britain, which received such data from many colonies.
• The British invested in botanical, geological, and geographical surveys, from which they hoped to gain direct and substantial economic and military advantage; medical and zoological sciences, holding no such promise, were correspondingly neglected.
  • Research in physics or chemistry was simply out of the question, since these subjects were tied to industrial development — something the British had no wish to encourage. India was to remain only a source of raw materials and a market for British manufactures, from needles and pencils to shoes, textiles, and medicines.

Early Scientific Societies and Institutions (1784–1829)

• However, the setting up of some scientific bodies and museums was a positive step. Pre-British India had a weak scientific base, and neither scientific institutions nor journals existed to spread scientific information.
  • William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, along with other European intellectuals in the city, recognised this gap and founded the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in 1784, which soon became the focal point of all scientific activity in India.
  • It was followed by the Madras Literary and Scientific Society (1818), the Agricultural-Horticultural Society of India (1817), the Calcutta Medical & Physical Society (1823), and the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society (1829).
  • These societies rendered invaluable service, particularly through their journals, which compared very favourably with their European counterparts.

Consolidation of Science under Crown Rule (Post-1858)

• When the Crown formally took over Indian administration in 1858, the exploration of the country’s natural resources had already passed its formative stage — the task now was chiefly one of consolidating the gains made possible by individual effort. Many institutions were set up, and the government expanded its survey organisations.
  • In 1878, the three survey branches — trigonometrical, topographical, and revenue — which had until then been separate departments, were amalgamated; naturally, the Revenue Survey gained the upper hand.
  • Geological explorations were similarly patronised for their direct economic benefit, leading to the creation of the Geological Survey of India in 1851; unlike geology, however, no dedicated organisation for botanical exploration was ever established.
• The establishment of various scientific departments called for a different administrative cadre.
  • The biggest and oldest of these was the Indian Medical Service, raised and maintained chiefly to serve the army.
  • Agriculture, by contrast, was the most disorganised sector: although it generated the maximum revenue, the government left its improvement to private agricultural societies because the problems involved were too complex. An Indian Agricultural Service was organised much later, in 1906, but it never grew into a well-knit, integrated scientific department owing to financial and administrative constraints.
  • Only a few branches of military or immediate economic significance managed to develop; on the whole, efforts remained ad hoc, sporadic, and local, since the government wanted practical results rather than research papers. Excessive administrative control, exercised at every level, ensured that colonial scientists always danced to the official tune.

Science in the Colonial Education System

• Science was never given high priority in the colonial educational scheme.
  • The Charter of 1813 called for “the introduction and promotion of knowledge of science among the inhabitants of British India,” but this remained a pious wish — partly because the indigenous educational system was also unsympathetic to the idea.
  • In 1835, Macaulay succeeded in making English the medium of instruction; his personal distaste for science produced a curriculum that was purely literary, delaying the entry of science into schools. A few medical and engineering institutions were opened, but these existed mainly to supply assistants to British-trained doctors and engineers.
• India’s ancient universities and its famous centres of Islamic learning in the medieval period had once attracted scholars from other countries, but these traditions did not survive into the colonial era.
  • It was only in 1857 that the Universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established, broadly on the pattern of London University, and only from 1870 that Indian universities began showing interest in science education.
  • In 1875, Madras University decided to examine its matriculation candidates in geography and elementary physics in place of British history; Bombay was the first to grant degrees in science; and Calcutta University divided its B.A. into two branches — ‘A’ course (literary) and ‘B’ course (science).
• Of great significance, however, was that colonial education as a whole was directed not towards opening students’ minds or cultivating a questioning attitude, but towards encouraging passive acceptance of what was taught or written in textbooks.
  • These textbooks were in English, largely written and printed abroad, and depicted British culture — an education that tended to alienate educated Indians from their own heritage, while fostering a lack of enterprise and a readiness to simply take orders from above, exactly as the rulers intended.
  • Institutions and teachers looked upon the British educational model as the ideal and, by and large, tried to copy it, even though India’s social and economic situation was entirely different.
• In sum, the British were primarily interested in strengthening their political and economic domination over India. They exploited India’s resources fully and built a nominal scientific infrastructure for this purpose alone, paying no attention to fields such as physics, chemistry, or agriculture where scientific development was not imperative to their interests.
  • In the process, India’s cultural heritage, scientific tradition, and educational system were undermined, replaced by a tradition of servility and an education designed to produce subservience rather than a spirit of free and creative inquiry.

The Status of Scientific Research in Colonial India

• In the absence of higher scientific education, scientific research remained an exclusively governmental exercise for a long time, closely linked to the economic policies pursued by the imperial power.
  • A scientist serving the colonial power was expected not only to discover new economic resources, but also to help in their exploitation.
  • In agriculture, this meant plantation research — experimental farms, the introduction of new varieties, and problems related to cash crops such as cotton, indigo, tobacco, and tea, all destined for export to Britain.
  • In geology, it meant surveys to exploit mineral resources, again for export as raw material.
  • Health was another major area of concern, since the survival of the army, the planters, and other colonisers depended on it.
• Despite difficult conditions and the government’s lukewarm attitude, a number of notable scientific works did emerge in this period.
  • Ronald Ross did original work on the relation between malaria and the mosquito; Macnamara worked on cholera, Haffkine on plague, and Rogers on kala-azar; the famous medical scientist Robert Koch even visited Calcutta to work on cholera.
  • Bacteriological laboratories were set up in Bombay, Madras, Coonoor, Kasauli, and Mukteswar. This shift towards bacteriological research had one significant result — the growth of clinical treatment, private practice, and a booming drug industry — while preventive measures, such as sanitary reforms or even the supply of drinking water to villages and towns, remained neglected.
  • In other fields too, significant developments took place through the efforts of foreign and Indian scientists working in institutions in India.

Response of the Local Populace

• British scientific activity did evoke some response from the local populace, particularly the educated section looking for jobs in the colonial administration and economy.
  • A few Indians participated in officially patronised scientific associations or institutions; however, they often searched for a distinct identity, establishing institutions, scholarships, and facilities of their own.
  • Ram Mohun Roy’s petition to Amherst, asking for proper science education, became well known.
  • Bal Gangadhar Shastri and Hari Keshavji Pathare in Bombay, Master Ramchander in Delhi, Shubhaji Bapu and Onkar Bhatt Joshi in the Central Provinces, and Aukhoy Dutt in Calcutta worked towards the popularisation of modern science in Indian languages.
• Geography and astronomy were the fields chosen first for this effort, since it was here that Pauranic myths were considered strongest.
  • Vyas, the author of the Srimad Bhagwat, had, for instance, written of oceans of milk and nectar — a myth still popular even today, which these reformers attacked. Onkar Bhatt, for example, explained that Vyas was only a poet, not a scientist, whose sole interest was to recount the glories of God, and who therefore wrote whatever he fancied.
  • Even Urdu poets, devoted mainly to the romances of life, took notice of Western science and technology — Hali and Ghalib, for instance, wrote of the achievements of Western civilisation founded on steam and coal power.
• The next logical step from these individual efforts was to give some organisational shape to the growing yearning for modern science.
  • In 1864, Syed Ahmed Khan founded the Aligarh Scientific Society, calling for the introduction of technology into industrial and agricultural production; four years later, Syed Imdad Ali founded the Bihar Scientific Society — both societies gradually became defunct.
  • In 1876, M.L. Sarkar established the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, run entirely under Indian management without any government aid or patronage. Sarkar’s fairly ambitious scheme aimed at both original investigation and science popularisation, and it gradually developed into an important centre for research in optics, acoustics, the scattering of light, and magnetism.
  • In Bombay, Jamshedji Tata drew up a similar scheme for higher scientific education and research, which led to the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore in 1909.
• By the turn of the century, there was, thus, greater awareness of science in India — especially as a movement to gain freedom from colonial rule began to emerge.

Impact of the Freedom Movement

• By the early 20th century, Indian society had started witnessing the first stirrings of the freedom movement. While political aspirations led to a demand for self-rule, frustration with the colonial economic stranglehold found expression in the insistence on using only goods made in India.
  • The Swadeshi Movement provided further impetus for the promotion of education along national lines and under national control — with special reference to science and technology — as well as for the industrialisation of the country.
  • In 1904, an Association for the Advancement of Scientific and Industrial Education of Indians was formed, with the objective of sending qualified students to Europe, America, and Japan to study science-based industries.

Discrimination against Indian Scientists

• As noted earlier, the colonial environment was not conducive to higher studies, let alone research. Indians were confined to subordinate posts, and even those who had distinguished themselves abroad were paid less than Europeans of the same grade and rank — this “apartheid” in science provoked a strong reaction among Indian scientists.
  • J.C. Bose, India’s first noted physicist, refused to accept this reduced salary for three years; until the Royal Society recognised him, college authorities refused him any research facility, treating his work as purely private.
    • Bose was unorthodox in another sense too: he was among the first modern scientists to take up interdisciplinary research, moving from physics into plant physiology through his interest in electrical responses, and inventing the crescograph, a device for measuring plant growth.
    • To win a place and recognition in Britain’s scientific circles was no less difficult than fighting the administrative absurdities of a colonial government — but Bose persisted, and won.
  • P.C. Ray suffered similarly: on returning from England in 1888 with a doctorate in chemistry, he had to wait a year before being offered a temporary assistant professorship, and remained confined to the Provincial Service throughout his career.
  • P.N. Bose chose to resign in 1903, when he was superseded for the directorship of the Geological Survey by T. Holland, who was ten years his junior.

Nationalist Political Response

• These grievances were reflected on the political platform of the country.
  • In its third session (1887), the Indian National Congress took up the question of technical education and has passed resolutions on it every year since. K.T. Telang and B.N. Seal pointed out that, in the name of technical education, the government was merely imparting lower forms of practical training.
  • The Indian Medical Service was also severely criticised; in 1893, the Congress passed a resolution asking the government “to raise a scientific medical profession in India by throwing open fields for medical and scientific work to the best talent available, and indigenous talent in particular.”
  • Whether the issue was education, agriculture, or mining, the Congress touched on several such problems under its wide sweep.

Japan as Inspiration and Revivalist Tendencies

• The activities of this era carried two important features.
  • First, almost all exponents of Swadeshi looked to Japan as a major source of inspiration — its emergence as a viable Asian industrial power, and its military victory over Russia in 1904–05, caught the imagination of Indians.
  • Second, these efforts quite often showed revivalist tendencies, perhaps because the distant past comes in handy for recovering a lost self or reasserting one’s identity.
    • This search for moorings led P.N. Bose, the geologist mentioned earlier, to write A History of Hindu Civilisation in three volumes.
    • J.C. Bose gave Sanskrit names to the instruments he had fabricated, such as the Kunchanagraph and Shoshangraph.
    • Many science popularisers tended to argue that whatever was good in Western science had already existed in ancient India — for instance, Ramendrasundar Trivedi’s discussion of Darwin concluded by comparing his theory with ideas in the Gita, while B.K. Sarkar later wrote on Hindu Achievements in Exact Science.
  • All these scientists favoured the industrial application of modern science, but they failed to overcome certain cultural constraints necessary for this effort — all they managed to demonstrate was that Indian ethos and the values of modern science were congruent rather than opposed. Evolving a correct understanding of India’s intellectual and cultural heritage was made all the more difficult by the total colonial domination of education and social life. Nonetheless, these efforts had a galvanising effect.

Institution-Building and the Rise of Indian Science

• Taking advantage of the University Act of 1904, which allowed existing Indian universities to organise teaching and research instead of merely affiliating colleges, Sir Asutosh Mookherjee took the initiative of establishing a University College of Science in Calcutta.
  • Eminent scientists such as P.C. Ray, C.V. Raman, S.N. Bose, and K.S. Krishnan taught there; although starved of funds throughout, this college produced a group of physicists and chemists who received international recognition — in sharp contrast to the rather poor contributions of many government scientific organisations staffed by highly paid Europeans.
• Those who put India on the scientific map of the world were many:
  • J.C. Bose showed that animal and plant tissues display electric responses under different kinds of stimuli, such as pricking or heat.
  • S. Ramanujan, an intuitive mathematical genius, made major contributions to number theory.
  • P.C. Ray analysed a number of rare Indian minerals and started the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works, a pioneering, pace-setting organisation in indigenous chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing.
  • C.V. Raman’s research on the scattering of light later won him the Nobel Prize in 1930; K.S. Krishnan did theoretical work on the electric resistance of metals.
  • S.N. Bose’s collaboration with Einstein on the study of elementary particles led to what is known as Bose–Einstein Statistics.
  • D.N. Wadia worked in geology, Birbal Sahni in palaeobotany, P.C. Mahalanobis in statistics, and S.S. Bhatnagar in chemistry.
  • Beyond their individual contributions, the greatest legacy of these scientists lay in teaching and guiding research — institutions such as the Bose Institute (1917), the Sheila Dhar Institute of Soil Science (1936), and the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany further boosted scientific activity in India.
• The need for an annual scientific meeting — one that could bring scientific workers from across the country into closer touch with one another — had long been felt, something previously possible only through purely official, irregular gatherings such as the Sanitary Conference or the Agricultural Conference.
  • This led to the birth of the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) in 1914, with the objectives of giving a stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific enquiry, promoting interaction among societies and individuals interested in science across the country, and securing greater attention for pure and applied science.
  • These objectives have changed little since, and the ISCA has grown into the largest organisation of Indian scientists and technologists, representing all disciplines of science and technology.

Towards Self-Reliance: From World War I to World War II

• In the wake of the First World War (1914–18), the government realised that India needed to become more self-reliant scientifically and industrially, appointing an Indian Industrial Commission in 1916 to examine steps for reducing India’s scientific and industrial dependence on Britain.
  • Although the resulting recommendations were broad in scope, covering many aspects of industrial development, few were actually implemented — a fate shared by numerous other conferences and committees, as the government routinely pleaded insufficient funds or inadequate demand whenever India requested new or expanded institutions. The interests of the colonial administration and those of the nationalists, in most instances, simply clashed.
• The first quarter of the 20th century was, in general, marked by continuing debate over the direction of scientific development.
  • When Gandhiji launched his campaign for cottage industries, differing notes were heard at the annual sessions of the Indian Science Congress: P.C. Ray held that general progress through elementary education and traditional industries was a necessary precondition for scientific progress, while M.N. Saha and his Science & Culture group opposed the Gandhian path and supported the setting up of large-scale industries instead.
  • The socialist experiments in Russia had, meanwhile, revealed the immense potential of science for economic and material progress, and India’s national leadership was increasingly veering towards heavy industrialisation and socialism, both resting on the foundations of modern science and technology.
  • On Saha’s persuasion, Congress President Subhas Chandra Bose agreed to place national planning and industrialisation at the top of the Congress agenda, resulting in the formation of the National Planning Committee in 1938 under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru.
    • This Committee appointed 29 subcommittees, many dealing with technical subjects such as irrigation, industries, public health, and education. The subcommittee on Technical Education, chaired by M.N. Saha — with members including Birbal Sahni, J.C. Ghose, J.N. Mukherjee, N.R. Dhar, Nazir Ahmed, S.S. Bhatnagar, and A.H. Pandya — reviewed existing institutions to assess whether the available infrastructure of men and equipment was sufficient to produce technical personnel.
• The outbreak of the Second World War (1939–45), and the disruption of the direct sea route between India and England, made it necessary for the colonial government to allow greater industrial capability to develop within India.
  • It was, therefore, felt necessary to establish a Central Research Organisation, eventually leading to the founding of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1942.
  • As part of post-war reconstruction, the government invited A.V. Hill, President of the Royal Society, who prepared a report in 1944 identifying the various problems confronting research in India.
• These developments offered Indian scientists far greater opportunities in policy-making and the management of scientific affairs — and the origins of independent India’s science policy, and indeed of its wider national reconstruction effort, can be traced directly to these late-colonial activities.