The last keynote lecture of the DoHSS Conference, on “Displacing the History of Science OR Fashioning a Fauna for British India” was delivered by Dr John Mathew of IISER, Pune.
Perfectly combining his expertise in both zoology and history of science, he began with an excerpt from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. The British narrator moves from Shanghai, where he has spent his childhood, back to Britain – a rupture from one place known as home, to another.
Drawing a parallel with the Scots who came to India during the early days of the company, he introduced the term ‘translocate’, a specialist form of expatriate who serves as an intermediary between his culture and the culture native to the place where he lives.
After touching upon this briefly, he took the audience through a series of theories about the Scientific Revolution and its spread, mentioning E.H. Carr, T. S. Kuhn, Joseph Needham and George Basalla’s work, pondering whether modern science came purely from Western Europe — ‘West vs Rest’ situation where it spread throughout the world by contact, or whether it was Western Science that won over other competing sciences.
He then jumped back to translocates, this time quoting Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and further defined the translocate as someone who mediated the flow of information between two cultures, and could challenge the metropolitan scientist through claims of understanding the local more intimately and immediately.
In the early days of the Company, lax rules regarding mingling with the local population led to more cultural exchange, and he gives examples such as Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart and other ‘White Mughals’, British soldiers or officers who assimilated completely into the Indian way of life, even having multiple wives and children. He further mentions a few types of translocates (go-betweens) in South Asia, namely, the interpreter-translator, the merchant-banker, comprador, and the legal representative.
Dr Mathew now puts all the above theories into the framework of what is the main topic of his lecture, the tussle for the natural history of India between translocates from France and from Britain.
The French were forced to give up their Indian territories to the British after the Seven Years’ War. This however did not impede their naturalist efforts. Botanists like Jean-Baptiste Leschenault and Georges Cuvier were forerunners of natural science in the early 19th century. In fact, in 1830, Gleanings in Science, an English magazine, admitted that the French were way ahead of the competition, at least in natural history. A large part of this is because the French Government was deeply involved in exploration, where the British had turned almost exclusively to the administrative and political sphere.
However, projects such as the Duke of Wellesley’s Indian Natural History, charged Francis Buchanan-Hamilton with collecting animals from the Empire and create a menagerie. Here, it is pointed out that most of the ‘British’ involved in the zoological endeavour are actually Scots, something we continue to see in later decades of the Raj too.
The Dutch had significant contributions, such as Hendrik Adrian van Rheede’s 12-volume Hortus Malabaricus, written in Latin then translated to English and Malayalam.
For a while after this, Dr Mathew talked about institutions that were set up to further this research in zoology, such as the Geological Survey of India (GSI). He explains that the British effort was not very productive early in the 18th century because it was diffused. Centralisation, with the establishing of the GSI, yielded results, noticeably with the publication of the 81-volume Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma, which was undertaken at the behest of Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker. Despite this, scientists in India tended to see those commenting on research on fauna from Britain in a somewhat condescending manner.
Moving on to the wider picture, he talked about the imagination of the translocate in India as contrasted with that of the scientists at home. He points out the tendency to mix what one knows with what one sees, by citing the example of Leschenault’s discovery of the “coconut marten”, which is actually a civet. Interestingly, in Tamil and Malayalam, the civet is called the mara-naai or mara-patti (tree-dog).
Dr Mathew closed his lecture with a few potential research questions. Prominent among them was “When we look at the history of science, are we looking at a game that the British invented and are exulting at their win?”.
The keynote lecture was followed by a Q&A session, where Professor Roland Wittje commented on the fact that British historiography could not be understood without India. Professor Mathangi Krishnamurthy asked Dr Mathew about the stake of this massive project. He concluded by elaborating the various other players that he had not mentioned, such as Portugal, and also the many possibilities that examining the history of science with regards to British colonialism held.
Report by Tejas S.
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