Configurations of Life historicizes four distinct clusters of biological research in colonial and early post-colonial India: the Zoological Survey of India, the so called ‘wolf-children’ natural experiment by anthropologists, the program in plant physiology and insect behavior at the Bose Institute, and the interdisciplinary group led by JBS Haldane at the Indian Statistical Institute.
Each of these clusters, the dissertation shows, was invested in characterizing their sciences as specifically Indian in character: in the case of the “wolf-children,” by seizing on a supposedly endemic Indian social and natural phenomenon, and in the others, by claiming an allegedly Indian epistemological stance. Each, the dissertation argues, sought authority by claiming to provide heterodox and distinctly Indian solutions to the most fundamental question of biological science – what is life? – though they differed wildly on what ‘life,’ or ‘Indian,’ or indeed, ‘science’ itself meant.
While the extant historiography has often read the effusion of similar claims to ‘Indianness’ in modern knowledge systems around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a discursive byproduct of nationalism, this dissertation shows that the pursuit of an ‘Indian’ biology cut across racial, national and ideological lines among scientists working in British and early independent India. Instead, by tracking the complex relations between the institutional politics, material culture, and theoretical concerns across these clusters, the dissertation charts out the proselytization, practice and eventual demise of four very distinct understandings of an Indian science of life, based on ecological fieldwork, so-called natural experiments, laboratory instrumentation, and a holistic synthesis between population genetics, statistics and history, respectively.
The question of the meaning of life, the dissertation shows, was mostly a rhetorical device invoked to underline the theoretical and methodological ambitions of these sciences, while enabling their individual conceptualizations of the relations between environments and organisms, between heredity and habitat, or between human and animal, to be read as the configurations of life itself. These attempts to create new, distinctly Indian knowledge systems and practices existed side by side and were informed with the larger popular and political project claiming ancient scientific glory on behalf of India, but their aspirations and methods cannot be historically conflated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/7kg7-q521 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Sengupta, Aviroop |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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