Minakshi Menon | McGill University (original) (raw)

Papers by Minakshi Menon

Research paper thumbnail of Hommage to Rosane Rocher, CHPSAA/SPHere, Paris 9/12/22

Research paper thumbnail of What's in a name? William Jones, 'philological empiricism' and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India

South Asian History and Culture, 2022

'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-17... more 'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones's method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones's philological method for identifying the jat _ āmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the 'Spikenard of the Ancients'. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and 'ethnographic' explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object-Valeriana jatamansi Jones-and a mode of plant description that encoded the 'native' experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jat _ āmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751-1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones's method achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do.

Research paper thumbnail of Menon Humboldt Forum lecture

Youtube link to public lecture delivered at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin as part of the event "Gard... more Youtube link to public lecture delivered at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin as part of the event "Gardens of Empire. On he politics of collecting nature", 21/02/22

Research paper thumbnail of Grains of paradise and reading against the grain: Telling stories about science in the Global South

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Research paper thumbnail of Indigenous knowledges and colonial sciences in South Asia

South Asian History and Culture, 2021

What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak o... more What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak of ‘colonial sciences’? This Introduction briefly examines these questions in order to provide a context for the collection of articles presented in this issue on the making of the sciences in colonial South Asia. In doing so, it also addresses related questions: The translation of terms – does the Sanskrit word śāstra correspond to the English science? If not, what does each word mean? And the differences that arise when categories move across disciplines – development studies scholars use the term indigenous knowledges for the knowledge-forms of the original inhabitants of a territory; historians of South Asia and historians of science use it to refer to older forms of knowledge lost to colonial rule.

The contributors represent very different disciplines – anthropology, history, history of science and Indology; and bring a variety of methodological approaches to the questions they address. They cover a chronological span stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and address different subjects: the use of technical vocabulary in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy, astrology at universities in Banaras, the making of the Hindi Scientific Glossary, botanical knowledge-making in East India Company India, the philological practices of Vaidyas in Bengal, and Ayurvedic pedagogy in today’s Kerala. A common thread joining the essays appears in the role played by philology in practices as different as the naming of plants, the making of procedural medical knowledge in a gurukula, and the editing of Ayurvedic texts in the context of an expanding print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Research paper thumbnail of Making Useful Knowledge : : British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784-1820

Author(s): Menon, Minakshi | Abstract: This dissertation explores the making of natural historica... more Author(s): Menon, Minakshi | Abstract: This dissertation explores the making of natural historical knowledge in late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth-century British India. In answering its organizing question, "What was colonial natural history as a form of knowledge?" I argue that colonial natural history and the East India Company state were co- constitutive. Natural history was an expression of the manner in which the Company's commercial interests shaped the organization of governance. It was a hybrid way of knowing that brought together different types of knowledge, European and indigenous, in the service of the Company state; and it was useful knowledge, directed to specific contexts of use without necessarily affecting natural knowledge making in Europe. The dissertation draws on the literatures and methodologies of two sub-disciplines, history of science and South Asian history, as well as on research in science studies to explore the knowledge- making strateg...

Research paper thumbnail of Making Useful Knowledge : : British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784-1820

Research paper thumbnail of Knowing the Orient

SURPRISE 107 Variations on the Unexpected: Essays in Honour of Raine Daston, MPIWG, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of TRANSFERRABLE SURVEYS: NATURAL HISTORY FROM THE HEBRIDES TO SOUTH INDIA (uncorrected proof)

Journal of Scottish Historical Studies , 2018

This article seeks to explain why Rev. John Walker's teaching was able to travel in the kit of an... more This article seeks to explain why Rev. John Walker's teaching was able to travel in the kit of an Edinburgh medic and helped underpin the knowledge-making strategies of a colonising commercial concern, the EIC; and also why, in one particular instance, it did not. To do so it explores the historical circumstances for the institutionalization of a particular kind of natural history at Edinburgh, the natural objects it created and the rhetorical strategies it pursued. It then moves to explore conditions in south India at a critical moment in the history of British imperialism in India: the conclusion of the fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799) and the defeat of Tipu Sultan.

Research paper thumbnail of Essay Review Grains of paradise and reading against the grain: Telling stories about science in the Global South

Research paper thumbnail of Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article

Social Scientist, 1984

... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents... more ... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents, as indicated above, had written on peasant rebellions and movements, good examples being Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, and numerous ...

Research paper thumbnail of Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article

Social Scientist, 1984

... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents... more ... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents, as indicated above, had written on peasant rebellions and movements, good examples being Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, and numerous ...

Research paper thumbnail of Medicine, Money and the Making of the East India Company State: William Roxburgh in Madras, c. 1790, in Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World Volume One, eds. Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye, Palgrave MacMillan 2015

This paper addresses an important and much-neglected theme in science studies, the role of medica... more This paper addresses an important and much-neglected theme in science studies, the role of medical savants in early-modern state making. The subject of the paper, William Roxburgh (1751-1815), an Edinburgh-trained surgeon, joined the English East India Company’s (EIC) Medical Service in 1776. As an assistant surgeon in Madras Presidency, Roxburgh built firm bonds with an important free merchant, Andrew Ross (d. 1797). Roxburgh put his natural knowledge making skills at Ross’s service, enabling his trading ventures, and earning himself a tidy fortune of 50,000 pounds in the process. The paper draws on literature in history of science and South Asian studies to explain how Roxburgh, with Ross’s help, built himself a patronage network extending across Britain and its empire. This enabled his rise through the ranks of the EIC state, allowed him to build the institution of Company Naturalist in colonial India, and brought him the important post of Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Roxburgh also used his status as the client of eminent men of science, especially of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), to establish an unassailable position within Britain’s first scientific circles. When he died in 1815 he had set his son on a path into the British gentry and secured his claim to the title “The Father of Indian Botany”. The paper makes its arguments by drawing on recent sociological theorizing about the role of familial ideology and the use of “logistical” power (the use of the material world for political effect) in state making. Ross’s relationship with Roxburgh as revealed through his letters showed a strong familial affect. It illustrated an instance of the expansion of notions of paternity as masculine power and political husbandry into the polity. At the same time Roxburgh’s education at the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School equipped him with the skills to make the “useful” knowledge that was required by a state that was also a commercial entity. The paper is based on primary sources collected at a variety of sites in Britain and India.

Talks by Minakshi Menon

Research paper thumbnail of Did Kāśīnātha Śarma know Sanskrit? Recovering the Thought Worlds and Practices of "Brokers" in East India Company India

Abstract of paper delivered at workshop "(Dis)locating and Remapping the History of Science and M... more Abstract of paper delivered at workshop "(Dis)locating and Remapping the History of Science and Medicine, Harvard University, 21 April 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Sanskrit Names on Paper: Knowing Plants in East India Company Bengal, c. 1790

How did a scientific "language" for botany develop in early modern Europe? The success of the Lin... more How did a scientific "language" for botany develop in early modern Europe? The success of the Linnaean system of botanical classification and nomenclature, according to historians of botany, lay in its artificial character. The conceptual content of Linnaean botany, it has been argued, was based on the idea that botany formed a "sphere of exchange". Thus Linnaean species names, rigidly attributable to the plants in question and freed of all context, assisted in stabilizing plants as objects of scientific inquiry, as they circulated among botanic gardens in Europe. Such names were of little use, however, if your aim was to identify and describe plants in unfamiliar tropical milieus.

Conferences by Minakshi Menon

Research paper thumbnail of Open Discussion: Decolonizing the History of Science in Asia

History of Science Society Virtual Forum, 2020

What do we mean when we speak of decolonizing the history of science? Today, leading voices on de... more What do we mean when we speak of decolonizing the history of science? Today, leading voices on decolonization come from the Indigenous studies community, some of whom have emphasized, following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, that "decolonization is not a metaphor," but rather about giving land back to those from whom it was stolen. Other scholars, however, expand the significance of decolonization to all subjugated cultures and express the need to "decolonize Western epistemologies" and "build decolonial epistemologies" (Mignolo). This session will be organized as an open forum to take up the question of decolonizing science from the perspective of Asian history. What is the relationship between deterritorializaton and epistemological colonialism? How can changes in methodology introduced by postcolonial and/or decolonial thinkers inform the history of science in Asia? We invite all participants to reflect on what decolonization means to you as intellectual and political practice. The Co-Chairs of FHSAsia (Minakshi Menon and Sigrid Schmalzer) will each speak for ten minutes on the state-of-play in South Asian and East Asian studies regarding decolonizing the history of science. We will then open the floor for discussion among our members and the audience at large.

Research paper thumbnail of Program PCKP

Politics of Collecting and Knowledge Production, 2019

In modern societies, the production of knowledge is closely associated with discipline-in every s... more In modern societies, the production of knowledge is closely associated with discipline-in every sense of the word. It defines the standards of Western methodologies and classifications, of academic disciplines and institutions as universal, while at the same time appropriating or excluding local or 'indigenous' knowledge and its respective global agents. Critical Museum Studies and Critical Heritage Studies reflect on the hierarchies of knowledge that exist in ethnographic and natural history collections and exhibitions in terms of their colonial legacy. Decolonizing knowledge and collections requires tracing how objects were acquired and translocated as well as the collaboration of diverse communities. It reveals the influence of local academic or 'indigenous' knowledge and its subsequent suppression, and highlights its current relevance for assuming political and ecological responsibility. The research and exhibition project Researching Collecting is a collaborative effort of the Centre for Collection Development in Göttingen and the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. This workshop is developed by Susanne Wernsing (HTW Berlin) in collaboration with Dominik Hünniger (University of Hamburg). Based on Göttingen's ethnographic and natural history collections, it aims to challenge methodologies and techniques of research and documentation of the global heritage. 20.11. ARRIVAL AND VISITING COLLECTIONS 2:00pm to 8:00pm Visiting collections in Berlin 21.11. INTRO 9:00am to 10:30am Welcome

Research paper thumbnail of Science and its Local Readers in British India (Panel) History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Utrecht, 2019

This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge i... more This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in colonial South Asia. It brings together rich empirical histories of the process of selecting, translating, and publishing the sciences by indigenous elites for Indian readers in regional languages. These papers are based on printed materials in Urdu, Bengali and Hindi-three regional languages widely used across the subcontinent and often associated with distinct communities of religion and knowledge, Muslims and Hindus. Together these papers provide dense case-studies of the reception, translation and reconfiguration of scientific knowledge in a multilingual colonial context with pre-existing knowledge communities and longstanding intellectual traditions. The panel engages with an existing geography within the historiography of science in the British empire, which has London and Calcutta as its centers, by situating its inquiries in the cities of Aligarh, Allahabad and Hyderabad, and their attendant cultures of knowledge. These case-studies aim to demonstrate the cultural embeddedness of knowledge production; the interactions between categories of science and religion; and the importance of language and translation to the global circulations of scientific discourse.

Organized by Sarah Qidwai
Sponsored by the Forum for the History of Science in Asia

Translating Science: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Scientific Discourse in Print
09:00 - 09:30
Presented by: Sarah Qidwai (University of Toronto)

Vigyan, Scientific Readerships, and the Colonial Lives of Science Popularization in North India, ca. 1915
09:30 - 10:00
Presented by: Dr. Charu Singh (Adrian Research Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge)
'Itibritto' and 'Upokarita': Tracking a Historically Conscious Narration of Chemistry in Nineteenth Century Bengali Periodicals
10:15 - 10:45
Presented by: Ms. Sthira Bhattacharya (PhD student, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Printing Science in Princely Hyderabad: Nawab Fakhruddin Khan Shamsul Umara’s Epistemological Interventions

Presented by: Muhammad Ashraf T. (Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad)

Commentary: Science and Its Local Readers in British India
10:45 - 11:15
Presented by: Dr. Minakshi Menon (Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)

Research paper thumbnail of Conference: H. T. Colebrooke and Historiographies of Sciences in Sanskrit, 15-16 April 2019, organized by Sphere/CNRS & Université Paris Diderot

Research paper thumbnail of Therapeutic Commodities: Trade, Transmission and the Culture of Global Medicine, 1600-2000

A Joint Workshop by the Global History and Culture Centre (University of Warwick) and the Centre ... more A Joint Workshop by the Global History and Culture Centre (University of Warwick) and the Centre for Historical Studies (JNU)
New Delhi, 5-6 November 2018

Research paper thumbnail of Hommage to Rosane Rocher, CHPSAA/SPHere, Paris 9/12/22

Research paper thumbnail of What's in a name? William Jones, 'philological empiricism' and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India

South Asian History and Culture, 2022

'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-17... more 'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones's method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones's philological method for identifying the jat _ āmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the 'Spikenard of the Ancients'. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and 'ethnographic' explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object-Valeriana jatamansi Jones-and a mode of plant description that encoded the 'native' experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jat _ āmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751-1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones's method achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do.

Research paper thumbnail of Menon Humboldt Forum lecture

Youtube link to public lecture delivered at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin as part of the event "Gard... more Youtube link to public lecture delivered at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin as part of the event "Gardens of Empire. On he politics of collecting nature", 21/02/22

Research paper thumbnail of Grains of paradise and reading against the grain: Telling stories about science in the Global South

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Research paper thumbnail of Indigenous knowledges and colonial sciences in South Asia

South Asian History and Culture, 2021

What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak o... more What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak of ‘colonial sciences’? This Introduction briefly examines these questions in order to provide a context for the collection of articles presented in this issue on the making of the sciences in colonial South Asia. In doing so, it also addresses related questions: The translation of terms – does the Sanskrit word śāstra correspond to the English science? If not, what does each word mean? And the differences that arise when categories move across disciplines – development studies scholars use the term indigenous knowledges for the knowledge-forms of the original inhabitants of a territory; historians of South Asia and historians of science use it to refer to older forms of knowledge lost to colonial rule.

The contributors represent very different disciplines – anthropology, history, history of science and Indology; and bring a variety of methodological approaches to the questions they address. They cover a chronological span stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and address different subjects: the use of technical vocabulary in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy, astrology at universities in Banaras, the making of the Hindi Scientific Glossary, botanical knowledge-making in East India Company India, the philological practices of Vaidyas in Bengal, and Ayurvedic pedagogy in today’s Kerala. A common thread joining the essays appears in the role played by philology in practices as different as the naming of plants, the making of procedural medical knowledge in a gurukula, and the editing of Ayurvedic texts in the context of an expanding print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Research paper thumbnail of Making Useful Knowledge : : British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784-1820

Author(s): Menon, Minakshi | Abstract: This dissertation explores the making of natural historica... more Author(s): Menon, Minakshi | Abstract: This dissertation explores the making of natural historical knowledge in late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth-century British India. In answering its organizing question, "What was colonial natural history as a form of knowledge?" I argue that colonial natural history and the East India Company state were co- constitutive. Natural history was an expression of the manner in which the Company's commercial interests shaped the organization of governance. It was a hybrid way of knowing that brought together different types of knowledge, European and indigenous, in the service of the Company state; and it was useful knowledge, directed to specific contexts of use without necessarily affecting natural knowledge making in Europe. The dissertation draws on the literatures and methodologies of two sub-disciplines, history of science and South Asian history, as well as on research in science studies to explore the knowledge- making strateg...

Research paper thumbnail of Making Useful Knowledge : : British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784-1820

Research paper thumbnail of Knowing the Orient

SURPRISE 107 Variations on the Unexpected: Essays in Honour of Raine Daston, MPIWG, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of TRANSFERRABLE SURVEYS: NATURAL HISTORY FROM THE HEBRIDES TO SOUTH INDIA (uncorrected proof)

Journal of Scottish Historical Studies , 2018

This article seeks to explain why Rev. John Walker's teaching was able to travel in the kit of an... more This article seeks to explain why Rev. John Walker's teaching was able to travel in the kit of an Edinburgh medic and helped underpin the knowledge-making strategies of a colonising commercial concern, the EIC; and also why, in one particular instance, it did not. To do so it explores the historical circumstances for the institutionalization of a particular kind of natural history at Edinburgh, the natural objects it created and the rhetorical strategies it pursued. It then moves to explore conditions in south India at a critical moment in the history of British imperialism in India: the conclusion of the fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799) and the defeat of Tipu Sultan.

Research paper thumbnail of Essay Review Grains of paradise and reading against the grain: Telling stories about science in the Global South

Research paper thumbnail of Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article

Social Scientist, 1984

... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents... more ... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents, as indicated above, had written on peasant rebellions and movements, good examples being Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, and numerous ...

Research paper thumbnail of Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article

Social Scientist, 1984

... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents... more ... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents, as indicated above, had written on peasant rebellions and movements, good examples being Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, and numerous ...

Research paper thumbnail of Medicine, Money and the Making of the East India Company State: William Roxburgh in Madras, c. 1790, in Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World Volume One, eds. Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye, Palgrave MacMillan 2015

This paper addresses an important and much-neglected theme in science studies, the role of medica... more This paper addresses an important and much-neglected theme in science studies, the role of medical savants in early-modern state making. The subject of the paper, William Roxburgh (1751-1815), an Edinburgh-trained surgeon, joined the English East India Company’s (EIC) Medical Service in 1776. As an assistant surgeon in Madras Presidency, Roxburgh built firm bonds with an important free merchant, Andrew Ross (d. 1797). Roxburgh put his natural knowledge making skills at Ross’s service, enabling his trading ventures, and earning himself a tidy fortune of 50,000 pounds in the process. The paper draws on literature in history of science and South Asian studies to explain how Roxburgh, with Ross’s help, built himself a patronage network extending across Britain and its empire. This enabled his rise through the ranks of the EIC state, allowed him to build the institution of Company Naturalist in colonial India, and brought him the important post of Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Roxburgh also used his status as the client of eminent men of science, especially of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), to establish an unassailable position within Britain’s first scientific circles. When he died in 1815 he had set his son on a path into the British gentry and secured his claim to the title “The Father of Indian Botany”. The paper makes its arguments by drawing on recent sociological theorizing about the role of familial ideology and the use of “logistical” power (the use of the material world for political effect) in state making. Ross’s relationship with Roxburgh as revealed through his letters showed a strong familial affect. It illustrated an instance of the expansion of notions of paternity as masculine power and political husbandry into the polity. At the same time Roxburgh’s education at the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School equipped him with the skills to make the “useful” knowledge that was required by a state that was also a commercial entity. The paper is based on primary sources collected at a variety of sites in Britain and India.

Research paper thumbnail of Did Kāśīnātha Śarma know Sanskrit? Recovering the Thought Worlds and Practices of "Brokers" in East India Company India

Abstract of paper delivered at workshop "(Dis)locating and Remapping the History of Science and M... more Abstract of paper delivered at workshop "(Dis)locating and Remapping the History of Science and Medicine, Harvard University, 21 April 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Sanskrit Names on Paper: Knowing Plants in East India Company Bengal, c. 1790

How did a scientific "language" for botany develop in early modern Europe? The success of the Lin... more How did a scientific "language" for botany develop in early modern Europe? The success of the Linnaean system of botanical classification and nomenclature, according to historians of botany, lay in its artificial character. The conceptual content of Linnaean botany, it has been argued, was based on the idea that botany formed a "sphere of exchange". Thus Linnaean species names, rigidly attributable to the plants in question and freed of all context, assisted in stabilizing plants as objects of scientific inquiry, as they circulated among botanic gardens in Europe. Such names were of little use, however, if your aim was to identify and describe plants in unfamiliar tropical milieus.

Research paper thumbnail of Open Discussion: Decolonizing the History of Science in Asia

History of Science Society Virtual Forum, 2020

What do we mean when we speak of decolonizing the history of science? Today, leading voices on de... more What do we mean when we speak of decolonizing the history of science? Today, leading voices on decolonization come from the Indigenous studies community, some of whom have emphasized, following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, that "decolonization is not a metaphor," but rather about giving land back to those from whom it was stolen. Other scholars, however, expand the significance of decolonization to all subjugated cultures and express the need to "decolonize Western epistemologies" and "build decolonial epistemologies" (Mignolo). This session will be organized as an open forum to take up the question of decolonizing science from the perspective of Asian history. What is the relationship between deterritorializaton and epistemological colonialism? How can changes in methodology introduced by postcolonial and/or decolonial thinkers inform the history of science in Asia? We invite all participants to reflect on what decolonization means to you as intellectual and political practice. The Co-Chairs of FHSAsia (Minakshi Menon and Sigrid Schmalzer) will each speak for ten minutes on the state-of-play in South Asian and East Asian studies regarding decolonizing the history of science. We will then open the floor for discussion among our members and the audience at large.

Research paper thumbnail of Program PCKP

Politics of Collecting and Knowledge Production, 2019

In modern societies, the production of knowledge is closely associated with discipline-in every s... more In modern societies, the production of knowledge is closely associated with discipline-in every sense of the word. It defines the standards of Western methodologies and classifications, of academic disciplines and institutions as universal, while at the same time appropriating or excluding local or 'indigenous' knowledge and its respective global agents. Critical Museum Studies and Critical Heritage Studies reflect on the hierarchies of knowledge that exist in ethnographic and natural history collections and exhibitions in terms of their colonial legacy. Decolonizing knowledge and collections requires tracing how objects were acquired and translocated as well as the collaboration of diverse communities. It reveals the influence of local academic or 'indigenous' knowledge and its subsequent suppression, and highlights its current relevance for assuming political and ecological responsibility. The research and exhibition project Researching Collecting is a collaborative effort of the Centre for Collection Development in Göttingen and the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. This workshop is developed by Susanne Wernsing (HTW Berlin) in collaboration with Dominik Hünniger (University of Hamburg). Based on Göttingen's ethnographic and natural history collections, it aims to challenge methodologies and techniques of research and documentation of the global heritage. 20.11. ARRIVAL AND VISITING COLLECTIONS 2:00pm to 8:00pm Visiting collections in Berlin 21.11. INTRO 9:00am to 10:30am Welcome

Research paper thumbnail of Science and its Local Readers in British India (Panel) History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Utrecht, 2019

This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge i... more This panel examines the role of print in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in colonial South Asia. It brings together rich empirical histories of the process of selecting, translating, and publishing the sciences by indigenous elites for Indian readers in regional languages. These papers are based on printed materials in Urdu, Bengali and Hindi-three regional languages widely used across the subcontinent and often associated with distinct communities of religion and knowledge, Muslims and Hindus. Together these papers provide dense case-studies of the reception, translation and reconfiguration of scientific knowledge in a multilingual colonial context with pre-existing knowledge communities and longstanding intellectual traditions. The panel engages with an existing geography within the historiography of science in the British empire, which has London and Calcutta as its centers, by situating its inquiries in the cities of Aligarh, Allahabad and Hyderabad, and their attendant cultures of knowledge. These case-studies aim to demonstrate the cultural embeddedness of knowledge production; the interactions between categories of science and religion; and the importance of language and translation to the global circulations of scientific discourse.

Organized by Sarah Qidwai
Sponsored by the Forum for the History of Science in Asia

Translating Science: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Scientific Discourse in Print
09:00 - 09:30
Presented by: Sarah Qidwai (University of Toronto)

Vigyan, Scientific Readerships, and the Colonial Lives of Science Popularization in North India, ca. 1915
09:30 - 10:00
Presented by: Dr. Charu Singh (Adrian Research Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge)
'Itibritto' and 'Upokarita': Tracking a Historically Conscious Narration of Chemistry in Nineteenth Century Bengali Periodicals
10:15 - 10:45
Presented by: Ms. Sthira Bhattacharya (PhD student, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Printing Science in Princely Hyderabad: Nawab Fakhruddin Khan Shamsul Umara’s Epistemological Interventions

Presented by: Muhammad Ashraf T. (Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad)

Commentary: Science and Its Local Readers in British India
10:45 - 11:15
Presented by: Dr. Minakshi Menon (Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)

Research paper thumbnail of Conference: H. T. Colebrooke and Historiographies of Sciences in Sanskrit, 15-16 April 2019, organized by Sphere/CNRS & Université Paris Diderot

Research paper thumbnail of Therapeutic Commodities: Trade, Transmission and the Culture of Global Medicine, 1600-2000

A Joint Workshop by the Global History and Culture Centre (University of Warwick) and the Centre ... more A Joint Workshop by the Global History and Culture Centre (University of Warwick) and the Centre for Historical Studies (JNU)
New Delhi, 5-6 November 2018

Research paper thumbnail of FORTHCOMING: JUNE- JULY 2018: Knowledge in Translation: Lecture Series, Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge

What happens when knowledge is transferred across cultural boundaries? How is it affected by movi... more What happens when knowledge is transferred across cultural boundaries? How is it affected by moving between different media and passing through institutional frameworks? This series of three two-day colloquia will explore the translation of knowledge in different contexts over time and space. Each event consists of a public lecture and a panel discussion on the first day, and a closed group masterclass on the second day.

Research paper thumbnail of Liko Global Natural History Program 2017 11 28 2

Workshop on Global Natural History held at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen, 7-9 December 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Roundtable: Rethinking Histories of Science and Medicine: Beyond Eurocentrism and Postcolonialism, History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Toronto, 10 November 2017

Roundtable Abstract Our speakers will critique current theories, methodological assumptions and c... more Roundtable Abstract Our speakers will critique current theories, methodological assumptions and chronological frameworks in the disciplines of the history of science and medicine, using case studies from Latin America, South Asia and Africa. Scholars who study the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism in the Global South have presented major challenges to Eurocentrism in the social sciences and humanities. Recent scholarship has, however, pointed to the limitations of postcolonial theories of difference/alterity, which organize such revisionist accounts. Can historians of science and medicine who study the Global South present new methodologies and new frameworks with which to move beyond the epistemologies of both Eurocentrism and postcolonialism? The roundtable will use this organizing question to reflect on alternative models with which to study nature and natural knowledge making in spaces outside the normative " West ". The participants will discuss, among other topics, developments in the early modern Black Atlantic; systematic knowledge forms in South Asia that elude the categories of Western modernity; and narratives that present the Green Revolution in Mexico as the result of US philanthropy and innovation. They will interrogate standard accounts about the role of experts and subalterns regarding agro-ecological practices in early postcolonial India; scrutinize the role of scientific-historical narratives about Islam that work to produce Islam as a global identity; and ask how Islam and Africa work to produce identity within the historiography of science. They will also address the issue of increasing disciplinary engagement with non-western forms of knowledge.

Research paper thumbnail of Colonial Sciences and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Asia

Flyer for a workshop held on science in South Asia in June 2016 at the Max Planck Institute for t... more Flyer for a workshop held on science in South Asia in June 2016 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Research paper thumbnail of Workshop at Harvard on Remapping and (Dis)locating Histories of Science and Medicine, April 21-22 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Poster Yale Macmillan Center InterAsia Initiative 2023

Workshop: Botanical Knowledge in Motion: Plant Geography and Epistemic Traditions in and Across Asia, 1850-1945

Research paper thumbnail of Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali Plants in Early Modern Knowledge (and Before): History, Philosophy, and Medicine

Plants in Early Modern Knowledge (and Before): History, Philosophy and Medicine, online seminar 2021-22, Ca'Foscari, Venice):

Research paper thumbnail of Hortus Indicus Malabaricus Poster final-

Lecture by Florike Egmond, University of Leiden, "The Hortus Malabaricus Images in the Context of... more Lecture by Florike Egmond, University of Leiden, "The Hortus Malabaricus Images in the Context of a European Visual Tradition", organised by Minakshi Menon, MPIWG, 28th July, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Translation in Ancient Mesopotamia, Late Imperial China, and Modern Eastern Europe

What happens when knowledge is transferred across cultural boundaries? How is it affected by movi... more What happens when knowledge is transferred across cultural boundaries? How is it affected by moving between different media and passing through institutional frameworks? This series of three two-day colloquia will explore the translation of knowledge in different contexts over time and space. Each event consists of a public lecture and a panel discussion on the first day, and a closed group masterclass on the second day.