Session 5:'New' Knowledge and 'New' India: Lessons from the Colonial Past

Prof. Deepak Kumar  
Professor, History of Science and Education,   
ZakirHusain Centre for Educational Studies,School of Social Sciences,
Jawaharlal Nehru University

11thSeptember, 2010

Abstract: The onset of the 21st century was treated with a great deal of media hype and forecasts as a century of knowledge and incredible developments. As we move to the close of the first decade of the new century, the hype refuses to die down. Claims about knowledge-society and knowledge-economy (even in the midst of an apparent economic melt-down) continue to pour in as if the earlier societies or economies were not shaped or influenced by knowledge. Perhaps every age is an age of knowledge and change. How did the Indians feel when they entered the twentieth century? How did they look at the then existing techno-scientific knowledge?How different was it going to be from the past?The beginnings saw the apogee of the Empire but things were to change soon.What was their vision of ‘new’ India? How was ‘new’ knowledge perceived? What new strategies were thought of? On the new agenda figured technical education, scientific research, medical intervention, agricultural experiments, institutional dissemination of knowledge. Differences of opinion and controversies dogged the discourse all the time. The lecture will discuss not only the contours of the ‘development discourse’ but also the views that still lay on the margins.


Suggested Readings:


Deepak Kumar. Science and the Raj: A Study of British India. OUP, 2006.


Benjamin Zachariah. Developing India: an intellectual and social history, c. 1930-50. OUP, 2005.



Prof. Kumar began with a spin on the word “New” that his title had contained, talking about the ways in which it had been talked about as modern, western, cosmopolitan, colonial, etc. particularly with respect to science. This might evoke reactions from those who like to think science is universal, but Prof. Kumar maintained that the way science was done was different in different contexts … and such adjectives may be necessary to get at those differences. He also suggested that the whole question of knowledge economies and the globalization of knowledge might well have been a feature of colonial knowledge, and not a new phenomenon. Going back to the 18th century as a time of happenings rather than only decline, we saw, in this session, the advance of knowledge through incremental changes in the country rather than through paradigm shifts. This Prof. Kumar presented with the aid of various examples from the 12th century onwards. He traced one of the important landmarks of the establishment of “new knowledge” as the establishment of the Asiatic Society – here, he says, modernity begins as a change in a way of thinking, an attitude. Numerous other structures promoting rational knowledge came up – the Botanical Gardens, for instance, in various cities. Various colleges, like the Hindu College, followed. 1820-1850 saw 3000 literate people serviced by 30 journals, as an indicator of the vibrancy of debate. The mid-19th century saw the establishment of several new educational institutions with the following limitations – what to teach, how to teach, why to teach, and whom to teach. These questions were of course resolved and with varying results in various ways by the colonial regime, as seen in various commission reports post-Independence too. The 19th century saw an attempt, which was also a struggle, to ‘synthesize’ traditional and new knowledge – J.C. Bose, Mahendra Lal Sircar, P. C. Ray, institutions like IACS – a cultural response to colonialization that tried to prove that Indians are capable of original research. By the turn of the 20th century, after the failure of the synthesis model, other attempts had emerged – where the development turn may be sited. Prof. Kumar also spoke of the turn to spiritualism, the obsession with reform, the rise of nationalism. Again, new structures were coming up in this time – the Indian National Congress for one. In the event, what Prof. Kumar did is a representation of various categories like revivalism, traditionalists, and so on, to offer a thick description of the contexts within which various responses to the knowledge question were produced, as also the heterogeneity of responses, both of which disallow easy categorizations as well as attribution of pejorative connotations to them. By the 1930s, science has taken a backseat, but we still had stalwarts like Saha, Satyen Bose, all persistent proponents of development. We had, however, also an extraordinary dissenter – Gandhi – who introduced the term “social accountability” to the whole arena of the knowledge politics of the time, as also the question of distribution. The question had its valence, but we still had a westward ho. The questions of development were taken up as state responsibility, and centralization – including centralization of knowledge and excellence – was the inevitable result. The traditional distinctions between pure and applied science also died in this framework. However, the notion that science and technology were two sides of the same coin had 2 results for an undeveloped economy – one, the state got assigned a far greater responsibility, two, the problem of centralization.

The discussion threw up questions such as the value of a study of history of the 20th century such as the one Prof. Kumar presented – an understanding of the contexts for such a history. This might give us a feel for the future if we do it with our hindsight open, as Prof. Kumar eloquently put it. Further discussions again, like earlier sessions, threw open the explanatory tools we had hitherto easily put down – like easy understandings of Orientalism, colonialism – through a different ordering of history than the critical one we have in place.


This session, then, seemed to carry an implicit call for a revision of categories that we might have somewhat easily employed to explain distinctions between 'new' and 'traditional' knowledge, and we might well map the words modern/ western versus oriental/ eastern on to these. From the point where Orientalism was the framework wherein this distinction was even born, we were trying to look at what did not fit even this powerful explanatory framework - at the misfits to the puzzle, if you will - as a return to a recognition of the nominalism of categories, perhaps - that they are not meant to explain the world, and their not doing so qualifies rather than disqualifies them. There are multiple sides to this debate and takers on every side, but we might see Prof. Kumar as actually throwing open the field once again, by saying once more - 'our knowledge', in boldly and rigorously revisiting the attempts at 'synthesis', all of which are words we today cringe from using.