7 - Colonial controversies: astronomers and physicians

Summary

The following two chapters examine a series of debates which took place among the British and Indians in the early nineteenth century concerning astronomy, medicine, language and geography. Indian kings had fostered these forms of knowledge because they bore directly on the health and good order of the body politic. For their part, the British believed they could demonstrate intellectual superiority in such disciplines, even while they were uneasily aware that European scientific opinion was itself uncertain and divided. By surveying these debates we can examine British information-gathering beyond the bounds of warfare and statecraft. We also encounter Indians adapting their styles of argument to the new media and using them to conduct polemics about the status of Indian and western learning. The intellectual associations and alliances which emerged from such encounters were harbingers of an Indian nation. Indian protagonists in colonial debates were forming connections across the whole subcontinent and appealing to a national intellectual tradition two generations before indigenous political associations began to emerge.

The shape of the Indian astral sciences

The Indian astral sciences were typical of the knowledges of the ecumene. They were fractious disciplines and also highly political ones because observation of the heavens determined the correct timing for worship, war, politics and agriculture. For their part, the British grappled with these sciences and interrogated their specialists for practical reasons but also because astronomy, since Halley and Newton, had been regarded as a domain of national intellectual triumph. We consider first the Indian inheritance and then the British critical onslaught. Hindu and Jain astronomy (jyotishastra) and their associated mathematics and astrology were designed to foretell auspicious times for rites, alliances and day-to-day transactions.