The proposed project is a political history of agricultural science in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in colonial south Asia. It builds on the PI's doctoral research "Facing competition: The history of indigo experiments in colonial India, 1897-1920," which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation in 2004. The doctoral dissertation developed a case study of efforts in six laboratories and agricultural stations to improve natural indigo (the blue dyestuff extracted from the leaves of the indigo plant) to highlight the resistance of "plantation science" to the transition towards synthetic dyestuffs. The proposed project incorporates a focus on the science surrounding indigo within a broader study of agricultural science and modern science in late colonial India. It discusses the insertion of new technologies into South Asian agriculture by the moving diasporas of European planters, targeted effort by European entrepreneurs to organize "private" science and their wider impact, the creation of public institutions of science by the colonial state, and colonial cultural reforms in the field of education (particularly the efforts to promote curricula based on western sciences).
The research problematizes the transmission of science in the imperial-colonial continuum, maintaining that several earlier studies of technological imperialism failed to engage with the thick local politics in the colony and the context of power at the level of the colony and globally. The scrutiny of documents is planned to proceed on two planes. The analysis consistently emphasizes the engagement of Indians with the passage of western agricultural science and education into the colonial order. In this regard the work probes the political actions of aristocratic landlords in the mid nineteenth century, the vernacular public in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who wrote in the regional press, and nationalists. Science in this work thus becomes a surrogate for aspirations to nationhood just as much as a tool for making claims to modernity on behalf of the civic society constituted by the people. The research plan expends an equal amount of effort towards understanding the nature of agricultural change with reference to the role played by global actors and ideologues such as the American philanthropist Henry Phipps, the famous Pittsburgh based industrialist and conservationist whose financial contribution was instrumental in the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Institute at Pusa in India in 1905, and the impact of German state models of agricultural change, in particular the economic model of Friedrich List. This inter-continental research examines the documents of the Agriculture Department and the Education Department of the colonial government in Bengal, popular writings, records at institutions in England, technical publications of the scientists, trade journals, and the archives of printers and dyers in the Yorkshire region of England. Seeking inspiration from postcolonial theory the work plan includes an analysis of the imaginations of a "local" modernity in the multiple spaces of the colonial order and their correspondence with influences emanating from extraterritorial nodes.
The international and interdisciplinary scope of this research activity will enable forging of various partnerships. Benefits are likely to accrue across research, teaching, and policy-making. The work fundamentally expands the analysis of western science in the under-analyzed non-western context. It will thus provide useful insights to policymakers and technologists invested in the task of transfer of science and technology from the industrialized West. The firm grounding of this research in the two separate fields of Science and Technology Studies and South Asian history opens possibilities for enlarging the infrastructure for research and teaching. The output from this work will expand the frontiers of knowledge and offer possibilities of collaboration to specialists working on European and Asian history. The resulting monograph will prove to be an important resource for teaching new courses melding the theoretical and empirical contents of history of science and South Asian history like the actor network theory, social construction of technology, frontier science, sociology of scientific knowledge, nationalism, postcolonial theory, and critical studies of modernity and globalization.
This is a book length treatment of the history of science surrounding the world’s quintessential blue dye, indigo, over five centuries in the modern period. Indigo was a common plant of the tropics. Indigo being a source of blue dye of yore, the knowledge of indigo culture would have been widespread wherever the plant was found. There was widespread peasant tradition of indigo culture on the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Indian peasants, who grew indigo as a cash crop on their small holdings, processed its leaves using traditional forms of knowledge. The beginning of plantations in the greater Caribbean in the mid seventeenth century brought a new phase in the life of the blue dye and the knowledge of indigo culture became specialized and attached to large-scale production for commerce. This knowledge had several pasts in peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Spanish Central America, and possibly among local "little traditions" among the Antillean islands that are hard to recover and specify. Crisscrossing flows of knowledge and skills across continents led to the creation of a cosmopolitan body of knowledge of indigo culture in greater Caribbean. The French naturalists and philosophers were an important link in the consolidation of this knowledge. They rendered the erstwhile informal, skill-based knowledge concrete and portable. The mobility of some of these foundational texts was elemental in the spread of indigo culture subsequently. Twin forces of industrialization and imperialism influenced the subsequent history of plant indigo. The hunger for blue, one of the primary colors in textile dyeing and printing, increased with the spread of industrialization in the west. The European colonies ranging from Carolina to Central and South America in the western hemisphere and Java and the Indian subcontinent in the eastern hemisphere began to produce indigo. Colonial Bengal under British rule was the predominant supplier of indigo to the world throughout the nineteenth century. It was in colonial Bengal that indigo’s path intersected with the developing empirical agricultural science that was fast coming out of its natural history traditions. The rise of organic chemistry, Liebigean science, and ascent of disciplinary and laboratory-based science impacted indigo production on Bengal plantations. The knowledge and practice of indigo culture was influenced not only by local agrarian relations, landscape, and imperatives of colonial power, but also modernist trends within agricultural science that unfolded transnationally. The trajectory of the history of agricultural indigo was interrupted with the invention of synthetic dyes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The knowledge of artificial dyes grew out of a separate tradition in chemistry. It was shaped subsequently by systems of industrial manufacturing and marketing. The natural product held itself well against early threats from the synthetics. The challenge from synthetics however intensified after the launch in 1897 of a cheaper and purer synthetic indigo by German companies. Made out of hydrocarbons, the latter competed with natural indigo on the basis of its cheapness and purity. The indigo planters who were now majorly based in colonial India did not give up. They mobilized modern laboratory science to improve the agricultural dye by cheapening its cost of production and raising its consistency and purity. These efforts continued without a break for over two decades within colonial laboratories and experiment stations. This new phase of indigo science was remarkably colonial in nature on account of its proximity to colonial institutions and a narrow set of goals of landed interests of expatriate Europeans in the colony. During the First World War as German synthetic indigo disappeared from the English markets, metropolitan forces sponsored a new range of scientific experiments in the colony with the goal of turning out natural dye in a form that would be an exact replica of synthetic indigo. After the First World War German technologies of synthetic indigo became more commonly available and the industrial use of artificial indigo became almost universal. This erased any hopes of reviving the indigo plantation industry. The systematic pursuit of scientific knowledge on plant-derived indigo also came to an end. While indigo making and dyeing survives as artisanal and personal artistic activity, its prior reign of industrial use has been lost. It is this global odyssey of indigo across continents that this book length project has tracked by focusing on the changing form of knowledge of indigo culture as situated in the realms of peasant agriculture, plantation economies, and laboratory science. The research innovatively takes a rupture from limiting frameworks in order to capture the entire texture of systematized knowledge relating to culture of indigo throughout its modern history. These findings are due to be published in a book form by Cambridge University Press in the summer of 2012. It is titled, _The Odyssey of Indigo: Plantations and Science in Colonial India, 1600-1920_.
