Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

The British decision presented a problematic task for Indian nationalism—the reconciliation of one’s universalism with the realities of subjugation under the colonial power.⁵⁴ As a solution, a predominantly educated English-speaking Hindu elite, encompassing reformers, historians, writers, and scientists, constructed a narrative of Indianness through a particular interpretation of Hindu oral epics. In this reading, Hinduism was described as a universal scientific, religious, and cultural worldview—a “Hindu science.”⁵⁵ However, if this science had manifested itself in all its fullness in an ancient time, Indian civilization had been reduced to backwardness because of the savagery inflicted by waves of invaders and the economic exploitation caused by British rule. This recuperation of science as Hindu offered a basis to challenge the hegemony of Western claims over reason, since, the argument went, Hindu thought had been scientific since its very inception, predating the European Enlightenment by centuries.⁵⁶

Scientific knowledge and learning in colonial India operated as an arena in which the supremacy of the West could be contested, yet this contestation meant accepting, to a significant extent, the categories of classification proposed by the colonial state. For, while the Indian elite, through making a case for a “Hindu” science, did not accept the self-definition of science as inherently Western in its origins or character, they did, however, accept the self-definition of science as synonymous with rationality and enlightenment. Inasmuch as science stood for the intrinsic cultural superiority of the British colonizers or European civilization, a superiority manifested as a set of capacities that Indians lacked, that proposition was contested by the Indian anticolonial nationalist elites. For example, the Indian anticolonial nationalists articulated a case for the right and capability of Indians to govern themselves on economic grounds, arguing that British policies favored European businessmen over Indians, that British rule had resulted in a systematic drain of wealth from India, and that Britain could not reconcile its interests as an imperial power with the economic well-being of Indian society.