When Science became Vijñāna: Rethinking Categories of Knowledge in the Global History of Science from Early Twentieth Century South Asia

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Event Description 

The global, translation, and knowledge turns in the history of science have highlighted the contingency of the Anglophone term ‘science’ in several non-Western contexts. Several scholars have attended to the historical transformation of knowledge into science across languages, imperial geographies, and epistemological traditions. This talk joins these efforts by following science as an epistemic concept and as an actor’s category in the lay, vernacular setting of a popular-science periodical in colonial South Asia. At the turn of the twentieth century, when some Indian intellectuals presented modern scientific knowledge to lay readers, they invoked science not as śāstra—a millennia-old concept and term for scientific discourse among Sanskrit learned communities—but as vijñāna. What was at stake in this turn to a new, or rather, a renewed old epistemic concept, and what was the scope and meaning of science thus re-described? This talk will trace the vernacular meanings these categories acquired (and lost) as Hindi authors rendered modern scientific knowledge into public knowledge in the pages of Vigyan, a science monthly inaugurated in 1915. A range of science enthusiasts—Hindi literati, scholars of Sanskrit natural philosophy and Ayurveda, and science graduates and professors at provincial universities—published reflections on science as vijñāna in Vigyan. Charu Singh will show the multiple discursive strategies at work for translating knowledge and constituting the "Hindi reader with a taste for science" in early-twentieth century north India.

Event Speaker

Charu Singh, University Assistant Professor in Non-Western History of the Sciences at the University of Cambridge

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with any questions. 

Hosted by the Center for Science and Society. 

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