Science in Colonial India

Dhrub Kumar Singh is faculty at the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He works on science-society relationship and the social history of medicine in modern India. He is the founding Coordinator of the university archive of BHU – the Mahamana Archive and has institutionalized a two-year full time Masters Programme in Archival Studies and Management from the Dept of History, BHU.

Gautam Chandra is faculty at the Department of History, B.R. Ambedkar Bihar University, Muzaffarpur. His research interests include intellectual history, colonial economy, and the history of education, profession, competition and unemployment. He completed his doctoral research on the Emergence of Intellectual Proletariat in Colonial Madras from Pondicherry University and has published widely.

Part I. Science, Institution and Challenges in Nation-Building.- Chapter 1. Science and the Nation: From Dependence to Independence, 1850s-1950s (Dhrub Kumar Singh).- Chapter 2. Early Initiatives in the Cultivation of Science in Orissa, 1866-1962 (Shaan Kashyap).- Chapter 3. Technical Professions and Unemployment in Colonial South India, 1857-1937 (Gautam Chandra).- Part II. Progress in Medicine and Public Health.- Chapter 4. Making of Medical Institutions in Calcutta: Debates Within, Without and Beyond (Jayanta Bhattacharya).- Chapter 5. Girindrasekhar Bose and Psychoanalysis in Bengali Texts (Amit Ranjan Basu).- Chapter 6. Rural Public Health and Community Development in Colonial India: Domestic Impetuses and International Influences, 1920-1945 (Shirish N. Kavadi).- Chapter 7. The Construction of Sarda Canal and Public Health, 1856-1930 (Archana Pandey).- Part III. Forestry and Botanical Exploration.- Chapter 8. Fragrances from the Ghats: Courtallam Spice Gardens and Introduction of Clove and Nutmeg Plantation in the Subcontinent (Smarkia Nawani).- Chapter 9. Empire, Economic Botany and William Roxburgh (Pranjali).- Chapter 10. The Colonial Discourse on Minor Forest Produce: Control and Conflict (Natasha Nongbri).