Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix CHAPTER ONE The Sign of Science 3 PART ONE SCIENCE AND THE RELOCATION OF CULTURE CHAPTER TWO Staging Science 17 CHAPTER THREE Translation and Power 49 CHAPTER FOUR The Image of the Archaic 86 PART TWO SCIENCE, GOVERNMENTALITY, AND THE STATE CHAPTER FIVE Body and Governmentality 123 CHAPTER SIX Technologies of Government 159 CHAPTER SEVEN A Different Modernity 201 CHAPTER EIGHT Divided Love 227 Notes 239 Bibliography 277 Index 295

Promotional Information

In this tour de force of historical scholarship and archival invention, Gyan Prakash focuses on the political culture of scientific thought as the crucible of emergent Indian nationalism. He produces a brilliant genealogy of 'colonial modernity,' agile and attentive to contemporary postcolonial questions: the contradictory desires for both science and tradition, 'newness' and orthodoxy, the secular and the sacred. Immersed in such complexities, Prakash retrieves the aspirational, progressive voices of the freedom movement to address contemporary Indian life. This is a superb work of historical revision by a writer of great insight and imagination. -- Homi Bhabha, University of Chicago This is a pathbreaking work. It adds a new dimension to the study of colonialism by holding up the mirror of science to the Raj and reciprocally that of governmentality to science in a colonial condition. Caught up in this double reflection, the problem of modernity appears in a fresh but disturbing light. A truly brilliant achievement. -- Ranajit Guha Gyan Prakash mounts a powerful and sustained argument in this book for treating the dissemination of science in colonial India not, as conventional historiography would have it, as the gradual supersession of backwardness and superstition and the spread of universal enlightenment, but as a case of hybrid growth. As is to be expected from Prakash, the research is meticulous and solid and his presentation is clear and forceful. -- Partha Chatterjee, author of "The Nation and Its Fragments"

About the Author

Gyan Prakash is Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories, the editor of After Colonialism (Princeton), and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Reviews

"Prakash offers a fascinating analysis... The meticulous research and the compelling narrative make this a highly recommended book."--Choice "Another Reason is an intelligent, sophisticated and lucid work of scholarship, which fills a major gap in the historiography of India."--Zaheer Baber, Times Literary Supplement