ABSTRACT
Using the case studies of Indian bhadralok physicists Satyendranath Bose, C.V. Raman, and Meghnad Saha, this book examines how modern physics was established in colonial India. The case studies here illustrate and elucidate the origins and conscious emergence of a bhadralok outlook among these influential physicists, and its operation as a key component of Indian cultural nationalism.
The chapter examines the extant scholarship in the history of physics, postcolonial theory, science studies, and South Asian history. The analysis crucially depends on the somewhat malleable concept of bhadralok whose applicability, meanings and attributions have received an evolving treatment in historical and sociological literature. To understand the bhadralok identity, it will be important to discuss how scholars have viewed the bhadraloks in South Asian history.
This chapter also emphasizes the need for writing a cultural history of physics within a colonial framework in a non-Eurocentric fashion. A broader framework is required to examine the making of modern Indian science, it may be pointed out that there was an exchange of scientific knowledge between the local and the global. Knowledge was also indigenized, leading to the development of a distinctly modernized yet local form—an amalgamation of tradition with modernity in Indian physics. These relate, in particular, to an understanding of “bhadralok physics” as a worldview and social phenomenon, and its impact on the emergence of Indian cosmopolitan nationalism; which in turn contributed to the making of modern physics in colonial India.
