ABSTRACT

This chapter summarizes the findings of this monograph. This study has conceptualized and analyzed a different and more recent indigenous system of knowledge production, called bhadralok physics, which was a specific brand of modern science that developed in late colonial India. Its emergence was made possible by the rise of a distinctively new social group of Indian intelligentsia called the bhadraloks. The social esteem and self-identity of this group can be meaningfully compared to what in Wilhelmian Germany was called the bildungsbürgertum. The analogy with Germany illustrates that such a rise of a new intellectual class was not a uniquely Indian phenomenon, but part of a larger transnational trend—an epiphenomenon of modernization. These Indian bhadraloks used as their modus operandi other culturally specific tools described in this monograph as anticolonial nationalism, locally rooted Visvajaneen cosmopolitanism and decolonization.

The specific group of bhadralok scientists examined in this monograph consisted of intellectuals as Satyendranath Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Meghnad Saha. Their unique accomplishments developed in the form of groundbreaking contributions to quantum physics—a revolutionary new field of international science at that time. The fact that India was able to develop advanced scientific research under colonial rule, along with the resulting major influence of a colony on the course of fundamental scientific development in the European metropole, constitutes an astonishing, and perhaps an unprecedented historical phenomenon that deserved a special investigation. This monograph undertook such an investigation in the form of three related case studies.