ABSTRACT
This essay surveys the changing relationship between imperial science and colonial society in British India framed through the analytic of publics. It highlights a shift in the scholarship, from investigations of the imperial sciences to the study of colonised subjects as practitioners and participants in global scientific modernity. South Asians’ encounter with European sciences altered precolonial epistemologies and social hierarchies, defined the image of authoritative knowledge in colonial society, and came to shape desirable collective futures and individual aspirations. By the early twentieth century, science emerged as a distinctly Indian vocation. This essay studies these historical transformations through emblematic figures: the pandit, the daktar and the engineer, and the everyday reader and consumer of science. Social groups in colonial society had starkly different access to specialist education and expertise, and this differential access structured their recruitment and participation in scientific publics. This essay extends the critique of science as colonial power to reveal how science reshaped public authority, cultural archetypes, social aspirations, and professional vocations, and even became a technology of caste and nationalist power in colonial and postcolonial India.
