ABSTRACT
In 1844, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), founder of Aligarh Muslim University, published a translation titled Teshil fi Jarr-al Saaqil [The Principles of Mechanics]. This publication, an Urdu translation of a Persian text, was an extract of an Arabic treatise from Yemen. In Teshil, Sayyid Ahmad translated the use of various machines that could perform a variety of tasks. From the 1860s onwards, he moved away from Persian sources and focused on English texts. In 1864, he established a society in Ghazipur called the Scientific Society. Its purpose was to translate historical and scientific texts from English to Urdu. In this chapter, using Sayyid Ahmad as a case study, I will highlight the complexities that arise when examining scientific knowledge's reconfiguration in a multilingual colonial context with pre-existing knowledge communities and longstanding intellectual traditions. In this case, Sayyid Ahmad's translations moved away from Persian sources to English ones, but the translations were always in Urdu. Thus, by incorporating individuals like Sayyid Ahmad, who were not strictly ‘scientists’ but rather polymaths and technocrats, into the historical accounts, a broader perspective of how scientific knowledge was disseminated in the nineteenth century emerges.
