Public lecture on
“A Cosmopolitanism of Things: The History of an Astronomical Observatory in 18th Century India”

by Professor Dhruv Raina,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Monday | 25th September 2017 | 4.00 pm – 5.30 pm

Co-organised by The International Centre Goa
and Goa University Visiting Research Professors Programme (VRPP)

Entry Free & Open to all

Dhruv Raina is currently Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he teaches the history and philosophy of science. Before joining the Jawaharlal Nehru University, he was a Scientist with the National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi. He studied physics at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Göteborg University. His research has focused upon the politics and cultures of scientific knowledge in South Asia both in historical and contemporary contexts, as well as the history and historiography of mathematics. He has for long engaged with the work of Joseph Needham. In 1999 he co-edited Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (1999) with his colleague and collaborator S.Irfan Habib, and in 2015 published his most recently authored book Needham’s Indian Network. The history of science in colonial South Asia has been a pressing concern and he and Irfan again authored Domesticating Modern Science (2004) and co-edited Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (2007). The concerns of postcolonial theory of science and the historiography of sciences in global context have been constant concerns and his book Images and Contexts: the Historiography of Science and Modernity (2003) was a collection of papers contextualizing science and its modernity in India. His research has also focused upon the institutionalization of the history of sciences as an interdisciplinary field as well as the more recent STS in contemporary India. The turn towards historiography and the social theory of science resulted in the interrogation of the big picture of the history of sciences and the modalities of its subsequent reworking. Earlier formulations of these concerns are reflected in the volume he edited with Feza Gunnergun entitled, Science between Europe and Asia (2010). Two areas of interest that have remained with him for over two decades concern the historiography of mathematical proof and the historiography of mathematics in South Asia on the one hand, and the work of the French Jesuit astronomers and ethnographers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most recent work addresses the contemporary concerns of the circulation of concepts in the social sciences, the emergence of inter- and transdisciplinary fields of. This concern with interdisciplinary fields has resulted in a collaboration with mathematicians and physicists working on econophysics and sociophysics, and fields that cris-cross the natural and social sciences. He has been a visiting fellow of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the first incumbent of the Heinrich Zimmer Chair in Intellectual History and Indian Philosophy, and Visiting Professor at the ETH, Zurich, University of Cambridge and many other universities in India and abroad.

Abstract:
A Cosmopolitanism of Things: The History of an Astronomical Observatory in 18th Century India
The observatories that the astronomer-king jai Singh built in the eighteenth century appear as anachronisms when seen through the prism of the present. I shall argue counter-intuitively that the huge and impossible masonry astronomical and architectural projects that Sawai Jai Singh embarked upon in the 18th century would be easier perhaps to understand in the age of Big Science. However, the project finds its place among several other monumental projects of the 18th century. Many gargantuan scientific projects of data gathering across the globe extended over centuries. In the history of the so called modern sciences, the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are particularly important, marked as they are by the intensified circulation of artefacts, objects, specimens, data, textual collections and more importantly individuals – at one level it becomes impossible to speak of this circulation without engaging with this cosmopolitanism of things and peoples. However, in this talk I shall attempt to situate a much discussed “cosmopolitan encounter” between French and Bavarian astronomers with the jyotisha and nujumi astronomers in the court of Jai Singh, charting out the entangled nature of this engagement with a variety of objects, knowledge forms and practices. In doing so it will be seen that the term cosmopolitan science, astronomy or medicine acquires different meanings in the practice of historians of science especially in engaging with epochs preceding our own. In doing so, we shall also touch upon the consequences of these apercus for the social theory of science.