The study of knowledge forms of non-Western societies is a rapidly-emerging field of research. This volume of eight cogent essays situates the historiography of science in India within a social theory of science. In so doing, it deals with issues such as the paradigm shift within science studies, the move away from a West-centric theory of science, and future trends and possibilities. Modernist scholarship in India on the sciences dates back at least 300 years. This book takes up several strands from this corpus of writing over the last 150 years, and places them within the context of their times. Historians of science investigate the contexts of the production of scientific theories. The essays here extend this method to historical writing and representations of science. The concerns that underpin this writing include ideas about the interplay between centre and periphery, the internal and external accounts of science, the creative tension between scientism and romanticism, the model of colonial science and its relationship with the emergence of national science, and the distortions of nationalist historiography. These ideas are discussed in the light of contemporary researches in the sociology of sciences and more generally the human sciences. From several standpoints, the essays examine possibilities of and impediments to integrating India’s history of sciences with a global perspective. An important contribution to the historiography of science in India, this interdisciplinary work will attract students and scholars from a wide range of subjects, including Indian history, philosophy, and sociology, and general science.
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