Science and the Colonies
As the British Empire expanded throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, the colonies drew considerable interest from British scientists. Plants, animals and people, formerly unseen in Europe, were able to shed light on some of the mysteries of biology (e.g. the Galapagos finches from South America). India, with its diversity of species and cultures, was no exception, attracting the field sciences such as anthropology, botany and zoology and geology from Britain.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was established in 1759 to showcase the botanical diversity of the British Empire and to research the economic potential of the world’s plants. In India, the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta (now the AJC Bose Indian Botanic Garden), was established thirty years later in 1787 under the direction of Robert Kyd in the image of Kew, to act as a South Asian branch. In 1793 botanist William Roxburgh after he became superintendent of the garden brought in plants from all over India and developed an extensive herbarium. This collection of dried plant specimens eventually became the Central National Herbarium of the Botanical Survey of India, which comprises 2,500,000 items. The Survey of India was set up in 1767 and has evolved rich traditions over the years as the country’s principal mapping agency.
Throughout the late 19th Century, the British Government launched a number of Surveys of India, to establish the cultural, scientific and economic resources of the country. These included the Geological Survey of India (established 1851), Archaeological Survey of India (1861), the Botanical Survey of India (1890), the Zoological Survey of India (1916), and the Anthropological Survey of India, which was originally part of the Zoological Survey splitting in 1945.
These surveys made use of an Indian workforce who had been educated in Western scientific traditions, to gather data for the British to use in their administration of India. The Indian Museum, Kolkata was key to these field sciences, acting as a repository for their collections. It was initially established by Danish botanist, Nathaniel Wallich, who donated many of his personal botanical collection to the museum in 1814. As the museum expanded into other fields, the zoological collection and later the anthropological section grew out into formal and organised surveys. Bengali anthropologist, BS Guha led the organisation of the Anthropological Survey in 1945 and became its first director.
By contrast, human cultures in the 18th and early 19th Century, were studied largely informally by colonial administrators, who developed an interest in the cultural practices present in the subcontinent, in particular indigenous tribes. Initially they studied these cultures through objects, but by the 1920s, anthropology had transformed to include physical anthropology, adopting elements from genetics and eugenics in an effort to emphasise the physical differences between Europeans and non-Europeans.
All through the 19th Century, European models of schools, colleges and universities were established in India. Initially these were British missionary schools, designed to inculcate Western ideas and English language, lauded by the British Secretary to the Board of Control, Thomas Babington Macaulay as “useful knowledge” that would “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.
By the early 20th Century, Indian scientists began to have a more active role in research institutes. After working for 6 years as the assistant to the Director of the Sugarcane Breeding Institute, T.S. Venkataraman became its first Indian Director in 1918. He used this post to great effect, bringing in pioneering new techniques such as outcrossing, to produce high-yielding interspecific and intergeneric hybrids. In 1934, he hired E.K. Janaki Ammal as a geneticist, whose work at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute resulted in a sugarcane-maize hybrid, a feat which has never been replicated.
In 1917, Jagadish Chandra Bose, after years of dreaming of a research institution, run by Indians for Indians, free from the discrimination of British universities, realised his dream in the establishment of the Bose Institute, Kolkata. The Bose Institute followed its founder’s interdisciplinary vision of science, which, while focusing predominantly on Physics, also drew upon Chemistry, Botany, Zoology and Anthropology. Under the directorship of his nephew D.M. Bose (1938-1967), the Bose Institute expanded its horizons further with a department of microbiology.
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, India was also establishing a number of associations to formalise national science collaborations. In 1914, the British chemists, J. L. Simonsen and P. S. MacMahon established the Indian Science Congress Association, which ran yearly conferences devoted to national debates on scientific issues. This began with only 35 papers, and was already almost 700 papers by 1940. Throughout the 1930s, an additional three academies of science were established to facilitate scientific research and collaboration. This was the golden age of Indian science. In 1930, The National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) was established by astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, in 1934, The Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) in Bangalore by physicist and Nobel laureate C.V. Raman and in 1935, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) by British chemist Lewis Leigh Fermor. All three had similar aims of promoting and publicising science, each one publishing journals to highlight the research of its members. The membership of all three was also overlapping. Meghnad Saha, for example, was both the founding president of NASI and the second president of INSA from 1937 to 1938.
