Casting Blood Circulations

Abstract

In this article I examine three Bengali translations of texts about blood circulation from the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century. Through a close examination of these three translations, I demonstrate the importance of what Antonio Gramsci called “translatability” and what I have elsewhere called “braided sciences.” Taken together, these two heuristic devices demonstrate a relationship between social hierarchies and translation, on the one hand, and a selective alignment of various strands of epistemic, technological, and narrative traditions on the other. One of the principal objectives of the article is to recenter the importance of caste and social hierarchy in understanding colonial knowledge production.