Institutions and Knowledge: Framing the Translation of Science in Colonial South Asia

Abstract

New epistemic regimes and institutional forms — it has been maintained for some time now — are co-produced. This paper seeks to examine the process of the colonial transplantation of a modern institutional structure for the reproduction and production of scientific knowledge in colonial India. This attempt at re-engineering the system of education was complicated not just by the diverse motivations of colonial officials, missionaries, British educationists and policy makers but was deeply entangled within local institutional frameworks and ways of knowing. This entanglement generated processes of domestication of institutions and of knowledge forms of British or European provenance that resulted in the very metamorphosis of these institutional and pedagogical structures. This paper attempts a genealogy of the entanglement of colonial knowledge and power with the aspirations of a modernizing class of colonial subjects who would transform these structures to fashion a new cultural identity and orient the university to other developmental agendas.