Promoting Scientism: Institutions for Gathering and Disseminating Knowledge in British Bihar

Abstract

A young girl says two names as she passes particular images in a gallery exhibiting British prints of India: “Chainpur” and “Mundeswari.” Given that Chainpur village has been my research site in Bihar and that its residents often refer to Mundeswari temple, I pay attention when, a few minutes later, she returns with her parents in tow. They all stop to examine the images. When asked how they knew Chainpur, the father replies that they live in a nearby town. His daughter recognizes the Mundeswari temple from visits there and Chainpur, presumably, from its proximity to their home. The images that prompted this discussion were painted by Thomas and William Daniell, an uncle-nephew team who traversed British India in the late eighteenth century and provided Europe with its first widely reproduced pictures of South Asia. The introduction to the gallery explains in Hindi, “There has always been an insistence of cultivated people to live in excellence and modernity. For this reason, from the eighteenth century, cultivated Indians began to be influenced by Western knowledge of different sorts. Consequently, Indian artistic painting and architectural art did not advance.” Both the museum gallery’s association of the Daniells’ work with “excellence,” “modernity,” and “Western knowledge” and the child’s easy recognition of the images—in part made possible by the Archaeological Survey of India’s preservation of the Mundeswari temple—seem to evidence the impact of Western science on Indian perspectives.