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Questioning Basalla’s question (yet again): The view from cognitive history

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Abstract

In 1967, George Basalla posed the question: “How did modern science diffuse from Western Europe and find its place in the world?” Here, we consider this question particularized to India: “How did modern science find its place in India?” In answering his own question Basalla posited a 3-phase model–one that has been severely criticized by some prominent social historians and sociologists of modern Indian science. In this paper, we question Basalla’s question anew from the perspective of cognitive history, wherein the focus is on specific, individual scientific productions as knowledge-consuming/knowledge-generating creative phenomena. Drawing on Asiatic Society records on the work of British scientists in nineteenth century India and contributions made in the same period by five Indian pioneers of science, namely, Radhanath Sikdar, Yesudas Ramchandra, Mahendra Lal Sircar, Jagadis Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray–each of whom is presented here as representing a distinct aspect of science–we argue that: (1) the biographical records of the British scientists in nineteenth century India does not resonate in important ways with phase I of the Basalla model; (2) with one notable exception, the work of the British scientists and that of the Indian protagonists ran on essentially parallel tracks; (3) the distinction between Basalla’s phase II ‘colonial scientist’ and phase III ‘independent scientist’ dissolves in the case of our Indian protagonists; and (4) most importantly, we answer the Basalla question by way of identifying specific and distinctive contributions made to the knowledge-consuming/knowledge-producing enterprises constituting creative science. In the final analysis, we suggest that the Basalla model played virtually no role in understanding or explaining the genesis of modern science in India as practiced by our protagonists.

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Notes

  1. Here I am, of course, referring to the various models of scientific methodology as proposed by Popper (1968), Laudan (1977), Kuhn (2012) and Lakatos (1978) and their followers.

  2. I explore the thorny distinction between ‘information’, ‘data’ and ‘knowledge’ in Dasgupta (2016).

  3. Some returned to their homeland because of ill-health; some retired and returned; others died and were buried in India.

  4. The abbreviations stand for the following: FRS—Fellow of the Royal Society (of London); FRSE—Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; FLS—Fellow of the Linnaean Society; FRAS—Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; FRGS—Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

  5. The first Indian to become a member of the Asiatic Society was Dwaraknath Tagore, Rabindranath’s grandfather, in 1832, almost a half-century after the formation of the Society. Dwaraknath was, of course, not a scientist.

  6. For a far more extensive discussion of the cognitive model presented here see Dasgupta (2019, esp. pp. 1–12, 60–80); and Dasgupta (2022, pp. 1–21).

  7. For more extensive discussions of what might be called the theory of artifacts, see Kubler (1962); the collection of articles in Bensaude-Vincent & Newman (2007), especially the introductory essay by the editors; and Dasgupta (2019, pp. 13–27).

  8. Kochhar has explored further Sikdar’s non-involvement in the computation of the Himalayan heights.

  9. It is interesting to note that in his 450-page history of the Trigonometrical Survey of India, Matthew Edney (1997) dismisses Sikdar’s as “a Calcutta Brahmin” who had been incorrectly credited with the computation of XV’s height (p. 262).

  10. It should be noted that in his adult working life Ramchandra was as much a man of letters in Urdu as he was a mathematician. (See Raina & Habib, 1990; Minault, 2003).

  11. See Dasgupta (2022), p. 194 et seq for examples of operational principles and their representations in the context of Renaissance engineering.

  12. U.S. Patent 755,840, March 19, 1904.

  13. See Koyré (1968) for a magnificent body of evidence of correspondences between Newton and his contemporaries in the seventeenth century.

  14. Bose republished this paper in Electrician: see the relevant bibliographic entry below.

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Acknowledgements

I thank an anonymous referee for constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. School of Computing and Informatics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, 70504, USA

    Subrata Dasgupta

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Dasgupta, S. Questioning Basalla’s question (yet again): The view from cognitive history. Indian J Hist. Sci. 59, 65–82 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43539-024-00112-9

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