Discuss the complex negotiation that Western Science had to undertake in order to establish itself in colonial India.
The Beginning of Science's cultural authority in India lies in the civilising mission, introduced by the British in the early nineteenth century. The East India Company asserted its territorial control by establishing themselves as a body of traders. They brought about a new rule forming a new language of knowledge contrary to the Orientalists and classicalists known throughout India. The East India Company set about establishing a system of Western education designed to train Indians to serve as subordinate functionaries in the colonial bureaucracy. The emerging of Western Science in Colonial India is an important yet complex subject. With the practises of Science, the British constituted India as a laboratory for modernity. However the signature of modernity was to ultimately lie in India's hands. Throughout this topic we must keep one point in mind, India shaped Britain as much as Britain shaped India: the interaction was historical reality.
After the Mutiny of 1857 the pace of change speeded and became more extensive. The British learnt that they could not appease the Indians and therefore applied an iron hand in governing India. The British saw Empirical Science as a weapon, free from prediction and passion, their aim was to disenchant the world of superstition. Joseph Conrad highlights The idea was to enlighten the natives to extinguish their mythical thought with the power of reason. .
This was one of the first problems encountered by the British, as Theodor Adorno points out the disenchantment of the world, also served as a tool for setting up the mastery, of those who possessed an instrumentalist knowledge of nature over those who did not. The line of argument here is that men want to learn from nature in order to dominate it and other men. It was easy to state Indian natives needed to be freed of their ignorance and beliefs in myths and legends; however implementing the power of universal reason was a challenging task.
