Introduction

While there was evidence of a significant practical engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to modern astronomy in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Bombay in the 1830s and 1840s, this was arguably stifled in the long term. Due to a combination of racialized colonial institutions and attenuated educational schemas, the opportunities for sustained interactions based on collaborative and experiential constructions of knowledge, free of express awareness of fixed ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ paradigms, were limited in time and space. From the 1860s, it seemed that a more philosophical engagement in relation to astronomy was acquiring a new salience. There was a return to the themes and conceptualizations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalism, though now even Indians contributed to the discussion in the journals of the learned societies and through the medium of commercial, printed almanacs. The emphasis was on expressly demonstrating, through discursive means, that the paradigms of Indian astronomy (and astrology) could be reconciled with those of modern Western astronomy. Even when there was evidence of practical engagement, there was a concerted effort to refer to the paradigms of traditional knowledge. The historical literature has tended to focus on exactly these sorts of philosophical engagements in relation to science in colonial India. Yet though this is quite reasonable, and in fact there is more to add to existing characterizations, it is important to situate the philosophical engagement and the more practical engagement historically.