South Asian society has always nurtured a thinking civilization. It has never lived an isolated existence and never displayed xenophobic tendencies. The techno-scientific tradition in South Asia has largely been synthetic, continuously evolving because of each politico-cultural interaction with the outside world and social change within the region. In pre-modern times, South Asia was known for its contributions to astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. Scientific and technological activity, throughout the medieval period, as is evident from the number of contemporary manuscripts, was both continuous and vigorous.

Western scientific discourse occupied an extremely important place in the colonization of India. The study of plants, animals, minerals, and so on, known as natural history in the early colonial days, was introduced in India in the late-18th century by European surgeons, botanists, army engineers, and missionaries. Over the next 200 years, science became one of the foundations of Indian modernity and the nation state. Colonialism also facilitated the introduction of technologies such as the railways, and later electricity. Gradually, educated Indians sought to locate modern scientific ideas and principles within Indian culture, and, by the end of the 19th century, to adopt these for the economic regeneration of the country.

Approaches to the study of the history of science have undergone critical changes in the last three decades. Historians have explained science and colonialism in India broadly in two different ways. Some have seen science as a ‘Western’ or colonial construct imposed on India and used by the British to exploit her natural resources. Others have advanced a more nuanced articulation and assimilation of modern science within Indian society and culture. The discursive terrain of the history of science is replete with numerous debates on its nature and evolution, its changing contours, its complex civilizational journey, and, finally, the enormous impact it has had on our own life and time.

Young students and scholars from different disciplines may find in this short volume (of about 60,000 words) a useful introduction to our inheritance, and the interface of science, society, and government in the Indian context until the end of the 20th century.