Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Science and National Consciousness in Bengal
This book gives a flavour of the Indian response to modern science by analysing the lives and careers of four scientifically influential personalities in Bengal. His analysis of the careers of two scientists, J. C. Bose and P. C. Ray, and two institution builders, Mahendralal Sircar and Asutosh Mookerjee, brings to light the issues related to science at a time of colonialism and nationalism. Scientists often had to depend on British institutions for legitimation and funding, while also supporting the nationalist cause for greater autonomy. One of the central claims of this book is that the protagonists aimed to contribute to a modern world science, one based on a strong sense of universalism. They did not aim to construct any alternative sciences, though they did express and apply their work by drawing on their cultural heritage. This makes Science and National Consciousness a work of particular relevance today, when a homogenous, instrumentalist and totally Western conception of science is being globally accepted.
Science and Society in Modern India
The book delineates the role and place of the Western scientific discourse which occupied an important place in the colonization of India. During the colonial period, science became one of the foundations of Indian modernity and the nation-state. Gradually, the educated Indians sought to locate modern scientific ideas and principles within Indian culture and adopted those for the economic regeneration of the country. The discursive terrain of the history of science, especially in the context of a society with a very long and complex past, is bound to be replete with numerous debates on its nature and evolution, its changing contours, its complex civilizational journey, and finally, the enormous impact it has on our own life and time. The book offers a useful introduction to science, society, and government interface in the Indian context.
Civilising Natures
Science, both as a scholarly discipline and as a concept in the popular imagination, was critical to building hegemony in the British Empire. It also inspired alternative ideas of progress by elites and the disenfranchised: these competing spectres continue to haunt postcolonial modernities. Why and how has science so powerfully shaped both the common sense of individuals and the development of postcolonial states? Philip suggests that our ideas of race and resources are key. Civilising Natures tells us how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities, and along the way, it complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilised, environment and society.
Nationalizing the Body
This book seeks to move emphasis away from the over-riding importance given to the state in existing studies of 'western' medicine in India, and locates medical practice within its cultural, social and professional milieus. Based on Bengali doctors writings this book examines how various medical problems, challenges and debates were understood and interpreted within overlapping contexts of social identities and politics on the one hand, and their function within a largely unregulated medical market on the other.
The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal
This book is a focussed treatment of a famine both as an 'event' and a 'process'. It is a close-up of a peasant economy in the throes of a crisis which temporarily eroded the value-system determining the normal pattern of entitlements. An investigation of the socio-economic, ecological and cultural determinants of the famine helps evolve a coherent framework. The emphasis is on the distinctive problems of the various economic regions, most notably the tribal belts. Chakrabarti applies Amartya Sen's theory of exchange entitlements to a nineteenth century famine situation in Bengal, and finds that a market-based entitlement failure precipitating severe famine conditions, even without receiving any impulse from food production , has little relevance here. Though teh book underlines the predicament of the subalterns, the famine is not seen from the viewpoint of any specific group or community. The focus is, rather, on the phenomenon of famine in its totality---on the agony and trauma of a peasant society thrown out of gear in an abnormal situation, and the crisis of identities that ensued.
Remembering Sir J.C. Bose
The year 2008 marks the centennial birth anniversary of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose who, at a relatively young age, established himself among the ranks of European scientists during the heyday of colonial rule in India. He was one of those great Indian scientists who helped to introduce western science into India. A physicist, a plant electrophysiologist and one of the first few biophysicists in the world, Sir J C Bose was easily 60 years ahead of his time and much of his research that was ignored during his lifetime is now entering the mainstream. As the inventor of millimeter waves and their generation, transmission and reception, and the first to make a solid state diode, he was the first s...
Nucleus and Nation
In 1974 India joined the elite roster of nuclear world powers when it exploded its first nuclear bomb. But the technological progress that facilitated that feat was set in motion many decades before, as India sought both independence from the British and respect from the larger world. Over the course of the twentieth century, India metamorphosed from a marginal place to a serious hub of technological and scientific innovation. It is this tale of transformation that Robert S. Anderson recounts in Nucleus and Nation. Tracing the long institutional and individual preparations for India’s first nuclear test and its consequences, Anderson begins with the careers of India’s renowned scientists...
Expunging Variola
As A Crucial Component Of The Global Smallpox Eradication Programme, Which Has Been Widely Hailed As One Of The Greatest Public Health Successes In The Twentieth Century, The Indian Experience Has Some Important Stories To Tell. Expunging Variola Reveals These As It Chronicles The Last Three Decades Of The Anti-Smallpox Campaigns In India.This Wide-Ranging Study, Based On Extensive Archival Research In India, Britain, Switzerland And The United States Of America, Assesses The Many Complexities In The Formulation And Implementation Of The Smallpox Eradication Programme In The Subcontinent. Rather Than Merely Cataloguing The Developments Of This Extremely Complex Exercise Within The World Heal...
