Revisiting Two Jesuit Astronomical Expeditions in 18Th Century India

Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. Circulation and Cosmopolitanism in 18th Century Jaipur: The Workshop of Jyotishis, Nujumi and Jesuit Astronomers Dhruv Raina Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies School of Social Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 The history of science has long been preoccupied with the transmission and circulation of scientific knowledge. However, the social turn introduced a twist to these investigations by abandoning an earlier premise that marked studies on the “expansion of European science” [Basalla, 1968; Storey, 1996]. The new studies demonstrated the anchoring and reframing of ideas in varied cultural and social contexts. Beyond the domain of the history of sciences similar trends are evident in other disciplines such as the history of art (Brown and Hutton, 2011). Thus for example two recent edited volumes have independently tried to frame the movement of their respective objects of knowledge, science and art in terms of the metaphor of the “travelling companion” (Ibid; Renn, 2011). Interestingly enough this follows in a sequence of metaphors, such as the river metaphor (Needham, 1969) or transcultural flows (Appadurai, 1996). Without intending to trade in metaphors the important question that comes up here is that this revisioning of several disciplinary formations has been rendered possible through a major questioning of social theory underpinning the social sciences (Wallerstein, 1996). 1 Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. For example, a study on religion and modernity in nineteenth century India and Britain disbanded with the traditional oppositions of metropole and periphery, traditional and modern, secular and religious which framed modernist historiography and social theory suggesting instead that “… what is often assumed to be opposite is in fact deeply entangled … what is in fact seen as unconnected is in fact the product of close encounters “ (van der Veer, 2001, p. 3). This essay draws upon some of the developments of social theory of science by looking at the circulation of astronomical ideas between South Asia and Europe in the early to mid eighteenth century. More specifically I shall look at the circulation of astronomical ideas in the court of the Indian astronomer-king Jai Singh. Contrary to our intuitive understanding of “cosmopolitan science” and its contemporaneous conjugate, Big Science (Capshew and Rader, 1992; De Solla Price, 1963; Gallison and Hevly, 1992), I shall argue that the concerned historical actors were involved in an earlier version of both cosmopolitan and Big Science involving the circulation of people, money and machines. Furthermore, the traditional-modernity dichotomy within which this encounter between the so-called modern European sciences and the traditional Indian science has been framed proves inadequate to appreciate the circulation and cosmopolitanism of ideas unless an asymmetry in argumentation is allowed to frame the explanation. In other words, this essay gravitates around the notions of “Big Science” and the “cosmopolitan science” in order to foreground non-standard versions of these very two notions that frame our understanding of the circulation, transmission or movement of scientific ideas in the crucial eighteenth century. 2 Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. Even within the history and philosophy of science the discussion on cosmopolitanism and its different modes compels an engagement with the history of the concept itself since it has been extended to embrace a variety of historical and cultural contexts and modalities of engaging with “Other ways of knowing”. Nationalist historiographies have since the first quarter of the nineteenth century played an equally important role in shaping both the general and the disciplinary histories of the sciences; and yet by the end of the century, Pasteur would point out that science additionally was characterised by its international ethos. The literature on scientific internationalism, like the literature on cosmopolitanism constantly negotiates the tension between the universal and the local, between the nation as a unit of historical narrative, the emergence of national styles of research and the international ethos and spirit of science. The social theory of science has interrogated and de-stabilized many of the standard categories that have structured histories of science. Cosmopolitanism is often seen as a product of globalization or the transformations that have marked contemporary societies (Beck, 2000, 96-97), and yet empirically the phenomenon where people have an orientation or are disposed to “…think, feel and imagine beyond existing boundaries and to transform their everyday practices and identities” were encountered historically everywhere and perhaps at all times (Saito, 2011, p.126). In that sense I could well imagine historians of science speaking of cosmopolitanism of science in the ever present tense – to rephrase Latour: we were always cosmopolitan. For historians of science three aspects of cosmopolitanism matter namely cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance and cosmopolitics. The first refers to “a disposition to 3 Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. appreciate a wide variety of cultural objects”, while ethnic tolerance alludes to “positive attitudes towards ethnic outgroups”. The ubiquity of texts, artefacts and instruments engaging the attention of human actors transgressing regional and ethnic boundaries is testimony of shared intellectual or scientific concerns if not a shared epistemic frame or culture. The term cosmopolitan was probably first employed as a prefix to a scientific discipline by Carla Nappi and her colleagues to engage with attempts to reconcile medical knowledge from China’s borderlands with canonical Chinese medical texts that in turn transformed Chinese natural history and medicine [Nappi, 2009]. Drawing upon Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work on ethics and global exchange, the notion of cosmopolitanism helped create a medial space between relativism and universalism, that produces common ethical values joining otherwise disparate communities. This in turn reformed the linguistic and textual practices in the process of exchange. The problem we have to confront is the encounter of two different cosmopolitanisms. Mughal cosmopolitanism as a subject of scholarly investigation and Jai Singh’s own enterprise can be located within that frame and a kind of cosmopolitan astronomy that I shall try to characterize as embedded in networks where things, objects and people travel – a very Latourian idea, that does not carry the burden of historical origination of the notion of cosmopolitanism. The other way around the difficulty as Bhabha, Dipesh and Pollock have suggested is to consider cosmopolitanism “… in the plural, as cosmopolitanisms”, so as “to avoid the imposition of practices and histories that do not 4 Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. necessarily fit interpretations devised for historical situations elsewhere…” Pollock et. Al., 2000]. Lorraine Daston writes that by the turn of the seventeenth century two never before coupled words in medieval Latin Observatio and experimentum, became inseparable as the foremost forms of “learned experience”…instead of countless generations of occasional observers, global networks of coordinated observers would speed the work of looking, collecting, collating, and correlating” (Daston, 2011, p.14). The problem then was to deal with the observations flowing in from official informants, informal networks and scholarly publications. The circulation of manuscripts and publications, revealed the collective nature of the enterprise or now empiricism came to substantially imply “collective empiricism” (Ibid.). This was the epistemic backdrop within which the astronomical endeavours of our French Jesuit astronomers posted in India need to be located. In 1734, two French Jesuit astronomers stationed at the Jesuit mission in Chandernagore, India, then under French control, were invited to the court of the astronomer king Sawai Jai Singh II (1688-1743) (hereafter Jai Singh). The meeting of Jai Singh’s astronomers with the French Jesuit astronomers has evoked the interest of both historians and historians of science. Unfortunately, the encounter itself was not as interesting as the hype surrounding a dramatic episode in cultural encounter before the formal inauguration of the processes of colonisation. Often enough this episode in the history of sciences is framed by the dichotomy of tradition and modernity, or the encounter between modern astronomy and traditional astronomy, not to mention the cosmopolitan nature of a dialogue or conversation that did or did not occur and is encumbered by the valuations that are 5 Please do not quote. Forthcoming in Purusārthā. embedded in these dichotomies. For want of a better term, a transcultural perspective may well open up the history of science and knowledge to newer and global perspectives. This investigation seeks to approach the eighteenth century from a historiographic framework that questions the idea that Indian modernity has primarily been a colonial modernity, marked both by a sharp break and sudden transition from the traditional to the modern, this rupture being an outcome of the assertion of colonial dominance (Minkowski, 2010, p.89). In other words, cosmopolitanisms in South Asia, as in other parts of the world, had a vocation most certainly in early modernity localised to the period 1450-1750

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