After Colonial Forms of Knowledge and Post-Colonial Technoscience: Revisiting the Historiography of Techniques and Technology

Dhruv Raina's lecture explores the conceptual challenges of developing a comprehensive historiography of techniques and technology in a global context. The encounter between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced several discourses on the non-Western/non-European worlds that played a formative role in the crystallization of the social science disciplines. Late twentieth-century scholarship has indicated that there is no purely European discourse on India and its knowledge forms. Nevertheless, despite important differences, there is a family resemblance in the description, naming, and troping of colonial forms of knowledge. On the other hand, the history of technology is framed by certain conceptual distinctions and ideological paradigms that distinguish techniques from technology as much in Europe as elsewhere. Interrogating the distinction between the history of techniques and technology opens up other ways of historicizing their evolution in South Asia and the Global South.