Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library
cordially invites
you to a Public Lecture
(in
the ‘Science, Society and Nature’ series)
at
3.00 pm on Friday, 16th January, 2015
in
the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library
Building
on
‘Zoology and the
Raj’
by
Dr.
John Mathew,
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research,
Pune.
This talk examines the development of taxonomic zoology in India between
the very late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, largely coincident with
British colonisation of the region. In so doing it draws into question
conventional dyads of colonising and colonised nations where the vectors of
influence are deemed deterministic in one direction, by suggesting instead that
the flow of information is in fact reciprocal, if asymmetrical. While early
natural history studies of the region involve French ‘voyageurs-naturalistes’ who come for relatively brief periods to the Indian subcontinent as
part of larger expeditions to return material to the central dispatching body,
‘Le Muséum National
d’Histoire Naturelle’, thus contributing to France’s
domination in the field during the early nineteenth century, it is
functionaries from or working for Great Britain, first employees of the East
India Company and after the Great Mutiny of the 1857, of the Crown, given to
such disparate lines of occupational activity as medicine, religion,
administrative surveys and the military, that come to dominate the study of the
increasingly specialised disciplines of zoology, botany and geology over the
following century, their expertise predicated upon intimate knowledge of the
ground under study at first hand, which will play a pivotal role in writing the
zoological treatises of South Asia particularly in relation to large faunal
groups, especially the vertebrates. However, along with the metropolitan
taxonomist in London, the voice of the ‘native’ gets belatedly recognised in
the twentieth century through a complex and involved series of taxonomic texts
numbering eighty one volumes and grouped under the heading The Fauna of British India.
Speaker:
Dr. John Mathew is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
Education and Research (IISER) Pune. Prior to joining IISER in late 2014, he
was a visiting faculty associate at the University
of Pennsylvania, following teaching
appointments at Harvard University, the University
of Massachusetts Boston and Duke University, USA. After obtaining B.Sc.,
M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Zoology at the Madras
Christian College,
he pursued a doctorate in Ecological Sciences at Old
Dominion University,
Norfolk, Virginia,
which he completed in 2003. He also holds an A. M. in Medical Anthropology
(2006) and a Ph.D. in the History of Science (2011) from Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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