SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN COLONIAL INDIA The history of science is itself a science and one of the most interesting and important of them all. To trace the stream of discovery from its lofty well-head, to follow its various windings, mark its frequent disappearances, its rapids and its stagnancies, is a work at once of the greatest interest, the greatest importance, and the greatest difficulty. The interest of the investigation is derived from our very nature and constitution as members of the great human brotherhood...3 Fascinated by the intricacies of the man-nature relationship, the founder of the Asiatic Society, in 1784, had set as its goal 'Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other.'4 William Jones could not have been more apt and precise. Taken together, man and nature form the basis for the history of STM or STM in history. DISCURSIVE DICHOTOMIES While discussing the theme of this address, a senior historian whom I respect and admire most, advised me to think of 'mainstream' history. He did not elaborate on what constitutes mainstream history. Still I think it is possible to find some space for STM in this mainstream (if it exists at all!). What a study of material culture would be without STM? What history of ideas would be without Baconian rationalism or positivist episteme and the like? To quote Marx, 'History itself is a real part of natural history, of the development of nature into man. Natural science will one day incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate natural sciences; there will be a single science.' C.P. Snow was not alone in talking of the two cultures and the need to bridge the gap.5 The discursive terrain of STM was never flat. It had its ups and downs, ruptures and dichotomies. The ancient Greeks had talked of the 'desire to know', later it gave way to 'desire for power'. Ancient Indians had hailed knowledge as 'a liberating force'; Bacon popularised it as 'power to control'. For long scholars debated the distinctions between theoria and praxis, between episteme andtechne. Historians of science have wrangled over internalism and externalism.6 Many have played 'historiographer royal' to science, transforming an individual genius into an icon.7 In this sense history of science helped an ex post facto legitimation and pandered to the scientist's amour propre.* 'We are liable to optical illusions if we only have eyes for the mountain-peaks', warns Butterfield.9 Still on another occasion he wrote, 'Sir Isaac Newton is the starting-point of a new age not merely