The Animalia and British India

Abstract

This talk examines the manner in which zoological studies were prosecuted in India between the very late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, largely coincident with British colonisation of the region. While early natural history studies of the region involved French ‘voyageurs-naturalistes’ who came 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 pre-eminence in the field in the early nineteenth century, it was 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 came to dominate the study of the increasingly specialised discipline of zoology (apart from botany and geology) over the following century, their expertise predicated upon intimate knowledge of the ground under study at first hand. The result was that despite the centralisation of knowledge through taxonomic work in the metropole that was London, the voice of the colonial functionary remained central 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.

About the speaker

John Mathew is an associate professor in the Programme of the 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 stints at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Boston and Duke University. After completing B.Sc., M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Zoology at the Madras Christian College, he left to the United States to begin a doctorate in Ecological Sciences at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, which he completed in 2003. He immediately embarked upon a second Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he concluded in 2011, gaining an A.M. in Medical Anthropology as well along the way. It is the work that he undertook for his most recent doctorate that forms the kernel of the talk that he is giving today.