Das Weltmachen Indiens

Zweisprachige Ausgabe / Englisch - Deutsch

The "Thyssen Lectures" are a continuation of a tradition that the Fritz Thyssen Foundation initiated in 1979, first at various institutions throughout Germany, and then at several universities in Czechia, Israel, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and most recently Greece. The series in the United Kingdom and Ireland will be held ove a period of four years. Spearheaded by Prof. Christina von Hodenberg, director of the German Historical Insitute London, it will be dedicated to the overarching theme of "Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire".

Worlding India
Sumathi Ramaswamy's lecture focuses on a range of modern disciplinary formations known generally as earth sciences - especially geography and cartography - and explores how these sciences "worlded" one specific location on the earth's surface, "India", as a knowable, calculable, intelligible, and masterable place over the course of two centuries of British colonial rule. The lecture goes beyond the processes of imperial world-making: using three examples, Ramaswamy shows how the people of India responded to and engaged with such processes in very different ways, and very often on their own terms. Following Dipesh Chakrabaty, she demonstrates that for worldmaking projects in colonial and postcolonial India, the empire's gift of science is indispensable but inadequate.