in partnership with the South Asia Center & Dept of History and Sociology of Science
About the Seminar:
Over the course of the twentieth century, weather prediction periodically became a site for debates on the distinctiveness of India’s environment and society and the limits of modern science. In these moments, experts in jyotiṣa śāstra (astral science) played a leading role. Faced with competition from government forecasters and rival prognosticators in newspapers, as well as new market dynamics and opportunities for price speculation, certain figures reinterpreted and reorganized earlier texts to produce a rainfall science that had not previously been cast as a separate domain of knowledge. This seminar explores these dynamics by examining three Hindi-language efforts to build a counterpart to modern meteorology, all mounted by traditional experts based in Rajasthan: Mithalal Vyas’s Vāyu śāstra (“Wind Science,” Ahmedabad, 1908), Madhusudan Ojha’s Kādambinī (“Chain of Clouds,” Jaipur, c. 1930s), and Agar Chand Nahta’s Prakṛti se varṣā jñān (“Rain Knowledge from Nature,” Bikaner, 1969). These projects each addressed different audiences, ranging from trading communities to language activists to court patrons—and obliquely, elites educated in the language of modern science. But all these scholars sought to defend their individual and community livelihoods by asserting simultaneously their superior understanding of Sanskrit texts and the modern scientific utility of jyotiṣa knowledge.
About the Speaker:
Sarah Carson is a historian of modern South Asia who studies the intersections of weather and climate, predictive sciences, and imperialism. She is currently working on her first book Weathering Prediction, which identifies the “scientific forecast” as a crucial but controversial modern technology that played a pivotal role in colonial and postcolonial debates about scientific authority and authenticity in South Asia. In the book, she tracks the dynamic interplay between multiple traditions of weather prediction and explanation across the region from the 1860s to the 1960s. Sarah has previously published on the politics of the long-term monsoon forecast and climate history in South Asia. Her related research interests include jyotiṣa śāstra (astral science), Bengali and Rajasthani weather proverbs, global environmental science, and climate politics.