‘The World Rests on the Back of a Tortoise’: Science and mythology in Indian history

Abstract

This article traces the consilience of science and mythology in the history of fossil research in India: this is a narrative in which Indian fossil research met the Orientalist discovery of the Indian past. It demonstrates that in exploring the geological evolution of Indian fossils, British researchers such as Hugh Falconer invoked animals from thePuranas, picking up on a tradition of mythological hermeneutics first developed in India by the likes of William Jones. In exploring the nuances of this intellectual approach, the article thus identifies a hitherto obscured historical trajectory regarding the making of geology in colonial India.

Atmospheric happening and weather reasoning: Climate history in South Asia

“…6 Historians of climate would do well to look at examples from the history of medicine in South Asia, where scholars have developed tools to negotiate pluralistic ideas and practices involving the body, including exchanges between varied registers, languages, and traditions of knowledge. Projit Bihari Mukharji has recently offered a new metaphor of "braiding" to describe the ways in which practitioners of ayurveda integrated strands from different sources of knowledge into unique formations, sometimes individual and sometimes shared among communities of practitioners (Mukharji, 2016; see also Chakrabarti & Sen, 2016;Mukharji, 2014). 7 I am indebted to Debjani Bhattacharyya for suggesting this animal-as-instrument framing.…”