Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.6

c6.6

Initially, the quest is limited and the queries which are put by the various European learned societies and individual patrons to those of their kind who have stayed or wandered in the non-European world, are fairly simple. In course of time, as knowledge gets added to knowledge and newer formulations develop in Europe, the quest becomes wider and more sophisticated and the queries begin to be concerned with the more complex. The interest in the Indian manufacture of ice; in the making of the ‘Madras mortar’; in the processes of Indian iron and steel manufacture; or the observatory at Varanasi (Benares) (treated as one of the five ‘celebrated observatories’ of the world by the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* in its editions till 1823); the search for newer chemicals and dyes, or for materials for the water-proofing of the bottom of ships (considerable quantities of which were sent with information as late as the 1790s by a Bombay correspondent to the President of the British Royal Society: Chapter XVII), arose out of rapidly multiplying but specific European needs.