Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s2.31

c6.s2.31

Several questions arise out of the material on technology described and discussed here. One of them arises from the generally shared European opinion—at times asserted—that the Indian manufacturer of iron and steel (and, in other instances, of other commodities, or practitioners in other professions) could not have had any knowledge ‘of the theory of his operations’. Though such opinions essentially originated from the ethnocentric views and inclinations (Even the British Royal Society does not seem to have remained untouched from such inclinations. Referring to the letter of Dr Scott on *wootz*, it quoted him as having written that it ‘admits of a harder temper than anything known in that part of India.’ What Dr Scott had actually stated was that ‘it appears to admit of a harder temper than anything we are acquainted with.’ As is obvious, Dr Scott’s ‘we’ implied ‘we in Europe’. But as this must have seemed inadmissible in the pages of the *Philosophical Transactions*, the observation got altered to ‘than anything known in that part of India.’ (See *Philosophical Transactions*, vol.85, p.322; and chapter XVII, pp.256 in this volume).) of the societies to which such observers belonged, and were not in their essence derived from the subject observed and described, these, as mere statements which generally hold true at all times, need not be disputed. But most practitioners of a profession which they have learnt after a long apprenticeship and in which their essential job is to repeat ever more perfectly what they had done before, never require, and seldom possess, such knowledge. The possession of such knowledge and its development and refinement is, at all times, the function of a separate, though interlinked, group. Such division between the practitioners and the theoreticians is currently more evident than ever before.