Landscape and postcolonial science

This article draws attention to the framing of problems in the history and sociology of Indian science. It argues that physics in postcolonial India c annot be seen in isolation from the political context within which it was e mbedded and the international circuits within which its work circulated. Fu rther, the article demonstrates how certain experimental approaches, highly effective from a scientific point of view, depend upon a violent exclusion of all that is social and living from the scientific register. The article draws on the conceptual device of landscape borrowed from critical work in art history to make the link between different elements of the argument.