Quest for Technical Knowledge - Bengal in the Nineteenth Century (Hardcover)

Immense intellectual and cultural stirrings characterised nineteenth-century Bengal. The impact of modern Western culture and consciousness of defeat by a foreign power gave birth to a new awakening. Thoughtful Bengalis were impressed in particular by modern science and technology. The attainment of modern scientific knowledge in colonial Bengal was not purely a question of diffusion. Western science and technology, viewed as cultural import, were actively redefined by the recipient culture. A different society, culture, tradition and existing indigenous knowledge systems provided the background in which the gradual spread of the new knowledge occurred, followed by its adaptation through various reformulations. One of the major sources of dissemination of techno-scientific knowledge to the native society was the contemporary Bengali journals. This book is an account of the Bengali bhadralok's distinctive response to the modern technical knowledge as reflected in the pages of these journals.