Chemical Vernaculars: Chemistry, Bengali and the Shifting Politics of Vernacularity, c. 1900 – 1980

• In Event: Colonial Chemical Translations: South Asia and the Modern Chemical Sciences, 1850–1980

English Abstract

Michael Gordin has demonstrated how the discovery of the Periodic Table and the controversies surrounding it played out as rivalries between German and Russian as alternate languages of science. The incident itself became part of chemical lore that chemists in other countries were weaned on. In Presidency College, Calcutta, the foremost educational institution of the British Raj at the turn of the twentieth century, the story of Mendeleev was repeatedly told by the enigmatic chemist and teacher Sir PC Ray to his students to drive home the point that Bengali needed to be developed as a language of science. He himself undertook to produce a scheme for translating chemical terms into Bengali. Two of his Bengali students, Rajsekhar Basu and Muhammad Qudrat-i-Khuda, also took his message to heart and became lifelong evangelists for chemistry in Bengali. They both also came up with their own schemes for translating technical terms. Yet, these three schemes vary widely from one another. What is meant by vernacular? Which nation does it engender? And, what kind of Bengali chemical community it envisaged were all distinct. Comparing the three schemes will allow us to see how the Mendeleev-lore became a flexible standard: a standard that organized a broad set of investments and discussions around the “language of science”, but also left sufficient room for accommodating widely disparate understandings of language, science and community. The paper will draw mostly upon the published Bengali writings of Ray, Basu and Qudrat-i-Khuda, alongwith memoirs by and about them.

Author

• Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania