Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Time-Telling, the Exact Sciences, and Empire in Early Modern India

This doctoral dissertation research improvement grant supports a history of science project that examines relationships between science and empire in India during the early modern period (from sixteen to eighteen hundred); specifically, it will analyze the social practice of time-telling in Mughal India by focusing on activities, objects, institutions, and communities of practice that drew on the exact sciences of astronomy and mathematics. The project will explore how time-telling imparted cultural authority and material utility to the sciences and how they in turn were marshalled in support of the empire.

The requested funds will be used to engage in archival research; they will be used to obtain access to specific sources that are held in Britain, India, and Pakistan. The project will make a central intervention in postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, history of global science, and Islamic science.

The study uses time-telling as a portal into the socio-cultural world of Mughal scientific practices through original archival research configured around three sets of questions. The first concern the role of astronomical observations in political decision-making at an everyday level as well as empire-building on a broader level. Who are the principal actors and what contestations and collaborations occurred between them?

Why did Mughal observatory-building ambitions not succeed until the end of the early modern period? In lieu of observatories, what sites and approaches were used for original astronomical observations? The next set focus specifically on the economy of this large Mughal empire.

What transformations in agriculture and trade resulted from the instatement of new calendars and daily schedules? Were peasant logics reflected in this new temporal scheme? How did peasants’ lives change in one of the world’s most flourishing agricultural economies as a result of Mughal temporal systems?

The last set consider the deeper values and cultural entanglements in Mughal time-telling practices in the most religiously diverse empire in the early modern world. philosophical discourses on and historical constructions of time shaped the values of Mughal and regional courts in India? How did scholars from different traditions—Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jesuit—contribute to shifting sensibilities of eschatological and historical time during the early modern period?

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.