Indian Science and Its Makers

The standard scholarly survey, published by the Indian National Science Academy. Sober, sourced, and the right corrective to both dismissal and inflation.

How science arrived as an instrument of colonial rule, who was allowed to practise it, and what Indians did with it anyway.

Joseph places Indian mathematics inside a global non-European story, which is the right frame for judging what was original and what travelled.

The scholarly account, including the Kerala school deriving infinite series for sine and cosine two centuries before Newton and Leibniz.

A twelfth-century textbook written as problems in verse, addressed to a girl. Still charming, and the algebra is real.

Written at twenty-three, in verse, containing a value for pi, a sine table and the claim that the earth rotates. Read the W.E. Clark translation with the commentary.

The Jantar Mantar instruments photographed and explained: masonry the size of buildings, built to read the sky to the second.

Selections from the classical Sanskrit medical texts with a historian's introduction. The scholarly way in, and it does not oversell.

Read the surgical sections. Cataract couching, reconstructive nose surgery and over a hundred instruments, described with a precision that is hard to argue with.

Crucible steel made in south India and traded to Damascus, with the metallurgy explained by two metallurgists. The archaeology is the argument.

Dharampal assembled British colonial records describing Indian smallpox inoculation, ice making, drill ploughs and iron smelting. The sources are the East India Company's own.

Ray's autobiography: the chemistry, the founding of Bengal Chemicals, and his conviction that a country that cannot make its own medicines is not free.

Bose generating and detecting millimetre waves in 1895, refusing to patent, and then turning to plant response. Dasgupta is good on why he made those choices.

Saha's ionisation equation made stellar spectra readable, and Saha then spent his life building institutions. Anderson covers both halves.

Nearly a hundred Indian women scientists writing about their own careers, including Asima Chatterjee and Kamala Sohonie, who worked in exactly these laboratories.

Raman found his effect with equipment costing a few hundred rupees and had the Nobel within two years. Venkataraman is a physicist and does not skip the science.

Bose sent Einstein a paper that had been rejected, Einstein translated it himself, and every boson in physics is named after the man who wrote it.

Chandrasekhar calculated the mass limit on a white dwarf at nineteen, was publicly humiliated by Eddington for it, and was proved right decades later.

Bhabha founded TIFR, ran the atomic energy programme, collected modern art and got what he wanted from Nehru. The biography does not flatter him.

Sarabhai argued that a country with villages without electricity should still build satellites, and won the argument. Shah is clear-eyed about the cost of that.

A political history of technology in India: the ambivalence, the licence raj, the leapfrogging, and why the state kept changing its mind about machines.

An insider from the beginning, when rocket parts were carried on bicycles. Unpolished and much better for it.

The official history, written by the engineers, covering the launch vehicles, the satellites and the Mars Orbiter Mission in technical detail.

Thirty-one women scientists working in India now, interviewed at length, including members of the Mars Orbiter team such as Ritu Karidhal and Muthayya Vanitha.