The Science of Subjugation: India’s Long Battle for Technological Sovereignty

Chaitanya Giri’s erudite volume recasts India’s early modern past as a struggle over epistemic power.

In 1802, as the East India Company consolidated its dominion over large parts of the subcontinent, a young officer named William Lambton began what would become the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Stretching over nearly seven decades, completed under George Everest by 1871, it was one of the most ambitious scientific enterprises of its age: a project to measure India with mathematical precision, triangulating mountains, plains and rivers into a grid of imperial knowledge.

While this is the sort of endeavour that appears in most textbooks as a triumph of Enlightenment rationality, in Dr. Chaitanya Giri’s slender but densely argued and intellectually arresting The Long Siege, it acquires a more disquieting valence.

Giri, one of ‘New India’s’ Young Turks in the fields of technopolitics and strategic affairs who is with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), examines India’s 500-year struggle for technological sovereignty in his illuminating work.

His central provocation, that India’s last half-millennium is best understood as a “technopolitical siege,” places his work in a lineage that is at once Western and subversively anti-Western.

While reading it, one unmistakably hears the intellectual cadence of Max Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (1904; Eng. Translation 1930) which sought to explain Europe’s rise through cultural predispositions toward rationality and discipline. Giri effectively turns Weber’s famous thesis on its head.

External Paradigms

Where Weber traced Europe’s rise to internal cultural dispositions toward rationality and discipline, Giri forcefully argues that colonial power also depended on denying scientific and institutional autonomy to colonised societies like India. He contends that in the colonial world, paradigms were imposed externally, often violently, and maintained through exclusion. Scientific revolutions, in India’s case, were either deferred, disrupted or redirected.

The historical scaffolding of this argument in the battles of Battle of Plassey (1757) and Battle of Buxar (1764) mark the political turning point, but Giri insists that the deeper transformation lay in the rapid deployment of communication and measurement technologies that followed soon after.

The electric telegraph, introduced in India in 1851 and expanded after the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857, allowed the colonial state to compress time and space, helping it respond to uprisings with unprecedented speed.

The maritime dimension of Giri’s thesis is equally rich. By the early 18th century, European powers had mastered oceanic navigation, aided by the invention of the marine chronometer by John Harrison in the 1730s–1760s. This solved the problem of longitude, thus enabling precise global navigation. Indian polities, lacking comparable naval investments, were effectively excluded from this revolution.

This divergence finds an unexpected parallel in The Safavid World, which describes how Persia’s relative neglect of maritime power left it vulnerable to European encroachment in the Indian Ocean. Giri’s India is part of a broader Eurasian pattern where great land-based civilisations were overtaken by maritime empires that combined commerce, science and of course, violence.

The young scientist’s signal contribution lies in painstakingly demonstrating, using an astonishing range of illustrations, that the distribution of scientific creativity under empire was not merely unequal, but engineered by India’s colonial masters.

Beneath Britain’s rhetoric of its ‘civilising mission’ lay a persistent anxiety that if Indians were granted access to instruments, laboratories and industrial capital, they might generate technologies capable of unsettling imperial revenues and authority. The response was a careful throttling of opportunity that ensured while India could participate in the consumption of knowledge, it could not do so in its sovereign production.

It is in his treatment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Giri’s narrative acquires particular depth and texture. The Japanese Meiji Restoration (which was set in motion in 1868) emerges as a luminous counterpoint as an example of an Asian polity that assimilated Western science without surrendering political autonomy.

For Indian intellectuals and revolutionaries, this was a living example of what might have been, and perhaps still could be for India. Giri’s recovery of transnational networks, most notably the lesser-known India House in Tokyo, reveals a dense web of exchanges linking Indian aspirations to Japanese modernisation and European scientific ferment.

The role of Subhas Chandra Bose in fostering scientific institutions adds another layer of complexity. Bose’s presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1938–39, and his emphasis on industrial and technological development, is often overshadowed by his later military campaigns. Giri restores this dimension by linking it to the broader theme of ‘technopolitical freedom.’ The surveillance of Indian laboratories during the 1940s amid the global upheaval of the Second World War underscores the strategic importance of scientific knowledge.

The post-Independence period, in Giri’s telling, is no clean break from the colonial past but an uneasy inheritance. Institutions such as the Survey of India, which was established in 1767 and later folded into the apparatus of the colonial state, are presented as carriers of a deeper epistemic residue. That residue lies not merely in their administrative continuity but in the habits of thought they encoded in a way of measuring, cataloguing and prioritising knowledge that was never designed for civilisational self-expression.

Giri’s cri de cœur is not for cosmetic decolonisation (like renaming buildings or rewriting plaques) but for something more structural: a conscious severing, or at the very least, a reorientation of the intellectual frameworks inherited from Empire.

In his seminal ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), Thomas Kuhn argued that science advances through internally generated paradigm shifts, a process that presumes a relatively autonomous community of inquiry.

No Autonomy

Giri places that model under historical pressure. He clearly shows that in the colonial context such autonomy scarcely existed. The founding of universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857 (which coincided with the rebellion that year) did not inaugurate a scientific renaissance.

Instead, these institutions functioned largely as teaching bodies that were denied robust research ecosystems for decades. In Giri’s reading, the absence was not incidental as it amounted to a deliberate strategy of intellectual containment - a way on part of the English to produce Indian clerks and intermediaries, but not Indian innovators.

In his landmark 1980 work, ‘Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime,’ American historian Charles Coulston Gillispie showed how, in late 18th-century France, the state actively mobilised science for administrative precision and military efficiency by standardising weights and measures, sponsoring academies and integrating knowledge into governance.

While the British Empire pursued a parallel project in India, particularly through surveying, telegraphy and cartography, there was a decisive divergence here. In France, science was nationalised and absorbed into the service of the state and, by extension, its citizenry.

In contrast, Giri, in his work, shows how in India, it was monopolised and controlled by a colonial elite and withheld from the broader population, precisely to prevent its translation into autonomous power.

Giri’s insistence on cultural grounding is where the book acquires both its sharpest edge and its greatest originality. His suggestion that scientific autonomy must rest on a civilisational framework does more than challenge the universalist pretensions of modern science by asking a deeper question: can knowledge ever be fully detached from the cultures that produce it?

This line of thinking has deep antecedents. 19^th century German scholars, working within the expansive tradition of Wissenschaft, had similarly sought to anchor knowledge in national culture and historical experience. Giri’s intervention, however, is more urgent, for it emerges not from a position of dominance but from one of historical dispossession. It makes his call for rooted scientific practice both intellectually provocative and politically resonant.

Ultimately, what makes ‘The Long Siege’ so compelling is not that it resolves these tensions, but that it illuminates them with uncommon clarity and confidence. Giri is writing from the margins of Empire – not from its centre – and is seeking, with considerable intellectual daring, to reconstruct its agency. The result is a book that feels both urgent and expansive, animated by a sense that the stakes are not merely academic but civilisational.

Chaitanya Giri masterfully shows that the history of modern India cannot be properly understood without placing science at its centre- and then, too, not as a neutral and disembodied pursuit, but as a contested terrain of power, exclusion and aspiration. For those seeking to grasp the intellectual architecture of the ‘New India,’ The Long Siege is, in the fullest sense of the word, indispensable.