Sohini Chattopadhyay

What are the territorial limits of scientific knowledge in colonial India? This book project investigates scientific modernity through the territorialization of knowledge, comparing the divergent municipal trajectories of crematoriums in Bombay and Calcutta from 1850 to 1950. While both cities utilized the crematorium to manage “pauper” corpses, their developments followed distinct regional logics. In Calcutta, European capital and Hindu nationalism relegated the technology to the urban fringe. Conversely, in Bombay, anti-caste and socialist movements transformed the crematorium egalitarian promise. Drawing on multilingual archives, the book argues that colonial science was a fractured series of regional experiments bounded by land use, and regional negotiations of caste and labor. Ultimately, this work shows how the furnace became a laboratory for testing the limits of social value, urban space, and the modern state. Aspects of this research have appeared in “Modern Asian Studies” and “Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society.”