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Joseph Needham and his South Asian Encounters Leon Antonio Rocha Research Fellow, Emmanuel College University of Cambridge LAR29@cam.ac.uk Intersections: New Perspectives on Science and Technology in Twentieth-Century India and China. Conference organised by Jahnavi Phalkey (King’s College London) and Tong Lam (University of Toronto). Tsinghua University, Beijing, 28-30 June 2013. Please do not cite or circulate without the permission of the author. June 2013. Prefatory Remarks Because of family commitments, I cannot be present at the Conference to discuss this material — my sincere apologies. Here I will provide some context of what I am doing. I am currently working on two book-length projects, entitled respectively Harnessing Pleasure: Imagining Chinese Sex in the Twentieth Century and Needham Questions. This paper, and the research I have carried out for it, belongs to the latter project. Joseph Needham (1900-1995) of course requires little introduction. He was the inaugurator of the Science and Civilisation in China project and Needham was, and probably remains, the most famous British intellectual and historian in China. Entitled Needham Questions, my project aims to produce the first book-length work that dissects the evolution of Needham’s thinking about China, science, politics and “civilisation”. Through archival research as well as oral histories with Needham’s former collaborators, students, interlocutors and critics in Europe, America and Asia — historians, philosophers, sociologists, Sinologists, Indologists, political theorists, archivists and librarians, scientists and doctors, popularisers — I place Needham’s monumental scholarship on Chinese science, medicine and technology in historical and philosophical contexts. The central premise of Needham Questions is that Joseph Needham’s inquiries addressed a host of problems — scientific, philosophical, historical, linguistic, political and ethical — which intensely preoccupied generations of twentieth-century intellectuals and scholars. Under Needham’s outlook, China was always the privileged channel through which to contemplate the basic dilemmas of the “modern world”. Moreover, “Chinese civilisation” almost invariably emerged as the most promising candidate in providing solutions to these dilemmas. For instance: How could one generate accurate knowledge about the world — or how to do “good science”? What was the nature of reality — and did different peoples or “civilisations” have access to different parts of reality? How would one organise the social and political worlds such that everyone could fulfil their aspirations — or could one come to consensus on a universal, ecumenical set of values, combining the best of West and East, that would help everyone live an ethical life? And how would science fit into that ethical existence? In short, Science and Civilisation in China aimed to answer many broader questions — not just the famous so-called “Needham Question” i.e., why China was overtaken by Europe in science and technology in the seventeenth century despite China’s advancement and “supremacy” in earlier periods. Hence the title of my book-project,

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Needham Questions. By unpacking these questions, the evidence that Needham marshalled to argue his case, his theoretical vocabularies and stylistics, his methodologies and ideologies, and most importantly his long-range networks of scholars and intellectuals from whom he drew inspiration and whom he inspired, my project sheds light on the politics involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge about China in the twentieth century. The first part of my project essentially involves going through the archival materials deposited at the Cambridge University Library, the Needham Research Institute and other Cambridge colleges, and I have taken a somewhat unusual strategy by starting from the 1990s (the last years of Needham’s life), and working backwards to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Needham, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling 王玲 and other collaborators worked on the first and second volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Since I argue that there are fundamental continuities between Needham’s scientific career and Sinological inquiries, I also go back to the 1920s and 1930s. At the moment I am studying a number of key episodes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This was the period — overlapping with the Cultural Revolution in China and student politics around the world — when Needham was absolutely preoccupied with the history of alchemy, medicine and the body. This period culminated in the publication of key SCC volumes on “Spagyrical Discovery and Invention” (Vol.V Pt.2, 1974; Vol.V Pt.3, 1976; Vol.V Pt.4, 1980; Vol.V Pt. 5, 1983), as well as Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa (1980), the only book-length work on Chinese medicine that Needham and Lu published in their lifetime. The archival materials associated with these volumes included extensive correspondence, particularly with scholars in South Asia, with whom Needham discussed possible cross-cultural comparisons and connections between theories and practices in Chinese medicine vs. South Asian medicine. This has prompted me to look further into Joseph Needham’s South Asian encounters. The present paper here is somewhat rough around the edges — it is divided into four parts, which are yet to be “harmonised”. It proceeds in rough chronological order. The first is a quick and very general introduction to Needham’s encounter with South Asia i.e. when South Asia first appeared on Needham’s intellectual horizon and political “radar” in the 1940s and 1950s, when he first travelled to India, and so forth. The second section looks at some of Needham’s connections with historians of science and medicine in India, using his extensive correspondence — some lasting for four decades — with Abdul Rahman (1923-2009), Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (1918-1993) and others. Needham has influenced — and is himself influenced by — a generation of scholars in Indian science, and his idiosyncratic grand narratives of “ecumenism” and “suppression” in particular made a deep impression on Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s work. Indian scholars also turned to Needham for advice on building up history of science and medicine communities. I envisage that this section may develop into a spin-off paper in its own right, analysing attempts to produce multi-volume histories of science, medicine and technology ca. mid- to late-twentieth-century: George Sarton’s History of Science, J.D. Bernal’s Science in History, Rupert Hall and Norman Smith’s History of Technology, UNESCO’s “History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Humankind”, to the ongoing Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture (PHISPC) of the Centre for Studies in Civilisations (CSC) in India, and the History of Science and Technology in China (Zhongguo kexue jishushi 中國科學技

術史) project led by Lu Jiaxi 盧嘉錫 (1915-2001). The third part concentrates on the materials regarding the Commission on the University of Ceylon (CUC), roughly 1957-1960. The Government of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) appointed a special commission to report on the workings of the University and to make policy

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recommendations for improvements and developments in line with wider changes in the education system, and in tune with Ceylon’s national culture and aspirations to become more integrated in global research communities. Needham served as the Chair of this Commission. The fourth section concentrates on Science and Civilisation in China Volume V: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part V: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Physiological Alchemy (1983). Needham, from the 1960s onwards, increasingly sought confirmation from historians of Indian science and medicine and argued that certain Chinese ideas corresponded to Indian concepts about the natural world. On occasion he would speculate on whether the Chinese first arrived at these ideas, which then “diffused” to South Asia. This has particular importance for the history of alchemy, where Needham was invested in claiming that alchemy transmitted from China, spread via South Asia and the Middle East, and arrived in Europe (where it mixed with Greek and Egyptian alchemical traditions). On this scenario I use some of the archival materials on Joseph Needham and the Pakistani chemist and historian Syed Mahdihassan (1892-1992), and I also touch on some mid-twentieth century attempts to verify experimentally the physiological effects of yoga. Needham, preoccupied with both the health benefits of Chinese and Indian macrobiotics, investigated extensively these projects to “bring yoga into the lab”. Again, whether “yoga in the lab” can spin off into a separate paper in its own right, I am not entirely sure at this point. With regard to the specific theme of the conference — the intersectionality of twentieth-century Chinese and Indian science — I want to draw out some of the global projects concerned with rediscovering and reconstructing different traditions of science and medicine, and with assessing the possibilities of integrating those different traditions (“indigenous knowledges” to use a contentious term) with “Western” science and biomedicine. This is what attracted Needham to South Asian scholarship, and what attracted South Asian historians and philosophers to Science and Civilisation in China. My ultimate aim (and I have a similar aim in Needham Questions) is to globalise the history of the history of science. Instead of following a storyline which privileges figures like George Sarton, Robert Merton, Herbert Butterfield, Thomas Kuhn and other familiar names (who are often invoked as “founding fathers” of the discipline), and then talking about how history of science as a discipline “diffused” around the world, I advocate a more symmetric look at how “science” was being written by a host of contemporaneous collectives of scholars and intellectuals. At least this is what I have in mind for now, and I am entirely open to the possibility of refining and revising the argumentation. I have written this paper in a fairly conversational style, so that, if somebody wants to read excerpts from this paper out aloud, it is not such cumbersome prose. Needless to say that this is very much work-in-progress so it is heavy on descriptions and details. Firstly, if there is anyone with whom I can and should collaborate, please do let me know. I am happy to attempt to develop and finish this piece by myself, but would deeply appreciate the expert input from a scholar working on the history of history of science in South Asia. Secondly, please do not circulate or cite this paper without my permission. Needham’s First Encounters with India, ca. Late 1930s-1950s There is no evidence to suggest that Joseph Needham was particularly interested in India before World War II. Among the Needham Archives, the earliest documents referring to India date back to the 1920s, but they belonged to Alicia Adelaide Needham (Joseph Needham’s mother, 1863-ca. 1940) — her manuscript notes on books that she read, including an unidentified work on inoculation practices in Pompeii and India.1 Joseph Needham first 1 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 A.458. “Needham CUL” refers to the collection of archival documents deposited at the Cambridge University Library.

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took a serious interest in India in 1939, when the Provinces of British India declared war on Germany. Over three million troops were eventually sent from India to fight alongside Allied Forces. Gandhi and others in the Indian Independence Movement criticised India’s entry into the World War II, as prominent Indian leaders were not consulted. Moreover, since Allied Powers’ rhetoric, promoted by Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, was that World War II was the battle to “save democracy”, Gandhi and others thought this amounted to gross hypocrisy as that very democracy was denied to the Indian people. Various military factions in India also collaborated with the Germans, Italians and the Japanese to attempt to overthrow the British Raj. While his political activities ca. 1939 and 1940 focussed primarily on the Japanese invasion of China, Soviet Russia, German annexation of Czechoslovakia and the arrival of Germanophone and Central European Jewish scientists and intellectuals in Britain, Needham also collected materials on the Indian developments during World War II. It confirmed his view that the World War II was about the fate of the “world”, not simply the struggle for freedom and liberty in Western Europe.2 The question of the organisation of science (and ultimately the betterment of humankind) was always central to Needham’s political mission, and this was reflected in another of Needham’s first engagements with India — his contribution “Science, Capitalism and Fascism” for the Science and Politics series for the BBC Radio Eastern Service in June 1942. The broadcast was commissioned by Eric Blair (1903-1950, also known as George Orwell), who was hired as a Talks Producer (1941-1942) for the BBC Radio Eastern Service. This BBC service actively transmitted British propaganda to India.3 It was also around this time that Needham did some serious reading on India, starting off with the work of V.A. (Vincent Arthur) Smith (1843-1920), an Irish-born Indologist and historian who served in the Bengal Civil Service (1871-1900) and who wrote the famous Oxford History of India (1919).4 Over the 1940s and 1950s, Needham became well-acquainted with the output of Arthur Berriedale Keith (1879-1944), Dale Maurice Riepe (1918- ), Sir Harold Walter (H.W.) Bauley (1899-1996), Venkataraman Raghavan (1908-1979), Douglas Morton Dunlop (1909-1987), Baren Ray (?-2004), Parashuram Krishna (P.K.) Gode (1891-1961), Horace Geoffrey (H.G.) Quaritch Wales (1900-1981), S.N. Nagarajan (?-?), Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952), Cedric Dover (1904-1961), Eberhart (Edward) Julius Dietrich Conze (1904-1979), Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914-1986), Jean Filliozat (1906-1982), and many others. An exceptionally powerful networker, Needham quickly became correspondents and friends with these Indologists and Sanskritists, from whom he sought advice whenever he needed help on South Asia during the production of various parts of Science and Civilisation in China.5 2 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 K.112. Materials classified under Section K are generally on pre-war and wartime British politics. 3 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 G.120. This was after Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), and before he wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteenth Eighty-Four (1949). 4 Needham NRI2/SCC2/1/7. See V.A. (Vincent Arthur) Smith, The Oxford History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End of 1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919). Needham made extensive notes on this book ca.1942 and re-read this again in depth in the 1950s, see Needham NRI2/SCC2/27/9. “Needham NRI” referred to archival materials deposited at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. 5 On Keith: SCC2/9/27 (contribution in Cambridge History of India, “The Period of the Later Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads”; on Riepe SCC2/9/28, “Philosophical Foundations of Indian Naturalistic and Protoscientific thought” as well as SCC2/9/62, 68, 80; on Harold Walter Bailey and Venkataraman Raghavan, SCC/2/9/26; on Douglas Morton Dunlop, SCC/2/9/23; on Baren Ray, NRI2/SCC/SCC2/358/7; on P.K. Gode, SCC/2/9/40; on H.G. Quaritch Wales, SCC/2/9/47; on S.N. Nagarajan, SCC/2/9/55, author of Eastern Marxism and Other Essays (2008); on Dasgupta, SCC2/64/2; on Dover, SCC2/371/42; on Conze, SCC2/213/12/7; on Basham, Needham/NRI2/SCC2/317/39.

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As is well-known, Joseph Needham travelled to China in Autumn 1942 and became the Director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office (SBSCO) in Chongqing from 1943 until 1946. Needham’s ship set off from Tilbury in Essex in November 1942, and reached Calcutta in February 1943, by way of Lisbon, Malta, the Suez Canal and Bombay. This was Needham’s first visit to India. From Calcutta he boarded a United States Army Air Forces plane that flew over “The Hump” (Eastern end of the Himalayas) into Kunming, and from Kunming Needham travelled to the wartime capital of Chongqing. Needham did not discuss much about this “first encounter” with India in his diaries, except for the episode involving the collection of his sidearm from the Fort William Royal Naval Armaments Depot.6 Needham’s second visit to India was in ca. May-June 1944, en route to Moscow and Leningrad where he attended the 220th Anniversary of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.7 After the Anniversary event in the Soviet Union, Needham then returned to China via India.8 Again, not a great deal was recorded concerning Needham’s encounters with politicians and intellectuals in India, except for a set of notes and letters between Needham and a certain Zain-ul-Abedin (not to be confused with the Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin), who was working for All India Radio and subsequently had a career in government service in Bangladesh, as Director General of the Department of Research and Reference.9 The next phase of Needham’s engagement with India was mediated through his work at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). To cut a long story short: in October 1942, the Allies formed the “Conference of Allied Ministers of Education” (CAME) to discuss the post-war educational needs of Allied nations, and by 1944 CAME developed into an organisation that was concerned with the cultural reconstruction of occupied Europe. After World War II ended, the United Nations, following the success of CAME, planned to establish a “United Nations Organisation for Educational and Cultural Reconstruction”, which then became in April 1944 the “United Nations Educational and Cultural Organisation” (UNECO) with the support of the United States and Britain. Joseph Needham was still working as Director at the SBSCO in Chongqing, and he thought that scientific cooperation and organisation ought to come under the auspices of the United Nations. He sent three famous memoranda in 1944 and 1945 to the British Council and the United Kingdom Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, insisting on, basically, putting the “S” in “UNECO”. Needham enjoyed the support of various British and American colleagues on this matter, and by November 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) came into being and its first Conference was held in Paris. The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was elected its first Director General and Joseph Needham was appointed Director of the Natural Sciences Division. Needham served in this position until April 1948, and returned to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to begin writing the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China, eventually published in 1954.10 Among Needham’s documents on his work for UNESCO’s Natural Sciences Division include notes, papers and reports ca. 1947-1948 on the development and organisation (and resumption) of scientific research, particularly in nations that were devastated in World War 6 An episode also described in Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 58-59. 7 Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 A.897-898; Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 H.51-H.56; Needham NRI2/5/12/11. 8 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 H.51-H.56. 9 Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 M.245-M.257. 10 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 D.1-D.365.

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II or part of the so-called “Third World”. For instance papers on the establishment of research institutes on the mathematical and physical sciences in Mexico (which Needham visited in 1948), organisation of scientists in India or in Brazil, governmental provision for higher education in South Africa or Egypt, collaborations with academies in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so forth.11 The UNESCO Natural Sciences Division, following Needham’s SBSCO experience in Chongqing, established a number of Science Cooperation Offices. The branch for South Asia was set up in 1948 in Delhi, and its officers included a certain Dr P.C. Young (no information found so far), the Hungarian zoologist Alexander A. Wolsky (1902-2004, later Professor Emeritus of Biology and Chair of the Department of Science at Marymount College), and the Norwegian economist and insurance specialist Karl H. Borch (1919-1986, later Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and author of the classic The Economics of Uncertainty, published in 1968). It was through colleagues like Young, Wolsky and Borch that Joseph Needham learned news of scientific development in India, which became formally independent from Britain in August 1947, and gained access to emergent research communities and political networks — for instance the Society of Biological Chemists (India), the All-India Friends of the Soviet Union (founded in 1941 as Bengal Friends of the Soviet Union, became national in 1944 and presided by Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit).12 Among the first Indian scientists that Needham befriended was Abdul Rahman (1923-2009). The two men met some time ca. 1947-1948 in Britain, and they would enter into correspondence for nearly five decades, until Needham’s death in 1995.13 Rahman would later become an instrumental figure in the history of history of science in South Asia. Rahman was from Aligarh, in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He received his BSc from the Aligarh Muslim University and then his MSc in biochemistry from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. With sponsorship from the Tata family of industrialists and philanthropists, Rahman enrolled at the University of Sheffield for doctoral work. He became acquainted with J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), and was said to be moved by Haldane to study the history of science and technology in South Asia and in the Muslim world. It was probably through Haldane that Rahman was introduced to Needham. Rahman moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, with the intention of researching the history of science and possibly linking up with Needham.14 He abandoned this plan — probably because there was no formal or sponsored programme for further study in history of science yet in Cambridge — and returned to India ca. 1948-1949, whereupon he was imprisoned by the India Government on the grounds of his Communist affiliations.15 Rahman was freed from jail, likely with the intervention of Haldane, Needham, and the Tata family. Rahman then took up a position at the Central Laboratories of Scientific and Industrial Research (CLSIR) in Hyderabad, which was established in 1944 by the Government of Hyderabad State and in 1948 appointed Dr S. Hussain Zaheer as its director.16 Rahman then

11 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 D.229-D.231. 12 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 F.446. Needham NRI2/SCC/SCC2/358/4. Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 406-410. 13 Needham NRI SCC2/9/1. The earliest letter between Rahman and Needham is in fact a message dated 29 October 1948, sent from Rahman in Paris on the purchase of books. 14 On Rahman, see also Preface of K.D. Sharma and M.A. Qureshi (eds.) Science, Technology, and Development: Essays in Honour of A. Rahman (New Delhi: Sterling, 1978). 15 Needham NRI SCC2/359/2. 16 Needham NRI SCC2/9/5, 12 September 1949. Following “Operation Polo” in which the Indian Armed Forces invaded the State of Hyderabad and overthrew its Nizam, the Central Laboratories for Scientific and Industrial Research (CLSIR) became part of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in New Delhi and

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worked at the Central Building Research Institute (CBRI) in Roorkee (ca. 1957),17 Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) in Mysore (1961), 18 and was then appointed Chief of Planning and the Head of the History of Science Unit at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in New Delhi (1962).19 Rahman then became the Founding Director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) in 1980, retiring in 1985. He became an Editorial Fellow of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture (PHISPC) initiated by the Centre for Studies in Civilisations (CSC, founded 1995) and directed by D.P. (Debi Prasad) Chattopadhyaya (1933- , not to be confused with Marxist historian and philosopher Debipradsad Chattopadhyaya, 1918-1993). For the PHISPC series, Rahman edited parts of Volume III Development of Philosophy, Science and Technology in India and Neighbouring Civilisations, specifically Part 1 History of Indian Science, Technology and Culture (AD 1000-1800) (1999) and Part 2 India’s Interaction with West Asia, Central Asia and China (2002). The most intense period in the Rahman-Needham correspondence was in the 1950s and 1960s, when Rahman frequently sought advice from Needham on how to build scholarly infrastructures in South Asia, on the establishment of the Indian Society for the History of Science (1956) and its regular meetings, on the possibility of setting up History of Indian Science libraries and journals, and on the compilation of History of Science in India bibliographies. The two men also discussed the scientific collaboration between developing countries around the world, and exchanged ideas on the episodes in South Asian history and in the history of science in general.20 To end this quick introduction of Needham’s first encounters in India, I will give you a tiny bit of Cambridge folklore (which will take us up to year 1950). Upon the death of Jan Smuts (1870-1970), who was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge since 1948, two candidates were put forward for the replacement: Arthur William Tedder (1890-1967), Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964). Joseph Needham supported Nehru, but Nehru was never consulted before his nomination and subsequently indicated that he would decline the offer. The possibility of Nehru becoming the symbolic figurehead of University of Cambridge, and indeed the prospect of a contest for the Chancellorship — the first time for 105 years — generated considerable interest in the British media, though in the end Lord Tedder was appointed without any competition.21 Chronological “Chauvinism” and “Ecumenism”: Some Encounters with Historians of Science in South Asia, ca. 1950-mid-1960s

was renamed Regional Research Laboratory, Hyderabad (RRL-H) in the mid-1950s. It was then renamed as the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) in 1989. 17 Needham NRI SCC2/9/20. 18 Needham NRI SCC2/9/41. 19 Needham NRI SCC2/9/48. 20 E.g. Needham NRI SCC2/9/4, SCC2/9/13, SCC2/9/15, SCC2/9/16, SCC2/9/17, SCC2/9/18, SCC2/9/19, SCC2/9/24, SCC2/9/25, SCC2/9/29, SCC2/9/30, SC2/9/31, SCC2/9/33, SCC2/9/39, SCC2/9/44, SCC2/9/49, SCC2/9/52, SCC2/9/56, SCC2/9/58, SCC2/9/82, SCC2/9/88, SCC5/3/3/33. 21 Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 B.265-266. As an aside, in 2011, a contest for the Chancellorship of the University of Cambridge did materialise. The Duke of Edinburgh retired from this position, and Lord Sainsbury (of the supermarket fame) was formally proposed by the Nominations Board of the University. Sainsbury was contested by local shopkeeper Abdul Arain (who wished to defend the local greengrocers’ interest against supermarket giants like Sainsbury’s and Tesco), actor Brian Blessed (who accepted the nomination of a group of students from the Faculty of English), and the radical barrister Michael Mansfield (who basically declared “war” on the Government over its cuts on higher education). Sainsbury subsequently won the election with 52% of the vote. For the record, I voted for Brian Blessed, also known as Boss Nass.

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To grasp Joseph Needham’s work, one must understand two interrelated, recurring metaphors in Science and Civilisation in China and other writings. The first is “the grand titration”. This involves a retrospective competition between China and Europe, with Joseph Needham acting as the biochemist-cum-historian “fixing” the dates of the discovery of ideas, and determining who first invented various technologies. Here Europe becomes a “titrant” i.e. a standard solution containing a known molarity of “science”, and China becomes a “titrand” to be analysed to find out how much “science” it really contains. The second key metaphor is the “ecumenical”, best illustrated by a bewildering diagram that Needham drew in 1967. (See Appendix at the end of this paper.) Here time is on the x-axis and the “level of scientific achievement” is on the y-axis. The top line is “Europe” and the bottom line is “China”. Needham suggests that science during Aristotle’s time was more advanced than Warring States China. Scientific achievement then dramatically dipped in Europe during the Dark Ages, and from the seventeenth century onwards Western science grew exponentially, finally taking over China with the publication of Galileo’s Starry Messenger in 1610. The point at which Western mathematics, astronomy and physics overtook their Chinese counterparts was represented by T1 — Needham called this the “transcurrent point”. What was F1 then? This was the “fusion point” i.e. when Western and Chinese mathematics, astronomy and physics supposedly merged to become truly universal or “ecumenical”. Suffice it to say here that this extraordinary assertion is not supported by historical evidence! I want to draw your attention to T3, the “transcurrent point” for medicine. In Needham’s view Western medicine acquired a noteworthy edge over Chinese medicine in the nineteenth century. Although he never specified what happened, he was most likely referring to the development of the germ theory of disease. Note that there is no “fusion point” for medicine (or the sciences of life) on the diagram — for Needham, “fusion” has taken place with astronomy, mathematics, physics, botany and chemistry, but the “fusion” between Western and Chinese medicine has not yet happened. What is interesting is that Needham’s “grand titration”, in the case of medicine, morphs into some kind of “distillation”. Arguing that China preceded Europe in the invention of printing, and “giving China the credit where it is due”, would be rather different from suggesting that we should now revive Chinese techniques or combine European and Chinese technologies to manufacture all our books. But with Chinese medicine, Joseph Needham believed that there was something to be recovered and “distilled” that could be fused with Western medicine to create a genuinely “ecumenical medicine” that combined the best of East and West. Needham was therefore in full support of the “Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine” (Zhong xi yi jiehe 中西醫結合) programmes in China ca. 1960s-70s. This was Needham’s utopian vision, and it was one that animated Science and Civilisation in China and inspired some of his South Asian colleagues. Finally, it is necessary here to point towards another key motif in Joseph Needham’s work — the narrative of “suppression” and “degeneration”. Again, I will use Needham’s historiography of Chinese medicine to illustrate. He postulates a kind of “pre-history”, very distant in the past — when the first Chinese people came to realise the healing powers or toxic properties of certain herbs and substances, and discovered through “trial and error” that there were certain sensitive pressure points along the body. It is not dissimilar to claiming that the history of mathematics must have begun when people in some pre-historic past, before the advent of the written language, started to count the fruits that they gathered or the animals that they hunted or domesticated. Because there was no “science” to explain why one herb could alleviate stomach ache, but another herb would do nothing against it — often the

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“primitive man” might assign some kind of agency to nature, or even postulate some kind of “supernatural being” responsible for the healing effects of a substance. Such experiences and interaction with things in nature might be passed onto the next generation through an oral tradition, and such “primitive knowledge” about state of affairs and properties of objects could be encoded in some kind of rituals, taboos and “primitive religion”. A special figure within a “primitive tribe” might claim to have some kind of privileged access to some supernatural agency or revealed knowledge of the relations of things in the natural world, or might have that power endowed upon him and could therefore perform “magic” and bring about changes to the world or to another human being that other members of that “primitive tribe” could not. Needham quite often resorted to this kind of “origins of magic and science” narrative, which was borrowed from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century anthropologists like Franz Boas and particularly Bronislaw Malinowski.22 According to this kind of narrative, in the early, pre-historic times in China, medicine was, supposedly, purely grounded on “people’s experiences”. For Needham, the “problem” for Chinese medicine began with the crystallisation or even fossilisation of so-called “correlative thinking” (or “analogical thinking”) in the highly elaborate scheme of “systematic correspondences” in early China, which permeated all spheres of intellectual inquiries. Needham states that “correlative thinking” — the Yin-Yang theory, the Wuxing (Five elements) theory, statements like “The Emperor is to the State as the Heart is to the Body” or “the Liver is Wood, the Heart is Fire, the Spleen is Earth, the Lung is Metal, the Kidney is Water” so forth — were “proto-scientific” or “magical”. This kind of scheme of correspondences functioned as a useful shorthand, recording complex observations witnessed by philosophers, and it also cashed out some useful predictions about the world e.g. herbs which grew with full exposure to the sun would have “cooling” properties (they contain Yin to counteract the Yang from the sun), and herbs which grew in dark caves would have “heating” properties (they contain Yang energy to counteract its Yin surroundings). However, for Needham, the only “proper” scientific style of reasoning was “causative” — A causes B which causes C — and Chinese medicine, in his account, never made a full transition from “correlative reasoning” to “causative reasoning”. The “retarding factor” responsible was Confucianism. The “Confucian scholars” — and in Needham’s account there is a certain ambiguity about who exactly they were — held back the development of science because they were always preoccupied with the arrangement of human affairs and social institutions, in contrast to the “Daoists” who were supposedly, genuinely interested in the observation of nature “as it was” and the “Mohists” who were engineers and inventors of new technologies (mechanics, optics etc). In another of Needham’s formulations, the “Confucians” were only interested in studying nature only insofar as patterns of natural phenomena could be mobilised to legitimate political power, and the Confucians did that by ruthlessly trimming and forcing observations to fit with Yin-Yang and the Five Elements schemes. In Needham’s plotline, empirical science and medicine were radically wrecked and derailed by the social and political interests of the Confucians, whom by the time of the Han Synthesis and Emperor Wudi, successfully suppressed or even erased the thought of rival schools. Four

22 On this, see one of Joseph Needham’s earliest publications, namely Joseph Needham (ed.), Science, Religion and Reality. With an Introduction by Arthur James, Earl of Balfour (London: Sheldon Press, 1926). See in particular “Magic, Science and Religion” by Bronislaw Malinowski, pp. 19-84, as well as the contribution by Charles Singer (who was a mentor of sorts for Needham in history of science and medicine), “Historical Relations of Religion and Science”, pp. 85-148.

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quick comments are warranted here. First: this was a particular mode of history of science and medicine also being written in the People’s Republic of China during the 1960s and 1970s. The postulation of a non-bourgeois, non-elite “pre-historic Chinese people” who discovered (for instance) the distribution of sensitive points along the body allowed acupuncture to be portrayed as a brilliantly simple, ingenious, practical, hands-on therapy with which the “barefoot doctors” served the people living in remote parts of China. Second comment: the designation of “Confucianism” as the “villain” that stifled the progress of science in China was not just exclusive to Joseph Needham; it could also be found in the work of philosopher Angus Graham or historian Paul Unschuld.23 Third, the anti-Confucianism in Needham’s analysis of Chinese science converges with a general anti-Confucianism in China that stemmed from the May Fourth New Cultural Movement (and continued in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and of course during the Cultural Revolution). Needham’s analysis was also implicitly a critique of discourses generated particularly in certain “Neo-Confucian schools” in American Sinology of the mid-twentieth century, which either claimed that Confucianism was the “essence” of Chinese culture or attempted to refurbish and promote some aspects of Confucianism. Needham would rather argue that Daoism was “really” the “essence” of being Chinese (not a claim really accepted by the Chinese, certainly not during the 1960s and 1970s — and imagine the “Confucius Institute” being renamed “Laozi Institute”!) Fourth and finally, this kind of “Confucian victory” narrative — i.e. the triumph of Confucianism during the Han Synthesis and the marginalisation of other rival schools — is no longer accepted in Sinological scholarship.24 How did this relate to South Asian historians of science? A good place to start is the Symposium on History of Science in South Asia, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Sciences of India (NISI) and UNESCO, held in Delhi in November 1950. Joseph Needham planned to attend this meeting but cancelled in the Fall due to Dorothy Needham’s ill health. Alexander Wolsky, who was working at UNESCO’s Science Co-operation Office for South Asia, arranged Needham to receive copies of the papers presented at the Symposium.25 Needham then wrote a review of the Symposium for Nature (published in the July 14 1951 issue).26 This review offers some important insights on Needham’s view of the development of History of Science in South Asia. It also generated a small storm in a teacup. Needham begins the review by pointing out that the fixing of dates of texts and objects for the history of science in South Asia is extremely difficult. While he praises several papers for being “judicious and careful” with datings, he states that “unfortunately this cannot be said of the majority of the papers which put forward quite unacceptably early datings”. One particular paper on astronomy (by K.S. Shukla and K.R. Dixit) especially offends Needham, as it seems to “[maintain] that the Babylonians owed the sexagesimal division of the circle 23 See the two classics in the China field: A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Chicago: Open Court, 1989), pp. 315-319; Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 [1986]), p. 197: “[T]he conceptual framework of systematic correspondence [...] was nothing more than a complex labyrinth, in which those thinkers seeking solutions to medical questions wandered aimlessly in all directions, lacking any orientation, and unable to find a feasible way out. Such a solution came only with the collapse of the Confucian social order and the subsequent weakening of the world view”. 24 On the fourth and final point, see for instance Michael Nylan’s excellent discussion in Michael Nylan, “A Problematic Model: The Han ‘Orthodox Synthesis’, Then and Now” in Kai-wing Chow, On-cho Ng and John B. Henderson (eds.) Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 17-56. 25 SCC2/9/7. 26 Joseph Needham, “History of Science and Technology in India and South-East Asia” in Nature 168 (1951), 64-65.

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and the system of twenty-eight lunar mansions to India”. The paper by Priyada Ranjan Ray waxes lyrical on the achievements of the potters of the Mohenjodaro civilisation but “no comparison is made with other pottery products”, while Sunder Lal Hora’s presentation “read[s] too much into ancient texts, as when the Pillar Edicts of Asoka or the text of the ‘Arthashastra’ are appealed to as evidence for advanced fishery legislation”. One of the most objectionable claims, in Needham’s opinion, is to be found in Prabodh Chandra Bagchi’s contribution, in which Bagchi “claim[s] Indian influence on a mathematical work such as the ‘Sun Tzu Suan Ching’ (third century AD) on the ground that the word ‘Ching’ was afterwards used for translating the term ‘Sutra’ in Buddhist texts”. Overall, Joseph Needham chastises the “chauvinistic tendency” of all the papers, which he sees as an “effort to minimise foreign influences on Indian science and to emphasise all outward transmissions”. Quoting extensively the preface of Jean Filliozat’s La Doctrine Classique de la Médecine Indienne (1949), Needham suggests that the Indian scholars are “moved by national pride” and thus “prone to maintain that their sciences in high antiquity surpassed even those of to-day”. In Needham’s vision, he wants a careful titration or fixing of the dates of major discoveries and inventions, and more importantly, he wants the writing of the history of science in South Asia to be thoroughly comparative first and foremost, and the aim of doing such history is not to support some kind of Indian nationalism but for the sake of “ecumenical science”. The point is not to write the history of “Indian science”, but to write a global history of science involving India, China, etc. (There is of course irony in that the reception and appropriation of Science and Civilisation in China in China is precisely driven by Chinese nationalism, which Needham rarely seeks to correct.) The ichthyologist Sunder Lal Hora (1896-1955), the President of the National Institute of Sciences of India, was disappointed with Needham’s review and wrote a reply in Nature (published in the December 15 1951 issue).27 Hora by and large side-steps Needham’s criticisms, focussing instead on Needham’s lack of acknowledgement of the role of the National Institute in organising the Symposium thus giving the “erroneous impression that it was the work of the UNESCO Science Co-operation Office for South Asia”. Hora also points out that a “Chronology Committee”, consisting of “historians and scientific men”, was already being set up to address Needham’s concerns regarding datings.28 Cedric Dover, in a letter to Needham, comments on the Indian scholars’ “chronological touchiness” and their investment in proving Indian priority in the development of all areas of science and technology.29 (Again, there is a certain irony here because Needham is also very much invested in claiming Chinese priority on many occasions in SCC.) As Dhruv Raina and Irfan Habib suggest, in the 1950s, Joseph Needham’s work appeared as more of a source of inspiration for South Asian scholars to embark on their history of science projects, to carry out their “titrations” and to accumulate their chronologies.30 One particular historian and Marxist intellectual was deeply impressed with Joseph Needham’s historiography of “ecumenism” and “suppression” — Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (1918-1993). Chattopadhyaya was born in Calcutta and received his BA (1939) and MA (1942) from Calcutta University. He joined the Communist Party in the late-1930s. He was a student

27 S.L. Hora, “History of Science and Technology in India and South-East Asia” in Nature 168 (1951), 1047-1048. 28 Chronology file? Needham/NRI2/SCC2/1/7 29 Needham NRI2/SCC/SCC2/9/14, November 1952. 30 Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, “The Missing Picture: The Non-Emergence of a Needhamian History of Sciences of India” in S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 279-302.

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of Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952), taught philosophy as a researcher at Calcutta, and later travelled to Britain where he studied with the classical scholar and Marxist philosopher George Derwent Thomson (1903-1987). By around 1951 Chattopadhyaya had already encountered Joseph Needham’s work, probably through Samarendra Nath Sen.31 Chattopadhyaya had also read the first two volumes of Science and Civilisation in China which appeared in 1954 and 1956, and his first major work, Lokayata: A Study of Ancient Indian Materialism (1959) showed convergences with Needham’s historiography. In that work, Chattopadhyaya was fighting multiple battles. First, he wanted to refute the stereotype — one that was created and sustained by both Orientalists and Indian scholars — that India was a “spiritual civilisation”. He thus aimed to write a comprehensive and affirmative account of materialism in ancient Indian philosophy. He later produced further work on the atheist tradition in India to bolster his arguments. Second, Chattopadhyaya wanted to produce a radical critique of the caste system. He began with the starting point that materialism was fundamentally necessary to the development of modern science. Then he argued that such materialism was embodied in the labour of the artisans and craftsmen, who belonged to a lower caste compared to the literati, the court philosophers and the theocrats patronised by royalty. These philosophers espoused a kind of “idealism”, “mysticism” and “spiritualism” that legitimated the social structure and served the political interests of the ruling elite, and in the process they denigrated, suppressed or even erased the “seeds” of materialist thought and experimental investigations in India. And so for For Chattopadhyaya, the materialist schools in ancient India were analogous to the Daoists, Mohists and Logicians in Needham’s account. The “proto-scientific” and “embryonic” work of the Daoists and others were marginalised and impeded by Confucianism, the state-ideology of the feudal bureaucracy. Chattopadhyaya also believed in writing an “ecumenical” account of science that fairly acknowledged the contributions of all civilisations (China, India, Arabic...) which flowed as rivers into an “ocean” of knowledge. And just like Needham, he thought that medicine would be the arena in which Indian traditional healing could make distinct contributions and would lead to the resolution of the troubling dichotomies and aporia that existed in Western biomedicine. To bring this part to a close, I will discuss briefly the archival documents on the preparation for the cancelled December 1962-January 1963 lecture tour in India.32 The Needham tour was co-organised by the India International Centre (IIC, established with the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959) and the National Book Trust (NBT, set up in 1957 as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education). The NBT was represented by Gyanesh Chandra (G.C.) Chatterji (1894-?), with whom Joseph Needham had worked on the Commission on the University of Ceylon (see next section) and the IIC was represented by Chintaman Dwarakanath (C.D.) Deshmukh (1896-1982) and V.V. Sastri (?-?). Deshmukh at that time was also Vice-Chancellor of University of Delhi and the President of the Indian Statistical Institute, having been Finance Minister and the Chair of the University Grants Commission (UGC) in New Delhi. Joseph and Dorothy Needham were invited to deliver lectures on scientific and historical subjects. The trip was planned from April 1962 onwards, and the provisional itinerary included Bombay, Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute in Delhi, Benaras Hindu University in Varanasi, Calcutta University and Indian Statistical Institute, Bhubneshwar and Konark, Khajuraho, Mathura, Delhi University and the Indian Science Congress, Osmania University 31 Not entirely sure about this SCC2/385/3? 32 Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 H.186.

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in Hyderabad, Madras University, Mahabalipuram and Arikamedu, Annamalai, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Science, Belur, Aurangabad, and finally Delhi again for the Golden Jubilee Session of the Indian Science Congress. Seminars and meetings were set up with the Sub-Committee on the History of Sciences in India, with the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which had awarded Needham the Sir William Jones Memorial Medal (collected on Needham’s behalf by Samarendra Nath Sen, the Secretary-General of the Indian Institute for the Cultivation of Science at Jadaypur).33 Needham offered to give ten different sets of lectures on various subjects; out of those Chatterji and Sastri picked five subjects, including the following:

4) Taoism and Science in China; Tantrism and Lokayata in India. Varying attitudes of the ancient philosophical schools in East Asia to the systematic study of Nature, and technical invention; 5) Laws of Nature; The development of the conception of laws of nature with relation to natural law and juristic philosophy in east and west. Theological influence upon nascent science; 6) The History of Astronomy as seen in the development of astronomical instruments in east and west. Greek, Indian, Chinese and Arabic stellar coordinates. The giant instruments phase; 8) Development of power engineering. Animal-power and water-power in east and west. Technology of animal power; the first efficient equine harness in 5th-century China; the oldest stirrup form in -2nd-century India. Water-power and water-raising machinery, the Indian origin of the noria; 10) The Methodology of the History of Science and Technology. Special difficulties of the subject. Ways and means of overcoming them and accumulating information.

The overall theme of Needham’s “lecture tour” was to be “Contacts and Transmissions”; Needham stated that it was important to remind people that no one of the former cultures had a monopoly of wisdom, and that there ought to be no “narrow-minded chauvinism” when it came to the writing of a history of science in the world (echoing his 1951 critique of the Delhi Symposium in Nature). Dorothy Needham, meanwhile, was invited to deliver lectures on the biochemistry and physiology of the uterus muscle (particularly during pregnancy), and there were also plans for Dorothy to visit the Maulana Azad Medical College, Lady Hardinge Medical College, and other medical institutions. Meetings were set up with Humayun Kabir (1898-1969), historian A.K. Ghosh (?-?), R.N. Dandekar (1909-2001), Kapila Vatsyayan (1928- ), Samarendra Nath (S.N.) Sen (?-?), T.A.V. Subramanian (?-?), Damodar Dharmananda (D.D.) Kosambi (1907-1966), Danda Venkata (D.V.) Subba Raddy (1899-1987), Syed Hussain Zaheer, Gaqir Chand (F.C.) Auluck (1912-1987), Debendra Mohan (D.M.) Bose (1885-1975), B.V. Subbrayappa — and a host of biochemists, physicists, historians, philosophers, mathematicians classicists and political figures (I am still working through the entire network of contacts and proposed meetings). Needham was particularly looking forward to re-connecting with Abdul Rahman and meeting Debiprasad Chattophayaya for the first time. By late-September and early-October, the Sino-Indian Border Dispute was escalating into military conflict, and Needham discussed the possibility of postponing the lecture tour. He discussed the political situation in India extensively with J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), who had recently relocated to the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory of the Government of Orissa,

33 Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 A.745, H.156.

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Buhbaneswar, following a fallout at the Indian Statistical Institute. Haldane, Deshmukh and Sastri advised Needham to cancel the lecture tour.34 As a result of the cancellation, the Needhams were able to accept at short notice the invitation from the Academy of the Romanian People’s Republic.35 Needham, Rahman, Chattopadhyaya, Chatterji and others all expressed disappointment and saw this as a missed opportunity for engaging in close debate on the future of the writing of history of Indian and Chinese science. The only other time that Needham visited India was in 1971 — a brief stop en route to Japan, and he never revisited the plans for an India “lecture tour”.36 Chattopadhyaya in particular regretted that he was not able to meet Needham in person — but they finally met almost 20 years later in 1981, when Chattopadhyaya came to the University of Cambridge with the sponsorship of the British Council and the NISTADS. At Cambridge, Needham, Chattopadhyaya, as well as archaeologists Raymond and Bridget Allchin discussed and made notes on each other’s work, with Chattopadhyaya producing work that would become part of History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings (1986) and the two-volume anthology Studies in the History of Science in India (1982).37 The former, in particular, was a synthetic summary of Chattopadhyaya’s scholarship, and amply demonstrated the way that Needham’s twin-narrative of “suppression” and “ecumenism” suffused his outlook on the (non-)development of science in India. The Commission for the University of Ceylon (CUC), ca.1957-1960 In 1954, the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China was published, followed by the second volume in 1956.38 Towards the end of the 1950s, three volumes were already in the advanced stages of their preparation, Volume III on the history of mathematics and astronomy, Volume IV Part I on physics, and Volume IV Part II on mechanical engineering.39 The first two volumes were released to universal acclaim, and Joseph

34 Debates on the border dispute between China and India, 1961-1964 and the Sino-Indian War, October to November 1962, also took place in during regular and emergency meetings of the British-China Friendship Association (BCFA), for which Joseph Needham served as President. Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 K.173-K.183. Later, the Sino-Soviet Split resulted in Needham’s resignation from the BCFA and the formation of Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), for which Needham was the Chairman. Needham (and the BCFA) mostly supported the Chinese position during the Sino-Indian War and the Sino-Soviet Split; members wrote to newspapers, appeared on radio shows, delivered talks in support of China in the United Kingdom. The Needham files also included press-releases that the BCFA collected on the Sino-Soviet Split, and bulletins and announcements from the London Embassy of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Xinhua News Agency. 35 Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 H.187-H.191. 36 Needham/NRI2/4/9. Needham was invited to the 26th International Congress of Orientalists in New Delhi, 4-10 January 1964. He was also invited to reconsider the plans for the lecture tour for March-June 1964. He declined both opportunities. Needham CUL NCUACS 81/2/99 H. 197 and H.203. 37 Needham/SCC2/9/85-86, 90, 93. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings. With a foreword by Joseph Needham (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986); Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (ed.) Studies in the History of Science in India. 2 volumes (New Delhi: Editorial Enterprises, 1982). See also Hiltrud Rüstau and Suman Gupta (eds.) Philosophy, Science and Social Progress: Essays in Honour of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1992). Needham/NRI2/SCC2/161/4/1-7. 38 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume I: Introductory Orientations. With the research assistance of Wang Ling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Science and Civilisation in China, Volume II: History of Scientific Thought. With the research assistance of Wang Ling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). 39 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume III: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth. With the research assistance of Wang Ling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV: Physics and Physical Technology, Part 1: Physics. With the research assistance of Wang Ling and the special co-operation of Kenneth Robinson (Cambridge:

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Needham’s reputation as a premier scholar in the history of Chinese science was enhanced ever further. His earlier career as a biochemist at Cambridge, his status as Fellow of Royal Society (since 1941) and a public intellectual, his experience building up international cooperation in science through UNESCO, his discussions on the organisation of scientific research and on the relationship between pure vs. applied science, and particularly his championing of ancient China meant that Needham was inundated with queries on Chinese science as well as “global science”. He became one of the major nodes in this network and acted as referees for a large number of scientific and historical papers on Chinese as well as South Asian science and medicine. Needham was therefore regarded as the ideal consultant for the Government of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to help improve its higher education system. The Commission on the University of Ceylon (CUC) was created ca.1957 to produce a special report and make policy recommendations on how the University of Ceylon, which was founded in 1942 and was the only university on the island until 1972, could develop in line with wider changes in the education system and in tune with both the nation’s aspirations to be more integrated in global scientific research and its “national culture” and “heritage”. I find Needham’s archival documents on this rarely discussed episode particularly informative because the conflict between Needham and one of the CUC’s members (Seneviratne) foregrounds the tension between the desire for the retention and revitalisation of “tradition” and “indigenous knowledge” on the one hand, and the need for “modernisation” on the other. In this case, the Ceylon Government thought that Needham — and Needham believed that himself — that he had solutions to that dilemma. These tensions and dilemmas, I argue, are the key motifs of Needham’s encounter with South Asia. Joseph Needham agreed to served as the Chair of this Commission in September 1957. Other members of the CUC included: Leopold James de Silva (L.J. de S.) Seneviratne (?-?), Dr Gyanesh Chandra (G.C.) Chatterji (1894-?), with A.T. Mahinda (A.T.M.) Silva (?-?) acting as Secretary. Seneviratne was a member of the National Languages Commission of Ceylon, which was set up in 1951 and led to the Official Language Act No. 33 (so-called “Sinhala Only Act”) of 1956. The official language of Sri Lanka was changed from English to Sinhala, with Tamil — spoken by roughly one-third of the nation’s population — marginalised. Seneviratne, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Education and then the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Finance and Planning (ca. 1954-1956), was at the forefront of the promotion of the “Sinhala Only” policy.40 Some quick research revealed that Seneviratne was a hugely influential figure in the elite Ceylon Civil Service, married to Sita Molamure Seneviratne (?-1998, daughter of Lady Adeline Meedeniya and Sir Alfred Francis Molamure, the first speaker of the Parliament of Sri Lanka) of the United National Party (UNP) and a late-1960s Senator. Seneviratne’s children are Sunetra Seneviratne (Mrs Sepala Ilangakoon) and the barrister Lakshman Chandra (L.C.) Seneviratne.41 Gyanesh Chandra Chatterji was Professor of Philosophy at the Government College in Lahore and later principal and Vice-Chancellor of Rajasthan University (1956-?). Of Punjabi Cambridge University Press, 1962); Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV: Physics and Physical Technology, Part 2: Mechanical Engineering. With the collaboration of Wang Ling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 40 Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 41 Sepala Ilangakoon, My Memories of the Plantations of Ceylon: Lest We Forget, the Golden Years 1948 Onwards (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003); This, That, and the Other, from Here, There, and Everywhere: Lest We Forget, the Golden Years, Volumes 1-3 (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2006).

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heritage, Chatterji studied at Cambridge University with a Government of India state scholarship and was close to the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920).42 Chatterji was also father of P.C. Chatterji (1919-2002), Director-General at All-India Radio (1974-1979) in charge of the Doordarshan broadcasting organisation, and Indu Mitha (1929- ), among the few experts in the Tamil traditional dance Bharatanatyam. Finally, A.T. Mahinda Silva was an agricultural scientist, later Director of Agriculture (1963-1965) and Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands (1970-1976), who helped develop that National Argricultural Research System (NARS) and establish rice-breeding programmes in Sri Lanka. Needham’s fieldwork in Ceylon for the CUC took place between 23 February and around 4 May 1958. He was accompanied by Dorothy Needham for part of the all-expense-paid trip. The Needhams visited over 20 higher education institutions on the island, collected evidence from 129 interested parties in 72 hearings, and studied 242 written representations on the state of higher education and scientific organisation in Ceylon. Needham visited sites and establishments of applied science, including: Government Department of Fisheries, Ceylon Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research (CISIR), Tea Research Institute of Sri Lanka (TRI), Hydraulic Research Station of the Irrigation Department, Rubber Research Institute, Coconut Research Institute, Government Training College, and many others.43 The Needhams also delivered lectures at various locations. At the Ceylon Association for the Advancement of Science, University of Ceylon, Dorothy Needham (who had already obtained her FRS in 1948) gave a lecture on “The Biochemistry of Muscle Contraction” (12 March 1958, work that was building up to her 1977 magnum opus Machina Carnis) and Joseph Needham on “The Origins of Nature of Modern Science with relation to China and the West” (13 March 1958, work-in-progress that appeared eventually in Grand Titration of 1969).44 Needham also engaged with the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Colombo and presented a paper on “Buddhism and Science in Chinese Civilisation”. Out in the field, Needham produced copious amounts of notes. One of the most impressive encounters he had — much of that material actually ended up in the Science and Civilisation in China volume on Civil Engineering and Nautics — was with a certain Mr William Delay of the Ceylon Irrigation Department.45 Through Delay, Needham studied ancient hydraulic engineering works in action, and particularly the question of what survey instruments might have been used in the distant past. Delay suggested that, although elementary levelling devices might have been employed, he had experiences with “an old Sinhalese irrigation worker who had an appreciation of contour so strong as to be like a sixth sense”.46 Apparently this Sinhalese man could “walk a way through low hilly country which would

42 Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), p. 237. 43 Ceylon University Commission, Report of the Ceylon University Commission. Ceylon Parliament Sessional Papers No. 23 (Colombo: Government Press and Government Publications Bureau, 1959), p.2. Also, Green Notebooks and Questionnaires of Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 J.47-J.112. 44 Dorothy M. Needham, Machina Carnis: The Biochemistry of Muscular Contraction and its Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969). 45 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV: Physics and Physical Technology, Part 3: Civil Engineering and Nautics. With the collaboration of Wang Ling and Lu Gwei-djen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Needham’s travels in fact often ended up in his writings. Another well-known example is his trips witnessing acupuncture anaesthesia in action in Chinese hospitals in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; or his visits to Daoist temples in Southwestern China that were described in his volumes on the history of alchemy. 46 See Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV Part 3, p. 329.

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turn out to be a perfect trace as good as if made with levelling equipment”.47 He also had an “extraordinary flair for rock which could be used as foundations”.48 William Delay claimed that, when he sought sites for bridges and embankments, many times he would come “upon traces of the works of the ancient Sinhalese, who had found and used just the same locations”.49 What Delay was interested in — and Needham to a certain extent — was the investigation and possible modernisation of ancient practices, and the articulation and systematisation of indigenous “tacit knowledges” among these local labourers in Ceylon who were regarded as a repository or embodiment of genius and wisdom.50 In a similar vein, Needham also wrote about Ayurvedic medicine, particularly the establishment of Swadeshiya Vaidya Vidyalaya (College of Indigenous Medicine) in 1929 and the enactment of Indigenous Medical Ordinance No. 17 of 1941.51 Such attempts to marshal indigenous medicine in India, Pakistan (Unani medicine) and Sri Lanka predate the construction of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in China, and more research I think is required on this global story of the construction of traditional medicines in the “developing world”. The most promising areas where traditional practices would make enormous contributions to modern science, in Needham’s outlook, were precisely medicine and the healing arts, knowledge concerning natural resources and civil engineering (e.g. hydraulics, groundwater extraction and land irrigation), cultivation and plantations (e.g. coconut, rubber trees). Joseph Needham’s further investigations include Lord Macaulay’s legacy and colonial language policies in nineteenth-century India (leading up to the aforementioned “Sinhala Only Policy” in Ceylon), as well as the so-called “Pirivena Problem”. This referred to the “Buddhism and Politics” movement in Ceylon in the 1940s, spearheaded by the monks of the prestigious monastic college Vidyalankara Pirivena, who supported the leftist Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP) and opposed the dominant United National Party (UNP). A fierce and intense debate ensued on the question of whether Buddhist monks ought to participate or withdraw from the political sphere, as well as the tension between traditional religious institutions of higher learning and the state’s ambition to build a modern system of universities.52 It is on this sensitive point that Needham and his fellow CUC committee member Seneviratne clashed, which led to a fallout.

47 Ibid., p. 329. 48 Ibid., p. 329. 49 Ibid., p. 329. 50 This paragraph/section will need greater elaboration. See also Needham/NRI2/SCC2/120/4/4, Needham on Alec Skempton (1914-2001) at Imperial College hydraulic engineering, founder of Soil Mechanics, “Ancient Irrigation in India and Ceylon” 51 A. de Zoysa and C.D. Palitharatna, “Models of European Scientific Expansion: A Comparative Description of ‘Classical; Medical Science at the time of Introduction of European Medical Science to Sri Lanka, and Subsequent Development to Present” in Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami and Anne Marie Moulin (eds.) Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 136 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), pp. 111-120; Richard Weiss, “The Autonomy of Tradition: Creating Space for Indian Medicine” in Steven Engler and Gregory P. Grieve (eds.) Historicising “Tradition” in the Study of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 175-194; Margaret Jones, “A Bounded Medical Pluralism: Ayurveda and Western Medicine in Colonial and Independent Sri Lanka” in Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (ed.), The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries: Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 108-126. 52 Anne M. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Ananda Abeysekara, Colours of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

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During Needham’s fieldwork around Ceylon, the nation, which became independent from Britain in 1948, experienced its first island-wide ethnic riots that targeted the minority Tamils. The Tamils carried out revenge attacks and the government declared a state of emergency on 27 May 1958. The series of events became known as the “58 riots” and the end of Needham’s tour coincided with this major social unrest. He made vague plans to visit North Vietnam from Ceylon but that trip never materialised, and it was proposed that the Commission on the University of Ceylon would meet at Jaipur in India in August 1958 to discuss conclusions and policy recommendations for the Ceylon Government. Seneviratne refused to attend the meeting and the Ceylon Government refused permission for A.T. Mahinda Silva to attend. Instead it was proposed that Needham and G.C. Chatterji would return to Ceylon, which the two men declined. Needham remained in Jaipur briefly to see the Jantar Mantar (the eighteenth-century architectural astronomical instruments) and connected with his friends Abdul Rahman, M.F. Soonawala and Daya Krishna (1924-2007), and then returned to Cambridge.53 G.C. Chatterji then visited Needham in ca. December 1958, and the two completed the 350-odd-page CUC report in January 1959. Seneviratne received drafts of the report but provided no feedback, as he seemed to be angered that Needham did not recommend the establishment of a “Buddhist Faculty” but only a Department of Buddhist Studies under the administration of the Faculty of Arts. Seneviratne, as a devout Buddhist, wanted a much deeper integration of the religious curriculum and traditional knowledge in a new formation of the University of Ceylon, and instead Needham pushed for greater secularisation. What Seneviratne wanted to promote was a kind of nationalistic science based on the insights obtained from serious engagement with Sinhalese folk, Needham was sympathetic but placed greater emphasis on the “universal” aspects of science and integration with international research communities. Needham consistently rejected that the idea that historical and scientific projects in India, China etc. was to help develop an “Indian science” or “Chinese science” for the present day; to be sure, there was an “Indian science” or “Chinese science” in earlier historical periods but his mission was always already oriented towards building an ecumenical science that combined the best characteristics of all cultures. Finally, Needham and Chatterji suggested that a campus ought to be established at Jaffna in Northern Ceylon — a city populated mostly by Tamils — and Seneviratne seemingly wanted nothing to do with that. Seneviratne’s refusal to cooperate delayed the release of the Report of the Ceylon University Commission. In June 1959 Joseph Needham wrote to the Governor General, Sir Oliver Goonetilleke (1892-1978), proposing to release the report as soon as possible; the Governor General agreed. Seneviratne then asked for a month to study the report that Needham and Chatterji drafted, and promised to send his observations and amendments by August. Needham and Chatterji were unwilling to sign the Report without seeing Seneviratne’s interventions but in October 1959 the report was released anyway.54 The delay of the Report’s publication became a heated debate in Ceylon media and politics, particularly in the light of the ethnic conflicts on the island. How the report actually (if at all?) impacted higher education organisation and the allocation of state resources to scientific research in Ceylon remains to be studied. Needham’s involvement in the CUC demonstrates the credentials that he has built up via

53 On Jaipur and Jantar Martar: Needham NRI2/SCC2/71/1/1, Needham NRI2/SCC2/86/1/21. On Lucien Hervé and the observatories at Delhi and Jaipur: Needham NRI2/SCC2/71/1/22: in 1955 photographer Hervé accompanied Le Corbusier to Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in India, photographing modern buildings under construction as well as local historical architecture in Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi and Jaipur (possibly with UNESCO sponsorship?) On Soonawala, Needham NRI2/SCC2/71/1/21. On Daya Krishna: Needham NRI2/SCC2/101/5/4. 54 Archival documents from Needham CUL NCUACS 54/3/95 J.47-J.112.

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science, Cambridge, UNESCO, China and Science and Civilisation in China such that he attracted a government of the “developing nation” to hire him as a consultant. The question of how these experiences in South Asia fed back into Needham’s outlook and his historiography is one that I want to tackle — and in the next section we will move onto alchemy, chemistry, Unani medicine, yoga. Writing the History of Alchemy and Seeking Scientific Verifications, ca. 1960s-1970s As is well-known, Joseph Needham never published a Science and Civilisation in China volume on medicine in his lifetime. Volume VI Part 6 on Chinese medicine was released posthumously in 2000 and was a collection of previously published essays by Lu Gwei-Djen and Needham, edited by Nathan Sivin, Needham’s life-long friend and collaborator and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Joseph Needham was already interested in the history of Chinese science in the 1940s, and intensified his collection of materials on Chinese medicine after Mao Zedong declared, in 1958, that Chinese medicine was a “treasure-house”. What happened in China, especially after the Sino-Soviet split, was an unprecedented, state-endorsed “proletarianisation of knowledge”. The Communist Party advocated mass participation of non-elite people in expert systems. This history has been (or is being) covered from many angles — from seismology (Fa-ti Fan), geology (Grace Shen), palaeontology (Sigrid Schmalzer), medicine (Kim Taylor), communication technologies and bureaucratic machines (Thomas Mullaney). Folk knowledge that people acquired from everyday experiences were taken absolutely seriously, and Needham’s projects contributed to this current via his collaborations and discussions with Chinese scholars. Yet despite a four-decade engagement with Chinese medicine (from 1940s-1980s), Needham repeatedly delayed the writing of the medicine volume. He tried to persuade Nathan Sivin to write this volume, but Sivin declined as he wanted to pursue other projects. There were numerous theoretical and practical issues that I would not have time to go into; I argue that there was a fundamental historiographical and ideological reason to Needham’s hesitation, namely, the aforementioned “grand titration” vs. “distillation” (see section on Chattopadhyaya). Needham eagerly awaited research to emerge which “assessed the therapeutic achievements of traditional medicine by the standards of modern science”, and repeatedly put off writing the volume on medicine.55 In the late 1970s, he and Lu Gwei-djen decided to move ahead with the book on acupuncture — Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa (1980) — because of a series of events, from James Reston’s report on acupuncture analgesia in the New York Times, Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, Miriam Lee’s trial in California in 1974 (on the legality of acupuncture), debates in the British Parliament ca. mid-1970s on regulation, and so forth (which resulted in acupuncture being regulated by the same statues as piercing and tattooing). Needham thought he had to jump in and put his mark on the debate on Chinese medicine. This is covered in another work-in-progress paper, “Celestial Lancets, Ecumenical Science: Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham’s Historiography of Acupuncture”, which I presented at Stanford University back in February this year. Another factor for Needham’s delay in fleshing out the medicine volume was his total immersion in the history of alchemy and Daoist practices ca. mid-1960s to late-1970s, resulting in four volumes of Science and Civilisation in China on “Spagyrical Discovery and Invention”.56

55 Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VI Biology and Biological Technology, Part 6 Medicine. Edited by Nathan Sivin. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 66. 56 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 2: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality. With the collaboration of Lu Gwei-

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Why was Needham so preoccupied with Chinese alchemy? There were two reasons. The first again was related to “distillation”. Needham believed that Chinese macrobiotic practices and exercises within the Chinese alchemical tradition could be “refurbished” for the consumption of modern men and women, in much the same way that he thought ancient Chinese sexual techniques and ways of heightening sensual delight were exactly what alienated Western people needed.57 The second reason was even more important. With mathematics, astronomy and physics, for instance, Joseph Needham thought that there was little connection between European developments during the seventeenth-century “Scientific Revolution” and Chinese science. For Needham, European mathematics, astronomy and physics certainly diffused eastwards to China. With alchemy, however, he was convinced that European alchemy was influenced by Chinese alchemy, and transmission had to have taken place via South Asia, Persia and the Arabic world. In a 1966 lecture that Needham delivered at the International Congress of Maritime History in Beirut, Needham put forward a radical historiographical thesis concerning the problem of transmission:

But as in all other fields of science and technology the onus of proof lies upon those who wish to maintain fully independent invention, and the longer the period elapsing between the successive appearances of a discovery or invention in two or more cultures concerned, the heavier the onus generally is.58

With one move, Joseph Needham argues that cross-cultural transmission is the “default”, and if two scientific theories (Theory A from Europe and Theory B from China) “look” similar then the proof of burden lies on those who wish to maintain that Theory A and Theory B are unrelated or developed independently. This is the place from which Joseph Needham’s inquiries on European and Chinese alchemy proceeds; for Needham it would actually be incredible for two different cultures to develop independently ideas about the “nobility” of gold, the transformation of “base substances” into the “elixir of life” — some cultural contact must have taken place. It is here that the Pakistani chemist and historian S. (Syed) Mahdihassan comes in, another of Joseph Needham’s long-time correspondents in South Asia. The two men exchanged letters and ideas for almost forty years, which petered out in the 1980s with Mahdihassan’s declining health and ended ca. 1987.59 Mahdihassan left a

djen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Part 3: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Historical Survey, from Cinnabar Elixirs to Synthetic Insulin. With the collaboration of Ho Peng-Yoke and Lu Gwei-djen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Part 4: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus and Theory. With the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen and a contribution by Nathan Sivin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Part 5: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Physiological Alchemy. With the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 57 On that, see my paper, “The Way of Sex: Joseph Needham and Jolan Chang” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012), pp. 611-626. 58 Joseph Needham, “China, Europe, and the Seas Between”. Material presented at the International Congress of Maritime History, Beirut, Lebanon in Joseph Needham (ed.) Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 [1966]), pp. 40-70 at p. 70. 59 Needham NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/1-28, around 29 sets/bundles of letters from 1953 to 1988. Dorothy Needham’s death in 1985 and Joseph Needham’s old age meant that, around the mid-to-late 1980s, he had ceased regular communication with many of his collaborators and interlocutors. Many letters were replied by Gregory Blue, who was then a research associate at Cambridge, with Needham’s approval. Needham NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/20, 23.

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traceable and indelible imprint on Volume V Part 5 of Science and Civilisation in China, in which 55 of Mahdihassan’s books and articles were cited — more than any other scholar.60 Syed Mahdihassan (1892-1992) was a chemist and historian. He obtained his PhD on Zoology from the University of Giessen in 1937, entitled Die Struktur des Stocklacks und der Bau der Lackzelle (shellac, a resin secreted by the lac bug, mostly used as varnish and sometimes as a natural dye or medicinal drug). He obtained his Diploma in Agricultural Science from Oxford, returned to India ca. 1940s and worked at Cipla (Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories) in Bombay. Mahdihassan later became the Head of the Biochemical Research Division in the PCSIR (Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) Research Laboratories in Karachi where he worked on, among many projects, insect pigments and pest control, specifically the Idioscopus clypealis (Lethierry). The Idioscopus clypealis, colloquially known as the “mango hopper”, was a major problem for agriculture in South Asia and particularly Pakistan, because the “hoppers” could decimate mango plantations by causing the non-setting of flowers and dropping of immature fruits.61 Mahdihassan’s scientific and later work on history of science and medicine were sponsored by the Hamdard National Foundation.62 A brief explanation of what the Hamdard National Foundation is warranted here, for those who are not South Asian historians. In 1906, Hakeem Hafiz Abdul Majeed (1883-1922), an expert practitioner of Unani medicine, opened a small shop and clinic in the Hauz Qazi district in Delhi, which by the 1920s and 1930s became a manufacturing plant producing Unani herbal medicine and drugs. Majeed’s vision was to turn Unani medicine, the traditional medicine widely practised by Muslims in South Asia, into a modern science. By the 1940s, the Hamdard pharmacetical company became a nationwide business. One of Majeed’s sons, Hakeem Abdul Hameed (1908-1999), turned Hamdard from a commercial enterprise into a waqf (charitable trust) in 1948, soon after the end of the British Raj and the independence of India and Pakistan. In 1964 the Hamdard National Foundation was established, which was deeply invested in promoting Unani medicine as well as the contribution of Islamic culture to Indian civilisation.63 To that end, the Foundation sponsored research into the modernisation (standardisation of formulae and dosage etc.) and scientific appraisal (clinical trials etc.) of traditional medicines as well as established an Institute of History of Medicine and Medical Research in 1962 in Delhi (and a History of Medicine Museum in 1969); for both projects the chairs of the Foundation Hakeem Abdul Hameed and Hakim Muhammad Said (1920-1998) sought Joseph Needham’s advice and approval. At Said’s invitation Needham became an honorary fellow of the Institute in 1970.64 Hamdard also set up the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, Unani medical colleges and eventually the Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi in 1989. Hakeem Abdul Hameed and Needham also discussed in a series of letters the principles

60 The other scholars who were heavily cited in Volume V Part 5 on physiological alchemy include Tenney Lombard Davis (1890-1949), Professor of Organic Chemistry at MIT and founding editor of the history of chemistry journal Chymia, as well as Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), Professor of Religious Studies and famous scholar of alchemy at the University of Chicago. Note Wendy Doniger’s portrayal of Eliade. 61 S. Mahdihassan, Symbiosis in the Mango-Hopper Idiocerus clypealis: A Study in Comparative Cytopathology (Karachi: Hamdard Foundation?, 1978). Needham NRI NRI2/SCC2/23/18. 62 Hakim Mohammad Said (ed.), Essays on Science: Felicitation Volume in Honour of Dr S. Mahdihassan. (Karachi: Hamdard Foundation Press, 1987). 63 In some ways its organisation and impetus is probably not dissimilar to the Leverhulme Trust (established in 1925; Unilever) and the Wellcome Trust (established in 1936; Henry Wellcome). This is just a throwaway comment for now; there is a history to be written on transnational medical charities, which support biomedicine (or traditional medicine) and history and ethics of medicine projects. 64 Needham NRI SCC2/315/19, 61, 64. NRI/SCC2/9/73.

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of Unani medicine — its system of elements, humours and temperaments — and the possibility of the integration of Western biomedicine and traditional medicine; the Hamdard Foundation was also keen to learn about Needham’s perspectives on the Traditional Chinese Medicine in project orchestrated by the Chinese state as well as the scholarship on the history of Chinese medicine that was emerging. What is so interesting here is again the convergence between Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China project and the histories that were being written in South Asia for particular political or cultural ends — and Needham and his South Asian interlocutors identified that convergence themselves. It is not so clear when exactly Mahdihassan and Needham met, but the first letter that I could find in the archives was dated 16 October 1951, from Mahdihassan on the very general question of drugs in Chinese medicine.65 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mahdihassan and Needham exchanged letters on the theories in early mediaeval Chinese alchemy, ancient symbols and colours, the so-called “Four Directions” and “Five Elements”, mythical creatures like the phoenix and the dragons, traditional Chinese cosmology and divination, and so forth.66 A series of letters discussed Mahdihassan’s movement between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan. There is an interesting “subplot” which I will not have time to get into but will simply mention here: Needham and the British Council representatives in Dhaka and Karachi, as well as the Pakistan National Scientific and Technical Documentation Centre, helped Mahdihassan to secure and transport his collection of books and manuscripts when he fled from Dhaka during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Needham and Mahdihassan also exchanged information on scholars writing on the history of alchemy and chemistry around the world, for instance the life and career of chemist and historian Zhang Zigong 張資珙 (1904-1968), who was beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution.67 Needham also advised Mahdihassan on how to set up history of science and medicine networks in Pakistan.68 They sent each other work to comment on, for instance, Mahdihassan’s paper on the soma of the “Aryans”, which he argued was the Lingzhi 靈芝, the “mushroom of immortality” and an “elixir of life” described in Han Dynasty texts like Records of the Great Historian (Shiji 史記) and the Book of Han (Hanshu 漢書).69 This research culminated in Mahdihassan’s monograph on soma, in which he revised his thesis somewhat (with Needham’s input perhaps?) and argued the ephedra (in Chinese medicine mahuang 麻黃) was what the Indians called soma.70 In turn, Mahdihassan read and commented on parts of Science and Civilisation in China, and Needham assisted him in acquiring journal papers and research materials. The discussions on alchemy between Mahdihassan and Needham orbit around two principal subjects: they are both committed to the “Chinese impact” hypothesis of alchemy and the possibility of establishing the “scientific basis” of yoga exercises. On the “Chinese impact” hypothesis, both men rely on the etymological arguments as a springboard. Again, to cut a rather long and protracted story quite short, Mahdihassan and Needham together propose that the word “alchemy” (Old French alquimie, Mediaeval Latin alchimia, Arabic al-kimia, Ancient Greek chemeia or chumia) ultimately come from kiem-yak, the approximate

65 See Needham NRI/SCC2/9/11, 12; Needham NRI NRI2/SCC2/23/18. 66 Needham NRI NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/1, 2, 9, 12, 14, 16. 67 Needham NRI NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/4, 5, 7, 8, 17. 68 Needham NRI NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/24. 69 S. Mahdihassan, “The Soma of the Aryans and the Chih of the Chinese” in May and Baker Pharmaceutical Bulletin, May/June (1972). Needham NRI NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/3, 6. 70 S. Mahdihassan, The History and Natural History of Ephedra as Soma (Islamabad: Pakistan Science Foundation, 1987).

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pronunciation of 金液 (now in Mandarin jinye), literally “golden liquor”, in the Tang Dynasty — a heyday for “outer alchemy” (waidan 外丹, the concoction of the elixir of life in a cauldron using various “basic” metallic and mineral ingredients, which was then ingested to achieve immortality).71 From the etymological explorations, Mahdihassan and Needham basically argue for the similarities and possible points of contact for Chinese, Indian and Arabic alchemy, and then deploy insights from available scholarship on the similarities and possible points of contact between alchemy in the Islamic world and subsequent developments in Mediaeval Europe, mostly the work of Prafulla Chandra (P.C.) Ray (1861-1944), Mircea Eliade and Piyo (P.M.) Rattansi.72 Mahdihassan puts forward a “strong” version of the “Chinese impact” hypothesis; he suggests that alchemy originated ultimately from China.73 On the other hand, Joseph Needham puts forward a “weak” version, arguing that Chinese alchemy flowed into Arabic alchemy via South Asia, and then into Europe, and therefore medieval alchemy in Europe was truly a melting pot of Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Roman and Egyptian practices. In current scholarship, almost all historians of alchemy are hostile to the idea that European alchemy have had any influence from China, because of lack of textual evidence — indeed current historiography is no longer committed to or really that interested in long-range transmissions and circulations in alchemical ideas, which are almost impossible to ascertain given the fragmentary, secretive, metaphorical and allegorical nature of alchemical texts.74 Etymological arguments are no longer held in special regard in current scholarship in alchemy (I do not think anyway!), or at least, they are now rarely used to build an entire case on flows and travels.75 Following Carl Gustav Jung, both Mahdihassan and Needham argue that the chief characteristic of European alchemy was concerned “not so much, if at all, with actual chemical operations as with states of mind, catharsis, sublimation, purification and the

71 S. Mahdihassan, “The Chinese Origin of Three Cognate Words: Chemistry, Elixir, and Genii” in Journal of the University of Bombay 20 (1951), pp. 107-131; S. Madhihassan, “Alchemy and its Chinese Origin as Revealed by its Etymology, Doctrines and Symbols” in Iqbal (Lahore) 22 (1966); S. Mahdihassan, “Chinese Alchemy in the Light of its Fundamental Terms” in American Journal of Chinese Medicine 8 (1980), pp. 307-312. See also Needham Volume V Part 5 Bibliography C particularly pp. 468-469 for all of Needham’s Mahdihassan citations; S. Mahdihassan, Alchemy and Sufism (Karachi: Hamdard Foundation, 1992). 72 See for instance, Joseph Needham, “Theoretical Influences of China on Arabic Alchemy” in Revista de Universidade de Coimbra 27 (1980), pp. 1-28. An essay for Luis de Albuquerque (1917-1992), maritime historian based at University of Coimbra. For China/India, see , Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V, Part 5, particularly pp. 257-288 comparing Chinese physiological alchemy (neidan) and the Indian Yoga, Tantric and Hathayoga systems. The Needham archives also includes a small set of folders entitled “Alchemy and Chemistry: Comparative – China and the Arabs 2”: Needham/NRI2/SCC2/207/1-6. Piyo Rattansi is Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London; Needham/NRI2/SCC/SCC2/358/8, SCC2/9/51. 73 See Mahdihassan’s articles in Ambix: S. Mahdihassan, “Early Terms for Elixir Hitherto Unrecognised in Greek Alchemy” in Ambix 23 (1976), pp. 129-133; S. Mahdihassan, “Elixirs of Mineral Origin in Greek Alchemy” in Ambix 24 (1977), 133-142. 74 Can find relevant bits discussing Chinese alchemy and Needham in William R Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 75 This is just a side-note that may not lead to any useful thought – I was also thinking about the debate on the “uses and abuses” of etymology in the Black Athena debate. There is of course a large volume of Martin Bernal and Joseph Needham correspondence that I have yet to look at; perhaps in there lies some interesting clues about etymological methodologies and strategies. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation. Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

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attainment of unity and equilibrium”.76 Needham would go as far as saying that European alchemy was “proto-psychoanalysis”. By contrast, the aforementioned “outer alchemy” in China was for Needham “Chinese proto-chemistry” or “inorganic laboratory alchemy”. And “inner alchemy” (neidan 内丹), where the human body itself was seen as the “reaction vessel” or “chamber”, and the elixir of life would be manufactured from within through the careful manipulation of bodily fluids and vital essences — was for Needham “Chinese proto-biochemistry” and “proto-physiology”. With this argumentative move, Needham sets up a curious dichotomy : “European alchemy” was “allegorical-mystical” and was somehow not as “scientific” as “Chinese alchemy”. It is this idiosyncratic standpoint that informs Mahdihassan and Needham’s belief that yoga exercises and Chinese “inner alchemical” macrobiotic gymnastics — daoyin 導引 as described in the Mawangdui Silk Texts (unearthed 1973), qigong 氣功 in the Daoist Canon, and its later martial art progenies such as taiji 太極 — ought to be evaluated scientifically and revitalised for present times. The aim of Mahdihassan’s 1977 book, Indian Alchemy or Rasayana in the light of Asceticism and Geriatrics, published by the Hamdard Foundation’s Institute for History of Medicine and Medical Research, was to identify precisely the elements of Indian Alchemy (i.e. asceticism, macrobiotics, “prolongevity”) that could have health-promoting effects.77 To end this section, I am going to mention some examples of the investigations of yoga’s scientific basis, which Needham studied and discussed avidly in Science and Civilisation in China Volume V Part 5. One story involves Kovoor Thomas (K.T.) Behanan (?-?), an Indian philosopher and psychologist who studied the physiological effects of Yoga at Yale University in the early 1930s. Behanan was born in the Kingdom of Travancore (now part of Kerala, India), received his BA in 1923 from Calcutta University , spent two years in government service in the Madras Presidency, and went to study philosophy at the University of Toronto. In 1929 Behanan relocated to Yale University to study in the Graduate Department of Psychology, and received a Sterling Fellowship to study Yoga under the direction of Walter R. Miles (1885-1978). Behanan was awarded a PhD in 1934, published Yoga: Its Scientific Basis (1937), and returned to India during the Second World War. Back in his native country Behanan worked briefly for the United Nations (?) and little else is known about his subsequent life and work. Behanan’s experimental work with Walter Miles is the first to study the cardiovascular effects of Yoga — essentially involving hooking up an electrocardiogram to a Yoga practitioner and measuring his rate of respiration, oxygen consumption, as well as investigating the yogis’ muscular control.78 Later projects investigating traditional Yoga practices of India by modern scientific methods involved Bal Krishan (B.K.) Anand (1917-2007), Professor at the Department of Physiology in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, who worked on this problem in the 1960s, as well as David Shannahoff-Khalsa of Salk Institute (later a Director of the Research Group of Mind-Body Dynamics at the BioCircuits Institute, University of California San Diego) in the 1980s.79 Joseph Needham believed that such attempts to give Yoga a scientific stamp of approval were invaluable and proved the very real physiological effects of “inner alchemy” 76 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V, Part 5, p. 2. 77 Needham NRI NRI2/SCC/SCC2/222/11. S. Mahdihassan, Indian Alchemy or Rasayana in the light of Asceticism and Geriatrics (New Delhi: Institute of History of Medicine and Medical Research, 1977). Second edition published by (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991). 78 See Kovoor T. Behanan, Yoga: Its Scientific Basis (New York: Macmillan, 1937). On Needham and laboratory studies on Yoga, see Science and Civilisation in China Volume V Part 5, pp. 263-273. Some Behanan materials could be found in the Papers for Walter R. Miles, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron in Akron, Ohio. This is a story I will write up when I get round to it! 79 On Anand’s work, see Needham SCC2/213/12/7. Part of Needham’s “Nei Tan” files and the folder on “Indian – Yoga, Tantrism, Hathayoga, Sahijiya”. On David Shannahoff-Khalsa, SCC2/213/12/10.

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exercises tout court, and confidently predicted a future in which Daoist practices and qigong techniques would be studied in the same way, and their benefits to elderly health and general well-being promoted in all corners of the world.80 Finally, it is clear that Needham’s engagement with South Asian history of science and medicine is bilateral: South Asia figures importantly as an intermediate in stories involving possible China to Europe transmission. And for Needham, projects involving the verification of South Asian science and medicine provide insights, or at the very least inject optimism, into the validity of similar Chinese practices. In Closing... In Haste... Let me return, in closing, the theme of the conference, the “intersections” between the history of science in India and China. What I have wanted to do, by looking at all the materials in South Asia through the archival materials of Joseph Needham, is to explore the intersections and interactions between two groups of scholars. Both were invested in the writing of history of science, and both were concerned with “indigenous knowledges” in the “developing world”, and both were interested in exploring the relationship between science and society, and between science and the global. Joseph Needham and his collaborators wrote particular visions of “China” into being, and their South Asian colleagues were in the business of producing knowledge about “India”. Instead of asking, as S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina did almost 15 years ago, “why has an Indian equivalent [to Science and Civilisation in China] not been produced” and arguing why “an Indian equivalent of the Needhamian oeuvre cannot be instituted”,81 here I want to show that the writing of China ca. mid-twentieth century was intimately tied to the writing of India —the historiographical and ideological perspectives, the building of networks of expertise, the exchange of historical findings, the goal of writing China and India into the global history of science, the shared dreams of revitalising traditional ideas and practices for the modern world.

80 As that volume of SCC was in press, scientific experiments on qigong was already taking place in China as part of the “Qigong Fever”. See David Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 102-135 chapter entitled “Qigong Scientism”. 81 Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, “The Missing Picture: The Non-Emergence of a Needhamian History of Sciences of India” in S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 279-302. Also Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 139-158.

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Appendix (From Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, 1970)