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Travancore's magnetic crusade: geomagnetism and the geography of scientific production in a princely state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2016

JESSICA RATCLIFF
JESSICA RATCLIFF*
Affiliation:
Cornell University and Yale-NUS College. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

In 1840 the raja of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, would offer his government's assistance to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its plan for a global system of magnetic observations. Over the next thirty years, the two directors of this princely state's observatory, John Caldecott and John Allan Broun, would pursue fundamental terrestrial magnetic research. Their efforts would culminate in the Trivandrum [Trevandrum] Magnetical Observations (1874). In what follows, the history of this publication is used to shed light on how and why a semi-autonomous princely state such as Travancore would engage the scientific community in Europe at this time. The article focuses in particular on the work of turning observation data into a published report and on how that labour would be distributed between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Because the production of such reports required dozens of hands and decades of labour, its history can reveal much about the concrete working relationship between informal colony and imperial metropole within the British Empire. The Trivandrum Magnetic Observations were produced within a global economy of science in which Travancore sometimes had the upper hand. At the same time, data and scientific productions tended to accumulate in Europe (at least for a time), where ultimately the consumers of scientific products and the arbiters of ‘scientific value’ also largely remained. Within the sprawling economic, political and cultural infrastructures that linked geomagnetic research in Travancore and Europe, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each region would cut in different directions. The history of the production of the Trivandrum Observations brings to light this robustly interconnected geography of scientific production within the British Empire. It also reveals some of the processes by which ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in the sciences were then becoming differentiated.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 325 - 352
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Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

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References

1 National Archives of India (NAI), Trevandrum Observatory Records (Trev. Obs. Rec.), Bundle 1865, Vol. 4, 3 March 1861, HH the Raja to Professor Phillips.

2 Thirty-three as of 1840. Cawood, John, ‘The magnetic crusade: science and politics in early Victorian Britain’, Isis (1979) 70, pp. 493–518 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 513–514. Also see Cawood, , ‘Terrestrial magnetism and the development of international collaboration in the early nineteenth century’, Annals of Science (1977) 34(6), pp. 551–587 Google Scholar; Josefowicz, Diane Greco, ‘Experience, pedagogy, and the study of terrestrial magnetism’, Perspectives on Science (2005) 13(4), pp. 452–494 Google Scholar; Christopher R. Carter, Magnetic Fever: Global Imperialism and Empiricism in the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009; Good, Gregory A., ‘Between data, mathematical analysis and physical theory: research on Earth's magnetism in the 19th century’, Centaurus (2008) 50, pp. 290–304 Google Scholar. On the history of the BAAS's central role in promoting geomagnetism at this time see Jack B. Morrell and Arnold W. Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

3 See e.g. Humphrey Lloyd, ‘History of the present magnetic crusade’, Cambridge Miscellany of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy (April 1842), p. 1.

4 John Allan Broun, Observations of Magnetic Declination made at Trevandrum and Agustia Malley in the Observatories of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore, G.C.S.I in the Years 1852 to 1869. Being Trevandrum Magnetical Observations, London: Henry S. King & Co., 1874. Note: in the text of the essay I have modernized the spelling of Trivandrum.

5 On recent challenges to the analytical and historical meanings of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ see Seth, Suman, ‘Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial’, Postcolonial Studies (2009) 12(4), pp. 373–388 Google Scholar. One response to this predicament has been to shift focus towards forms of connection between different localities. See, for example, Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). Kapil Raj, an early proponent of this approach, now argues that historians of science should stop talking in terms of centres and peripheries altogether. See Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond postcolonialism … and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science’ Isis (2013) 104(2), pp. 337–347 Google Scholar. From a different angle, David Livingstone, Simon Naylor and other historical geographers seek to integrate centres and peripheries within a single ‘landscape of knowledge’. David Livingstone, ‘Landscapes of knowledge’, in Peter Meusburger, David Livingstone and Heike Jöns (eds.), Geographies of Science, Berlin: Springer, 2010; Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.

6 Anon., Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science … Held at Cambridge June 1845, London, 1846, p. 33, original emphasis.

7 Anon., op. cit. (6), ‘Report of the Magnetic and Meteorological Committee’, pp. 2, 31.

8 Anon., op. cit. (6), pp. 31–34, original emphasis.

9 Anon., op. cit. (6), pp. 31–34.

10 On Humboldtian science in general see Michael Dettelbach, ‘Humboldtian science’, in Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 287–304. Also see Dettelbach, ‘Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldt's physical portrait of the tropics’, in David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reil (eds.), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 258–293. On the ‘local nature, global vision’ of Humboldtian science see L. Daston, ‘The Humboldtian gaze’, in Moritz Epple and Claus Zittel (eds.), Science as Cultural Practice, vol. 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes, Berlin: De Greuter, 2010, pp. 45–60.

11 Susan Faye Cannon was one of the first historians to argue that a significant increase in data collection from around the globe was one of the most fundamental changes that took place in science between 1800 and 1850. Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, Folkestone: Dawson, 1978, 225. This is also the classic work on what might be called ‘British Humboldtianism’. Also see Mary Louise Pratt's exploration of the rhetorical parallels between Humboldtian projects and capital accumulation: Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992.

12 As Ann Blair has shown, such an attitude was not then new or unique: Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. On the anxiety of too much data also see Poovey, M., ‘The limits of the universal knowledge project: British India and the East Indiamen’, Critical Inquiry (2004) 31(1), p. 183 Google Scholar; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

13 Cawood, ‘The magnetic crusade’, op. cit. (2), pp. 497–498.

14 Josefowicz, op. cit. (2).

15 For other recent work that has a focus on the information infrastructures of colonial science see, for example, Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008; Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London: I.B. Tauris, 2003; Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Enlightenment, Chicago, 2012. The classic work on the information order of British imperialism in India is C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Also see M. Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script, Print and the Making of the East India Company, Chicago, 2007.

16 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 33.

17 Phalkey, Jahnavi, ‘Introduction’, focus section on ‘Science, history and modern India’, Isis (2013) 104(2), pp. 330–336 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 336, original emphasis.

18 For a recent volume of essays that similarly explores issues of accumulation and centralization from the perspective of peripheries see the special issue on Accumulation and Management in Global Historical Perspective (ed. Lissa Roberts), History of Science (2014) 52(5).

19 Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858–1936, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; R. Jeffrey, The Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847–1908, New York: Holmes and Meir, 1976. On the city and its institutions see Heston, Mary Beth, ‘Mixed messages in a new “public” Travancore: building the capital 1860–1880’, Art History (2008) 31(2), pp. 211–247 Google Scholar. On the observatory itself see K.G. Gopchandran, former director of the University of Kerala Observatory, ‘History of the observatory’, at www.swathithirunal.in/observtry/obs1.htm.

20 In addition to Trivandrum, Indian patronage established the Royal Observatory at Lucknow (1835), the Maharaja Takhtasinghji Observatory at Poona (1882) and the Nizamiah Observatory at Hyderabad (1901). The other five were connected to either the East India Company or European-funded colleges. Ansari, S.M. Razaullah, ‘Astronomical archives in India’, Journal of Astronomical Data (2004) 10(7), pp. 3–12 Google Scholar; Kochar, Rajesh, ‘The growth of modern astronomy in India, 1651–1960’, Vistas in Astronomy (1991) 34, pp. 69–105 Google Scholar.

21 Exceptions include Andreas Volwahsen, Cosmic Architecture in India: The Astronomical Monuments of Maharaja Jai Singh II, Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2001; Savithri Preetha Nair, Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2012; Simon Schaffer, ‘The Asiatic enlightenments of European astronomy’, in Schaffer et al., op. cit. (5).

22 Nair, Savithri Preetha, ‘Native collecting and natural knowledge (1789–1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as a “center of calculation”’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2005) 15(3), pp. 279–302 Google Scholar, 279.

23 Joydeep Sen, Astronomy in India 1784–1876, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014, p. 81.

24 These special geographical and geomagnetical characteristics have long stimulated research in astrophysics and geophysics in the region. The Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in the Palni Hills of Tamil Nadu has been in operation since 1901. In the 1940s, out of nearby Bangalore, Robert Millikan and Homi J. Bhabha conducted groundbreaking experiments on cosmic rays; fundamental research of this kind continued to be pursued at the Ooty Radio Telescope (est. 1965) in the hills of Tamil Nadu, and at the Kolar Gold Fields in Mysore. Today Thiruvananthapuram is home to the main base of the Indian Space Research Organization and the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, which specializes in sensor-loaded research rockets used to study the atmosphere and ionosphere. Abraham, Itty, ‘Landscape and postcolonial science’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 34(2), pp. 163–187 Google Scholar. On locality and science at the Ooty hill station see Simon Schaffer, ‘Exact sciences and colonialism in south India 1900’, in Epple and Zittel, op. cit. (10), pp. 121–140. On space sciences in south India see Asok Maharaj Doraisamy, ‘Space for development: US–Indian space relations 1955–1976’, PhD diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011.

25 See summary of Arago's speech and the committee recommendations of the BAAS meeting in 1834 at Edinburgh: Report of the BAAS, 1834, pp. 30–31.

26 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1865, Vol. 4, Madhava Rao, Dewan, to H. Newill, Resident, 23 February 1865.

27 Sen, op. cit. (23), p. 82.

28 Caldecott, John, ‘The maharaja's observatory’, Madras Journal of Literature and Science (1837) 6, p. 56 Google Scholar.

29 J.A. Broun, Report on the Observatories of His Highness the Raja of Travancore at Trevandrum and on the Agustier Peak of the Western Ghats (Trivandrum: Sircar Press, 1857), pp. 5–7. From Dollond, Caldecott obtained a transit instrument and equatorial. From Troughton and Simms, Caldecott ordered a mural circle and portable altitude and azimuth instruments. The transit clock was by Dent. Grubb of Dublin supplied the magnetic declinometer, which was the key instrument for Broun’s magnetic survey and was identical to the rest of the observatories participating in the trans-colonial magnetic survey, designed by Lloyd. Also bought were several types of thermometer, barometer and anemometer for measuring atmospheric conditions. For the status of Cambridge and Oxford instrumentation at this time see Roger Hutchins, British University Observatories, 1772–1939, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

30 Royal Society Library (RSL) Caldecott Papers, 257/258, no 1, Caldecott to Sabine, 13 December 1840. In Egypt Caldecott prepared a report of the Cairo observatory's magnetic arrangements for the Viceroy Mahmoud Ali.

31 On the complex and the director's role in it see J.A. Broun, ‘Reports on the observatories, public museum, public park, and gardens, of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore’, Appendix I, in Broun, op. cit. (4).

32 For an overview of scholarship on the princely states see Groenhout, F., ‘The history of the Indian princely states: bringing the puppets back onto centre stage’, History Compass (2006) 4, pp. 629–644 Google Scholar; also see Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Robin Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, Delhi: Oxford University Press,1978.

33 RSL Caldecott Papers 257/270, no 3, RS 257–274, 257–275, 257–276.

34 RSL Caldecott Papers 257/275, HH the Maharaja of Travancore to Caldecott, 4 January 1843.

35 RSL Caldecott Papers 257/276, Caldecott to HH the Maharaja of Travancore, 6 January 1843.

36 RSL Caldecott Papers 257–265, Caldecott to Sabine, 20 October 1841. For example, ‘The first half of the Cape Observations I have seen [original emphasis] in this country – it is a copy sent by Mr Maclear [Thomas Maclear, head of the Cape observatory] to a friend of his, a Madras Civilian, who kindly allows me the use of it until I can procure one’.

37 RSL Caldecott Papers 257–265, Caldecott to Sabine, 20 October 1841.

38 Caldecott gives a schedule of Sabine's letter arrivals in RSL 257/270.

39 RSL Caldecott Papers 257–268, Caldecott to Sabine, 10 April 1842.

40 RSL Caldecott Papers 257–270, Caldecott to Sabine, 19 January 1843.

41 All of which are today part of the Napier Museum complex in central Thiruvananthapuram. The observatory has been taken over by the University of Kerala, and the site is now also home to the Meteorological Office for the state of Kerala.

42 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Madhava Rao, Dewan, 24 March 1863. The first offer, to a professor at the Elphinstone College Bombay, fell through.

43 National Library of Scotland (NLS), Broun Papers, Report to General Sir Thomas Mackdougall Brisbane, Bart. on the Completion of the Publication, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh of the Observations Made in His Observatory at Makerstoun (1850), No 6.1081(8).

44 Cawood, ‘The magnetic crusade’, op. cit. (2), p. 516; Larson, E.J., ‘Public science for a global empire: the British quest for the southern magnetic pole’, Isis (2011) 102, pp. 34–59 Google Scholar.

45 For which he was awarded the Keith Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. For Broun's account of his own work see NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863. Summaries of results of Broun's work in Travancore were published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1867) 24, (1872) 26. Also see Balfour Stewart, ‘Obituary of John Allan Broun’, Nature, 4 December 1879, p. 112.

46 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Madhava Rao, Dewan, 24 March 1863.

47 On the early history of print in Kerala see Jeffrey, Robin, ‘Testing concepts about print, newspapers, and politics: Kerala, India, 1800–2009’, Journal of Asian Studies (2009) 68(2), pp. 465–489 Google Scholar.

48 RSL Caldecott Papers 257–270, Caldecott to Sabine, 19 January 1843. NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863. Hundreds of thousands of observations collected by Caldecott and his assistants from 1836 to about 1849 were never reduced and published: ‘owing partly to the error of the instruments themselves and partly to the mode of making the observations, the observations have not been of that degree of exactitude as to make or render them worth printing to place them on record as data upon which dependence may be placed’. NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1862, Vol. 1, no 8, ‘minute’ from HE the Governor of Fort St George.

49 Broun, op. cit. (29).

50 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 6 June 1863.

51 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863.

52 On Rao and his dominant influence within the Sircar see Jeffrey, Robin, ‘The politics of “indirect rule”: types of relationship among rulers, ministers and residents in a “native state”, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics (1975) 13(3), pp. 261–281 Google Scholar. But see Kawashima, op. cit. (19),who grants more agency to the raja.

53 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Rao, Dewan, 16 April 1862.

54 E.J. Waring, Pharmacopoeia of India, London: India Office and W.H. Allen and Co., 1868; Waring, An Enquiry into the Statistics and Pathology of Some Points Connected with Abscess in the Liver as Met with in the East Indies, Trevandrum: Government Press, 1859; Waring, Remarks on the Uses of Some Bazaar Medicines … Procurable throughout India, 5th edn, London: J. & A. Churchill, 1897; ‘Obituary of Edward John Waring, M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., C.I.E.’, British Medical Journal (31 January 1891) 157(1), pp. 264–265 Google Scholar.

55 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1862, Vol. 2, Fisher, Resident, to Rao, Dewan, 16 September 1862.

56 Raja, Rama Varma, ‘The maharaja's observatory at Trivandrum’, Popular Astronomy (March 1916) 24(3), pp. 270–273 Google Scholar.

57 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863.

58 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863.

59 Broun, op. cit. (29), pp. 14–16. Sen states that under Broun (as compared to Caldecott) the involvement of Indians with the observatory decreased, and that Broun sought more distance from Indians. I have not found evidence of such a change.

60 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1874, Broun to Bollard, Resident, 5 March 1875. On acclimatization see Anderson, Warwick, ‘Climates of opinion: acclimatization in nineteenth-century France and England’, Victorian Studies (1992) 35(2), pp. 135–157 Google ScholarPubMed.

61 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, J. Madhava Rao, Dewan, to Broun, 10 December 1863.

62 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1864, Vol. 3, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 5 January 1864.

63 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1864, Vol. 3, Fisher, Resident, to Madhava Rao, Dewan, n.d.

64 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1865, Vol. 4, Madhava Rao, Dewan, to H. Newill, Resident, 23 February 1865.

65 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, ‘On the matter of Mr Broun's pension &c.’, 27 July 1872, n.a., n.d.

66 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Ballard, Resident, 24 June 1872.

67 The first volume treated only the lunar diurnal variation of declination – the effect of the Moon on the declination needle.

68 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Bollard, Resident, 12 November 1872.

69 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Bollard, Resident, 12 November 1872, underlining in original.

70 ‘The heavy calculations for the lunar variation of horizontal force required in the 2nd volume are as yet completed at Trevandrum. It is now absolutely necessary that all the notebooks and MS Calculations &c be forwarded to me and the remaining work be done under my eye’. NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Bollard, 5 March 1875.

71 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, memo, ‘Dewan of Trav.’, 29 July 1872. Also see NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1874, Proceedings of the Madras Government, Political Dept., 9 December 1876.

72 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1874, Proceedings of the Madras Government, Political Dept., 9 December 1876.

73 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Madhava Rao, Dewan, to Fisher, Resident, 5 December 1863; Fisher to Rao, 5 December 1863; Rao, Dewan, to Broun, 10 December 1863.

74 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Fisher, Resident, 15 June 1863.

75 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Broun to Smith, Elder & Co., 4 November 1863; Smith, Elder & Co. to Broun, 8 January 1864.

76 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Smith, Elder & Co. to Broun, 8 January 1864.

77 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Ballard, Resident, 24 June 1872.

78 Steve Ruskin, John Herschel's Cape Voyage: Private Science, Public Imagination, and the Ambitions of Empire, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, Chapter 5.

79 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1872, Vol. 6, Broun to Ballard, Resident, 24 June 1872.

80 Madras Times, 22 January 1874, quoted in Astronomical Register (1874) 12, p. 169.

81 For example, the Huntington Library's copy reads, printed on the first leaf, ‘Presented by His Highness the Maharajah of Trancore, G.C.S.I.’, then, in script, ‘à Monsieur Leverrier L'Observatoire Paris’. The title page reads ‘Observations of Magnetic Declination made at Trevandrum and Agustia Malley in the Observatories of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore, G.C.S.I In the Years 1852 to 1869. Being Trevandrum Magnetical Observations, Volume 1. Discussed and Edited By John Allan Broun, F.R.S., Late Director of the Observatories. (Printed by Order of His Highness the Maharajah.) London: Henry S. King & Co. 1874’. Overleaf reads ‘Printed by Neill and Company, Edinburgh’.

82 National Library of Scotland (NLS), Broun Papers, Report to General Sir Thomas Mackdougall Brisbane, Bart. On the Completion of the Publication, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh of the Observations Made in his Observatory at Makerstoun (1850), no 6.1081(8).

83 Naidu also did the calculations and press revision for the Madras Observatory's first magnetic publication, of data from 1846 to 1850, which would appear in 1850. Meteorological Observations Made at the Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory at Simla, during … 1841–5., under Lieut-Col J.T. Boileau, London: published by order of the Secretary of State for India by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1872.

84 Magnetical Observations Made at the Honorable East India Company's Observatory at Madras under … W.S. Jacob … 1851–1855, Madras 1884, p. iii.

85 Stewart, Balfour, Nature (6 May 1886) 34(862), pp. 3–4 Google Scholar.

86 Ansari, S.M. Razaullah, ‘The establishment of observatories and the socio-economic conditions of scientific work in nineteenth century India’, Journal of the Indian National Science Academy (1978) 13(1), pp. 62–72 Google Scholar.

87 Magnetical Observations Made at the Hon. E.I. Company's Magnetic Observatory at Singapore, by Capt C.M. Elliot … in … 1841–45, Madras, 1851; Meteorological Observations Made at the Hon. E.I. Company's Magnetic Observatory at Singapore, by Capt C.M. Elliot … in … 1841–45 [with an introductory notice by W.S. Jacob], Madras, 1850.

88 Observations Made at the Magnetical & Meteorological Observatory at Bombay … 1845–1870, 21 vols., Bombay, 1845–1870.

89 The Madras Times correspondent, writing to the Astronomical Register (1874) 12, p. 259.

90 Nature (1 July 1875) 12, p. 163.

91 Ruskin, op. cit. (78), Chapter 5.

92 Anon., Trevandrum Observatories by John Allan Broun, Selections from His Reports and Letters, Madras: K. Arnold & Co., 1935.

93 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, New York: Verso, 2000.

94 NLS, Broun Papers, Vol. 2, Royal Society of Edinburgh to HH the Maharaja of Travancore, 6 November 1879.

95 NLS, Broun Papers, Vol. 2, Neil and Co. to the Secretary of State for India, 16 March 1880.

96 NLS, Broun Papers, Vol. 2, India Office to the Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 6 February 1880; India Office to Neil and Co., 12 April 1880.

97 NLS, Broun Papers, Vol. 2, India Office to Neil and Co., 14 April 1880.

98 J. Eliot, ed., Indian Meteorological Memoirs, vols. 7–10, Simla, 1894–1897; Calcutta, 1895–1899. These contain Eliot's edited reduction of the Trivandrum and Agustia meteorological data from between 1853 and 1864. Also see Nature (5 January 1899) 59(1523).

99 NLS, Broun Papers, Meteorological Office, 12 May 1891, to the Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

100 NLS, Broun Papers, Met Office London to Prof. P.G. Tait, 10 June 1891. The problem of climate change, combined with cheap, powerful data processing and storage, has led to a renaissance for some of these physical records of the Earth from 150 years ago. One copy of the report now resides at the National Geophysical Data Center in Colorado, USA, where it awaits migration into digital form.

101 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1862, Vol. 1, Fisher, Resident, to Rao, Dewan, n.d.; Broun, op. cit. (4), p. iv.

102 From a speech in 1869 on the occasion of the founding of the Maharaja's College. Quoted in Heston, op. cit. (19), p. 226.

103 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1863, Vol. 2, Rao, Dewan, to Broun, 4 Feb. 1863.

104 NAI, Trev. Obs. Rec., Bundle 1865, Vol. 4, 1865, Rao, Dewan, to Newell, Resident, 23 February 1865.

105 Sunil P. Eliadom, ‘Cross-currents within: cultural critique of the Kerala renaissance’, paper presented in Kerala: Towards New Horizons, Jan Sanskriti, Delhi, 21 February 2009. For a different perspective see Amartya Sen's writing on what is sometimes called the ‘Kerala model of development’. See, for example, Amartya Sen and J. Dreze (eds.), Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.