Carnival for Science: essays on science. technology and development

This provocative, witty, polemical and passionate collection of essays makes searching forays into various aspects of modern life-in India and elsewhere-that have increasingly been hegemonized by science.
The early years of India's Independence were celebrations of science and technology, epitomized in Jawaharlal Nehru's dubbing of dams as 'the temples of modern India'. But the dream metamorphosed into a nightmare as the hegemony of science gradually became apparent. These essays attempt to understand the metamorphosis.

Visvanathan employs a varied set of narrative stratagems. The opening essay begins with an autobiographical celebration of science in the early years of independent India and proceeds to portray the disillusion ment that came with the Emergency and the Bhopal gas tragedy. Visvanathan goes on to argue that structures of violence are encoded within the worldview of science.
Development through science emerges as a contentious and ambiguous issue-it is shown as being not a humanitarian project but a genocidal fact. Three of the essays select a series of sites-genetic diversity, nuclear energy, modern medicine-and explore them as theatres of violence and resistance. 'Development, Medicine and Violence', for example, argues that development has endorsed the claims to power over the human body as a domain of social knowledge and social intervention; it reveals how the relationship between the modern doctor and his patient increasingly 'de-composes' the patient as a person.
Combining a grasp of history, a knowledge of scientific practice and a flair for intellectual prose, this book will interest all those aware of and concerned about the increasingly dominant role of science in our lives.