2017/11/01 by Aashish Velkar · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Civilization #Constitution #Corporate governance #Economics #Economy #History of Science and Medicine #Ideology #Law #Management #Modernization theory #Nationalism #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Sociology #State (computer science)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtx064
openalex publication_date 2017/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Jawaharlal Nehru, writing to his chief ministers in 1955, reminded them ‘the metric system like the zero symbol, originated in India. This was a gift of India to the world, but in this, as in some other matters, we lagged behind and other countries went ahead’.1 This claim is clearly disputable: the metric system was forged during the turbulence of the French Revolution in the 1790s. But Nehru’s statement illustrates how, as part of India’s modernization, metrological reforms were ensconced in what the editors of Science and Culture, in 1935, termed the ‘middle path’: building modern science over the cultural foundations of the country’s ancient and variegated civilisation.2 The reform of India’s metrology in 1956 was especially significant given that the British colonial government had been unable to ‘settle upon an organized system for the country as a whole’ throughout their rule of the subcontinent.3 Rethinking the links between legal metrology (a system of weights and measures) and the state allows historians to probe the technologies of state formation and governance.4 Indeed, the historical literature has established the notion that metrology is a constitutive element of state formation.5 What remains imperfectly understood is how various contending groups laid claim to this technology, framed the discourse regarding the structure and constitution of legal metrology, situated it within economic and cultural contexts and tied it to normative notions of state governance and the political economy. Historical narratives often tend to overemphasize the ability of the state to control or rule economic, political and social spaces through technocratic systems, including metrological systems. Examples of such narratives are reflected in the descriptions of space and state provided by Daniel R. Headrick’s ‘technological imperialism’, Gyan Prakash’s ‘sinews of power’ and Bruno Latour’s ‘metrological chains’.6 There is considerable evidence that metrological reforms fit imperfectly within narratives of this kind when the very notion of the state and its role is in flux.