Science, Law and the Raj: Cultural Fields of Fish(y) Fact

Abstract

Nineteenth century fact-making in British India was a cultural endeavour shared among its diverse colonial experts. Through a critical sociological reading of archival documents and official records, this paper contributes to aquatic-marine historiography by unpacking utterances and deeds of irrigation engineers, pisciculture proponents, naturalists and administrators regarding the facts of ‘injury to fish supplies’ and the preservation of these supplies by law. It argues that early scientific fisheries investigation and their culmination in the Indian Fisheries Act, 1897 were not the result of a successful separation of science and politics, or of fact from interest. Rather, colonial cultures of fact-making were forged in the interplay of the imperial utilitarianism and hybridity inherent to rule-making in the colony, which renders early fisheries science in India as a field of postcolonial politics by other means.