This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, historian of science and technology, filmmaker, and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Phalkey is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, and producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron (2020) – a film about the world's oldest functional particle accelerator and the people who keep it running today. Her writing spans the history of science, technology, and the state in twentieth-century India.
The conversation traces Phalkey's route into the history of science by way of political sociology, silent cinema, and a chance funded place at Georgia Tech under John Krige, and her eventual return to studying India after finding its absence conspicuous in accounts of twentieth-century science. She discusses how Atomic State pushes back against two dominant framings in the historiography of science in India: the "tools of empire" argument for the imperial period, and the scarcity of histories of Indian science after independence. Drawing on the early efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the eventual rise of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Department of Atomic Energy, she describes how the demands of a single, resource-intensive field reshaped the relationship between Indian science and the Indian state — and how that "big science" model went on to marginalise both university research and smaller-scale inquiry.
The discussion broadens into Phalkey's work reframing India and China as "conceptual sites" rather than deviant "cases" measured against a European norm, and closes with her current thinking on critique in the history and philosophy of science, informed in part by Bruno Latour, and on what it means for historians of science to help the public make meaning of research in an age of climate change, AI, and new gene technologies.
In this episode, Phalkey:
- Describes her winding path into history of science
- Explains what drew her back to studying science in India specifically, after finding it missing from standard histories of twentieth-century science
- Outlines the two historiographical tendencies Atomic State argues against: the "tools of empire" framework and the neglect of post-independence science
- Discusses the concept of India and China as "conceptual sites," against the limits of a Europe-benchmarked history of science
- Traces the early, fragile efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the wartime origins of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
- Reflects on how the everyday bureaucracy of running a national laboratory shaped the entangled relationship between Indian science and the postcolonial state
- Discusses her documentary Cyclotron and the material, practical difficulties of building and maintaining a particle accelerator in a resource-constrained setting
- Considers how the "big science" model, centred on the Department of Atomic Energy, drew resources and people away from Indian universities and small-scale research
- Calls for a connected rather than a difference-based history of science in the Global South, and reflects on reconstituting the meaning of critique in history and philosophy of science
Relevant Links
Mentioned scholarship
- David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge History of India)
- Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" (2004)
- Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)
Note: This conversation was recorded in May, 2026
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This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
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