UC San Diego

Much scholarship on scientific practice in India has been concerned with the postcolonial condition and science’s imbrication with the nation-state, or on situating science in India in its global context. Such foci have left unaddressed questions around caste: How might caste shape Indian scientists’ efforts to compete internationally? What might caste mean for the laboratory as a field of social relations? I address these questions through studying the discursive life of an experiment that is an exemplar of the nationalist mythologies of Indian science. The Kolar Gold Fields (KGF), a gold mine in south India, was the site for underground physics experiments led by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, from 1961 until the mines shut down in 1992. The physicists used the low background-radiation environment in the mines, over three kilometers deep, to study elusive subatomic phenomena. I ask: What themes do physicists and others emphasize, and what do they elide, in the stories they tell of these experiments? The experiments were enabled by a political economy of gold mining that relied on low-wage labor. But the stories of the experiments construct a persona that dissociates the upper-caste physicists from the mines while erasing the Dalit miners and their knowledge, and thus construct caste through the hierarchization of labor, of spaces, and of knowledge forms. Representing the underground laboratory as a place for the mind, but not of bodily labor, constructs an exclusionary persona that aligns with an image of scientific modernity and simultaneously serves to demarcate caste. It is a discursive practice that shares much with the origin story of gold mining in Kolar, one that, even in scholarly accounts, posits a discontinuity between indigenous mining by Dalit men and women and British-run industrial mining that began in the 1880s. Using published sources and a hitherto unseen archival document, I re-center the origin story around the indigenous Dalit miners whose knowledge was the ground on which industrial mining began. In doing so, I show how the story of the KGF experiments, while claiming to be anti-colonial, aligns with, and builds on, colonial and orientalist discourses.