A Meeting of the Minds: European and Tamil Encounters in Modern Sciences, 1507-1857 - Hardcover

A Meeting of the Minds: European and Tamil Encounters in Modern Sciences, 1507–1857 uncovers new aspects of the contributions of the Portuguese, Dutch, Dane, English and French East India Company officials and European missionaries to intellectual history in the fields of botany, chemistry, medicine, earth and space science within the specific geographical-historical locality of the Tamil coast in the early Modern Age. It discusses the relationships forged to underpin the progress in scientific knowledge and scholarship besides examining the varied manifestations of ideas, practices and forms of intellectual life developed and shared through association with the learned elite. The author argues that knowledge making processes then were not simple binaries such as dialogue or exchange, native or Western, collaboration or resistance, as found in the existing historiography, but were much more complex epistemological processes involving a deep understanding of construction and reconstruction at multiple nodes for production of knowledge, movement and reception.

S. Jeyaseela Stephen is Directeur, Institut pour Etudes Indo-EuropEennes. He was Professor of Maritime History (2001-13) at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. His publications include Portuguese-Tamil Grammar: Modernisation and Democratisation of Tamil (2001); Portuguese, the Armenians and the World of Art and Architecture on the Tamil Coast (2008); Caste, Catholic Christianity and the Language of Conversion: Social Change and Cultural Translation in Tamil Country, 1519-1774 (2008); Expanding Portuguese Empire and the Tamil Economy: Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries (2009); and Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World (2014)