Can India-China Historical Ties in Science Make Us Go Past Galwan?
After four years in Lucknow, Hs returned to Beijing, where he helped set up the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and carved out a distinguished career. Reconstructing Sahni and Hs's collaboration and uncovering the motivations that drove them offers alternate histories of twentieth-century China and India, which have long been mired in a civilisation/realpolitik binary. As a result, the majority of existing scholarship gravitates toward one of two poles: cultural and intellectual history or foreign policy and geopolitics. A history such as this one, centered on the inter-Asian circulation of experts, scientific knowledge, and materials, also helps decenter Europe and the United States in global histories of science. Barring notable exceptions, histories of the science of China and India, are written either within primarily national contexts or are framed with the West (also Japan, in the case of China) as points of contact and comparison. And yet, as the case of Sahni and Hs suggests, such a standard model paints a clearly incomplete and insufficient picture of mid-century science.