Digital Exhibition

This digital exhibition highlights instruments concerned with the measurement of land and grain, and the story of how these measures came to be standardised in colonial and postcolonial India. It is also the story of absence, countermeasures, and non-measurement, as the practice of standardisation was a political project with uncertain results. Opposition, evasion, and subterfuge are as central to this story as control, regulation, and legibility.

This digital exhibition brings together measuring instruments in the History of Science Museum collections and the various measuring instruments used, and still in use, in different parts of India. Through this dialogue, we wish to reinterpret objects in our museum as living artefacts that have shaped, and were in turn shaped by, historical practices of measuring in colonial India. We also hope that this exhibition brings greater attention to what is overlooked in our collections, and the knowledge, techniques, and the labour of measurement that have been historically elided due to the focus on particular innovations and scientific triumphs. These plural measuring practices and their rich histories serve as an important rebuke to our ‘standard’ histories of science and knowledge. 

The exhibition highlights the tension between the ideal of standardisation and its realisation in practice, whether this be colonial surveyors seeking to extract revenue during the height of the British empire or the postcolonial Indian state implementing new quality standards of paddy for the public distribution of grain. In short, this is an exhibition of the social history of measurement practices, and it is a story of constant negotiation between the measurer and the measured.