My paper will focus on the career of the Hindi Scientific Glossary (1906), an artefact of nationalist knowledge making and the global circulation of western science from early-twentieth century South Asia. A bilingual lexicon containing Hindi equivalents for English scientific terms, the Glossary was created by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Benares (est. 1893) to facilitate the production of books, journals and articles to popularize science among Hindi readers who were unable to access scientific ideas in English. In the following decades, as Hindi intellectuals debated the appropriate strategy for standardizing scientific nomenclature, the Glossary became a point of reference and critique. Through the opinions of its makers, readers and critics, my paper will follow the Glossary from its inception in a literary society in the late-1890s to debates in the public sphere into the 1920s. I argue that the making of the Glossary was an event within the history of translingual scientific practices in British India. The translation of western scientific concepts through the production of lexical equivalents was integral to the cultural politics of language. Translation emerged as a positive strategy for assimilating western scientific knowledge for the enrichment of the Hindi language, especially at a time when Hindi intellectuals set out to raise Hindi to the status of a modern national language. I will conclude by reflecting on the political implications of Hindi’s failed quest for commensurability with English as a language of science in India’s postcolonial history.
