Our panel explores different understandings of scientific knowledge, the historiography of science, and environmental history in modern South Asia. Each of our papers analyzes the production of scientific and medical knowledge in South Asia, with particular attention to how South Asians themselves conceptualized science, health, and environmental wellbeing. Ranging from case studies of scientific and medical practitioners in Bengal to agrarian expansion in colonial Assam and traditional ecology in contemporary India, our panel explores various facets of South Asia's contributions to scientific knowledge from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including plant biology, environmental history, ecology, and the history of science. Broadly, we investigate the impact of British colonialism, racial prejudice, and the global circulation of scientific knowledge on the production of science in modern South Asia. Specifically, Minorsky uses the case study of Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, India’s first modern plant biologist, to assess the impact of Western racism on the production of scientific knowledge in early twentieth century India. In turn, Bandyopadhyay discusses traditional ecological knowledge in contemporary India across a range of field sites. Amstutz examines how Muslim medical healers in eastern Bengal creatively positioned Islamic healing as a system of social renewal and political critique during the medical and political crises of World War II. Finally, Sarmah explores how the colonial rhetoric of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ approaches to land settlement and agrarian expansion had an extremely uneasy stay in the ecologically fragile, transient, and illegible floodplains of Assam.