“A Method, Not a Force”: Evolution, Environment, and Indigeneity at the Zoological Survey of India, 1916–36

This paper examines the history of the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), the final Imperial Scientific Department established by the British Indian state, from its founding in 1916 to the severe reduction of its research activities in the mid-1930s. Staffed by Scottish and English naturalists alongside Indian protégés, the ZSI sparked controversy by advancing two interrelated claims. First, it asserted that Indian species and ecosystems were fundamentally distinct from their Euro-American counterparts and required an “indigenous” zoology with its own principles and methodologies. Second, it challenged prevailing Darwinian and Mendelian debates in Western academia, arguing that evolution was not a universal causal force but a diverse set of adaptive methods shaped by local environmental pressures. This pseudo-Lamarckian theorization contended that evolution in Asia was uniquely determined by “abnormal” ecological factors, differing from mechanisms elsewhere. Colonial science historiography often assumes a binary between colonizer and colonized, while disciplinary histories remain Eurocentric. This paper bridges these approaches by analyzing the ZSI’s rise and decline as negotiations within a global yet unequal knowledge economy. The ZSI’s expatriate scientists, marginalized by metropolitan institutions, Indian nationalists, and colonial administrators, adapted tactically to assert scientific legitimacy. They dismissed India’s famed wildlife as amateur terrain, prioritizing invertebrate and cave fauna studies; rejected laboratory-based zoology in favor of immersive tropical fieldwork; framed “Indian” zoology as a transnational discipline; and reinterpreted Western evolutionary debates through a colonial lens. To secure state support, they also pursued applied research, such as surveys on Schistosomiasis-carrying snails and inland fisheries. This paper argues that the ZSI’s scientific assertions were neither incidental nor inevitable but strategic responses to competing pressures within colonial and global scientific networks.