Dialectical diffusion: the Rockefeller Foundation, Anil Gupta, and interactions between formal science and indigenous knowledge during India's Green Revolution

Abstract

Dominant narratives of the green revolution focus on the top-down dissemination of technology produced by global scientific networks into developing regions or nations, but comparatively little scholarship has been produced regarding the forms of local knowledge which were transferred during the same process. This thesis will examine several important sites of interaction between formal scientific networks and indigenous knowledge with a focus on moments of historical transition in methodology. A main contention of this thesis is that this dissemination was not just a top-down flow of Western technology into Indian villages, but was rather a dialectical process by which class interest and reductionist science moulded the interaction between disparate knowledge systems. The focus will be an exposition of changes in research methodologies pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Indian Agriculture Program, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, and the founder of an indigenous knowledge database NGO, Anil Gupta.