Abstract: The historian of physics, Simon Schaffer, once called meteors “eloquent stones”. They move easily between the languages of folklore, superstition, astrology, literature, astronomy etc. Yet,
this very eloquence creates what Schaffer called “crises of facts” about them. Different characters and qualities attributed to them by different groups not only present conflicting images of meteors but also end up instantiating new boundaries between the different social groups such as “superstitious peasants” and “learned scientists”. To address such crises, the late Englightenment (late 18th century) witnessed the development of more rigorous rules for the production of “facts” about meteors. Even as those eighteenth-century regimes of fact-making evolved through the twentieth century, they could never completely self-isolate from the other, neighbouring regimes of truths about meteors. As eloquent stones they continued to move between multiple worlds. In this paper, we shall look at the life and work of a Hyderabadi gentleman, Mohammad Abdur Rahman Khan, as be studied the movements of meteors between these different worlds of truth and knowledge.

About the Speaker: Projit Bihari Mukharji is a Professor and Head of the Department of History. Before joining Ashoka was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mukharji specializes in the history of science and has won prestigious awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pfizer Award.

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