This book was conceived in Calcutta, developed in London, reconceptu-alised and rewritten in Cambridge and Berlin, and ultimately completedin Reading. It has taken me more than ten years. I am deeply indebtedto many institutions and individuals. The Wellcome Trust Centre forthe History of Medicine at University College London awarded me athree-year doctoral studentship (2005) as well as the Roy Porter Prize(2006), which enabled me to put together my doctoral dissertation. Ihave since then held postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre for Studiesin Social Sciences Calcutta (2009–2010), at the Department of Historyand Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (2011–2013),and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin(2013–2015). A generous Medical History and Humanities grant fromthe Wellcome Trust (ref. 091630/Z/10/Z) supported my time in Cam-bridge. I am also grateful to the Governing Body of Christ’s College,Cambridge, for including me as a postdoctoral affiliate. I spent a part ofthe fall of 2012 in New York as the Barnard-Columbia Weiss Interna-tional Visiting Scholar in the History of Science. I thank colleagues inthese different institutions for their support while I was working on thisbook.My teachers in Calcutta have inspired me, ever since I was an under-graduate, to pursue professional research. Subhas Ranjan Chakrabortyand Rajat Kanta Ray at Presidency College, and Bhaskar Chakrabarty,Shireen Maswood, Madhumita Majumdar and Samita Sen at the Uni-versity of Calcutta exposed me to the various predicaments of SouthAsian history. I was introduced to interdisciplinary research when I was astudent at the Research and Training Programme at the Centre for Stud-ies in Social Sciences Calcutta. The courses offered by Sibaji Bandy-opadhyay, Gautam Bhadra, Pradip Bose, Partha Chatterjee, Rosinka Chaudhari, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Janaki Nair, Manas Ray and Lak-shmi Subramanian continue to inform my work. The last ten years havewitnessed my own transition from a student to a faculty member.