Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Euro/West-Centrism, Black Boxed Machines, and the (Post) Colonial Present

How is it possible that past technoscientific research in India does not serve as a sluice for circulations of technoscience even within India? Why do technoscientific artifacts and knowledge continue to flow largely through the West? The answer to these and related questions, I argue, lies in the entanglement of technoscientific practices in India with Orientalist historiography of the origin of modern science. Such an Orientalist construction forms the basis of the diffusion model and constitutes technologies and societies as black boxes, which, as I show in this article, is strikingly on display in the historical accounts of NMR and MRI machines at even the best institutions and laboratories in India. I thus propose a deconstructive-empirical approach to unravel the enduring implications of Orientalist construction of the origin of modern science.