Immense intellectual and cultural stirringscharacterisednineteenth-century Bengal. The impact of modernWestern culture andconsciousness of defeat by a foreign power gavebirth to a newawakening. Thoughtful Bengalis were impressed inparticular bymodern science and technology. The attainment ofmodern scientificknowledge in colonial Bengal was not purely aquestion ofdiffusion. Western science and technology, viewed asculturalimport, were actively redefined by the recipient culture.Adifferent society, culture, tradition and existingindigenousknowledge systems provided the background in which thegradualspread of the new knowledge occurred, followed by itsadaptationthrough various reformulations. One of the major sourcesofdissemination of techno-scientific knowledge to the nativesocietywas the contemporary Bengali journals. This book is anaccount ofthe Bengali bhadralok's distinctive response to themoderntechnical knowledge as reflected in the pages of thesejournals.