2015.1 EDITORIAL NOTE Monica Juneja and Joachim Kurtz .04 ARTICLES Dhruv Raina Translating the “Exact” and “Positive” Sciences: Early Twentieth Century Reflections on the Past of the Sciences in India .08 Maurizio Taddei Narrative Art Between India and the Hellenistic World .34 Christiane Brosius Emplacing and Excavating the City: Art, Ecology, and Public Space in New Delhi .75 Lisa Bixenstine Safford Art at the Crossroads: Lacquer Painting in French Vietnam .126 Catherine Vance Yeh Recasting the Chinese Novel: Ernest Major’s Shenbao Publishing House (1872–1890) .171 2 Contributors Transcultural Studies, No 1, 2015, ISSN: 2191-6411 Editors: Monica Juneja, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Joachim Kurtz, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Rudolf G. Wagner, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Managing Editor: Andrea Hacker Editorial Board: Christiane Brosius, Antje Fluechter, Madeleine Herren, Birgit Kellner, Axel Michaels, Barbara Mittler, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Vladimir Tikhonov, and Roland Wenzlhuemer. Transcultural Studies is an open-access e-journal published bi-annually by the Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics of Transculturality“ at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. For more information see: www.transculturalstudies.org CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE: Dhruv Raina is Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He studied physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Göteborg University. His research focuses on the politics and cultures of scientific knowledge in South Asia. He has co-edited Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (1999), Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (2007), and Science between Europe and Asia (2010). Images and Contexts: the Historiography of Science and Modernity (2003) was a collection of papers contextualizing science and its modernity in India. S. Irfan Habib and he co-authored Domesticating Modern Science (2004). His most recent book is Needham’s Indian Network (2015). Maurizio Taddei (1936-2000) was a leading scholar of early Buddhist art with broad interests ranging from archaeological work to scholarly analysis, the history of Oriental Studies in Italy, and teaching. A graduate of the University of Rome, he became Professor of Indian Archaeology and Art www.transculturalstudies.org 3Transcultural Studies 2015.1 History at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples in 1968. He was the author of 230 scholarly works, many of which were translated into foreign languages. Among them are India Antica (1972), Monuments of Civilization: India (1978), and On Gandhara (2003), a posthumous collection of essays in Italian with English summaries. The article in this issue is a full translation of one of them. Christiane Brosius is Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Her research focuses on large art events and emerging contemporary art scenes in Delhi and Kathmandu as well as mediatised affection and politics of affect in urban India. She is co-founder of the digital database Tasveerghar – A House of Pictures and project leader of a HERA-funded transnational research collaboration on SINGLE women in Delhi and Shanghai. Her latest monograph, India’s Middle Class. New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity, has been revised and reprinted by Routledge New Delhi in 2014. Lisa Bixenstine Safford is professor of art history and chair of the art department at Hiram College in Ohio. While her expertise is in Western art— Renaissance and Modern—she has received numerous grants from funding bodies such as the NEH, Fulbright-Hays, AACU, and ASIANetwork, to travel and learn in Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, India, and Sri Lanka. Her Asian research interests concern the preservation or translation of traditional culture in modern and modernizing societies. Catherine Vance Yeh is professor of modern Chinese and comparative literature at Boston University. Her research interest lies in global cultural interaction and flow in the field of literature, media, and visual culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published widely on the subject of entertainment culture and social change, and her publications include Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850- 1910 (2006) and The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre (2015). She is currently finishing a book project with the working title “The Rise of Peking Opera dan Actors to National Stardom and Chinese Theater Modernity, 1910s-1930s”. http://transculturalstudies.org http://www.tasveerghar.net/ http://www.hera-single.de/ http://www.hera-single.de/