Technology in the South Asian imaginary

For non-specialists, the accumulated scholarship on the history of science, technology, and medicine in South Asia presents particular challenges: although extensive, especially on the colonial period, it lacks any coherent and sustained interpretive threads. For example, there is a large body of literature that situates ancient knowledge in India as a precursor to modern (read West-identified) science.¹ Much of this work is highly empirical and antiquarian in nature, and reflects an interest in biography, invention, and priority rather than community practice, cultural meanings, or social contexts. At the same time, especially since the 1990s, a newer canon of scholarship has sought to implicitly, if not explicitly, unseat the very assumptions that undergird the West-oriented epistemologies of such universalizing notions as modernity, progress, and development. The latter literature, typically has been prone to arch abstractions rather than empirical studies.² In essence, both traditions work to destabilize the received narrative of modern science, where the vector of science moves from Europe to ‘diffuse’ to the rest of the world.³ The first antiquarian body of literature does this by suggesting it worked precisely in the opposite direction, and the second canon does this by interrogating the actual idea of a sequence, proposing co-productions and co-constitutions where no inevitable stage preceded another. All of these meditations are also less likely to engage with the prevailing concerns of most historians of science, technology, and medicine who study other regions of the world and speak instead to the urgent frames of reference that animate the contentious but scholarly archipelago that is South Asian history, which, especially as it relates to our understanding of the past four centuries, labors under the meanings, uses, and subversions of empire, identity, and nation. Here, the history of science, technology, and medicine moves along a barely visible rail pushing against the massive weight of scholarship on South Asia’s epistemic, somatic, and spatial ordeals as the region moved from ‘civilization’ to ‘colony’ to ‘nation’ in that same time period.

The inextricable relationship between science and nation in South Asia, especially as it bears on the twentieth century, warrants further explication. Histories of science, technology, and medicine in modern South Asia have been framed by – and struggled against – articulations of knowledge as an instrument of national possibility. There is a forward motion that looms over the language of this literature of historical recovery: on the colonial period, there is the pregnant (and teleological) anticipation of 1947; and in the work on science and technology in the independent nations of South Asia, the literature is overshadowed by the argot of aspiration and nation-building.⁴ One particular way that this literature, especially on post-1947 India, has been instrumentalized has been through an engagement, usually implicitly but often explicitly, with Nehruvian rhetoric, which, identified as it has been with both nation and national science, traffics a worn historiographical discourse.⁵ Largely delinked from the actual figure of Nehru, that same rhetoric, with the obligatory reference points to the cultivation of ‘scientific temper,’ has been embodied in a trio of seemingly self-evident and sequential axioms associated with him: India needs to be modern. In order to be modern, India needs science. And science and an independent state mutually legitimize each other. This is not to suggest that scholars have accepted this formulation uncritically but to acknowledge that the literature on twentieth century science and technology in India has been largely unable to avoid the set of floating ideologies about nation and science that many of the actors in their stories, such as Nehru, for example, internalized or confronted.⁶

There have, of course, been efforts to destabilize received wisdom, much of it coming from the literature on colonial science by historians and science, technology, and society (STS) scholars. The burst of new scholarship on science, technology, and empire that first emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, firmly abandoned the older diffusionist narratives of the ‘spread’ of European science. Drawing from postcolonial science studies, it has sought to subvert the received the language of dichotomies and to illuminate the inflicted violence of universalizing claims of European knowledge systems by revealing the unequal logic of encounter and circulation, and through them, the atomized and contingent vicissitudes of the production of knowledge at the level of communities, laboratories, and nations.⁷ Historians and social scientists who have investigated the nature of science and technology in South Asia have both shaped and been shaped by this set of concerns, while acknowledging that the Nehruvian framework has continuing resonances in understanding and critiquing the co-production of nation and science in modern India.⁸

Rather than reject the important contributions that have problematized nation, knowledge, and power in South Asia, this special issue of History and Technology situates its stakes as a more nuanced critical instrument precisely within the agencies and modalities of these above concerns. The essays in ‘Technology in the South Asian Imaginary’ represent interventions that connect, qualify, and reframe both the essentialist and entrenched signifiers of ‘nation’ and ‘science,’ and the somewhat dispersed meanings that have emerged from interpretations of postcolonial theory within histories of science.⁹ We the authors have concerned ourselves foremost with the problem that, as we lurch further towards multiplicities, ambivalences, hybridities, anxieties, reciprocities, and instabilities, we begin to unmoor ourselves from historicity, moving in one big leap from the transhistorical to the ahistorical. At that point, we have lost the power to say anything meaningful about our historical actors, at least as they understood the world. In this issue, we hope to ground our investigations of science and technology in twentieth century South Asia in context, contingency, and agency, with a keen eye towards the empirical; collectively, we see this as a fresh intervention into the discursive and material conditions of science, technology, and medicine in modern South Asia, drawing from received wisdom, provocative theoretical approaches, and fresh evidence.

The idea for this special issue emerged from exchanges rooted in the above concerns, and with Martin Collins’ encouragement, our first discussions took place as part of a panel at the Global South Asia meeting at New York University in February 2014. Our reflections there eventually flowered into an idea for a collection of essays bringing together emerging scholars trained in the past 10 years whose work has been shaped by the critical inquiries of their forebears but who are all actively seeking interventions into scholarly worlds beyond South Asia, both in terms of geography and epistemology. Although their work here bears on the history of science, technology, and medicine in South Asia, most of the scholars featured here are primarily identified with other disciplinary frameworks, and this heterogeneity carries through in the language and research that you see here. We have here three South Asianists: a historian specializing in gender and sexuality (Mitra), a historian of twentieth century physics (Phalkey), and a historian of medicine (Mukharji). We also have a historian of American neoliberalism and the development regime (Sackley) and a historian whose earlier work was on twentieth century Russian science and technology (Siddiqi), neither of whom limit their scholarship to South Asia. Finally, we have a non-historian whose concerns include technology and poverty in contemporary India (Chattapadhyay). The contributions themselves span the entire gamut of the twentieth century in South Asia, with Mitra’s essay crossing the boundary back into the late nineteenth century while Phalkey and Chattapadhyay’s work brushes up against the first decade of the twenty-first in independent India.¹⁰

Despite their diverse range of interests, all of the scholars invited to contribute here have produced empirical investigations on how science, technology and/or medicine was imagined – often as a political act – in the South Asian context. Collectively, they contribute to creating ‘an anthropology of intersecting imaginaries’ where the boundaries of the imagination are as mutable as the substance of what is imagined.¹¹ One thread running through many of the papers here is an attempt to transcend overdetermined categories, such as the geographical, temporal, social, political, or epistemological. For South Asianists, the particular heterogeneities of the objects of their study has necessitated creative modes of inquiry to confront the realities of (for example) religion, language, and caste. Historians of science and technology interested in empire and its legacies see analogous challenges in terms of the authority and heterogeneity of knowledge and the persistent problem of what it means to be ‘local’ or ‘global.’¹² We are less interested in the older battle to critique reflexive assumptions of the ‘local’ as merely an ethnographic appendix to the material and ‘global’ (read, Western) history of science, technology, and medicine, than to illuminate sites that help us focus our investigations on the epistemic (and otherwise) violence that results from the friction resulting from intersections between the ‘global’ and the ‘local,’ both imagined and material. In these frictions, to extend the analogy, we are interested in the sparks generated, as ideas burst forth and traveled into a contested epistemological terrain shaped by an incredibly heterogeneous social milieu. Here, we take to heart, one important facet of the postcolonial critique of the history of science and technology, which Stacy Pigg has eloquently articulated: ‘we now need to find out more about how science and technology travel, not whether they belong to one culture or another.’¹³ In one way or another, all these papers see patterns of ‘local’ transactions that were understood as – or in some cases, gave rise to – ‘global’ meanings and/or universalist claims, whether grounded in geography, time, or communities. Note, for example, Mitra’s meditation on how Bengali doctors in the early twentieth century understood the ‘sexually deviant woman’: we see here how actors translated and then redeployed European bourgeois ideas about sexuality that were at once universalist in their claims rooted in ‘modern science’ and particular in their drawing of the local concerns of the Bengali Hindu intellectual class.

Beyond imaginaries of scale, the papers here to one degree or another confront the problematic of the archive. More specifically, all of the papers do two things: they make use of ‘new’ empirical evidence, but also make use of archives in new ways, building on Ann Laura Stoler’s challenge to rethink colonial archives (and thus their postcolonial manifestations).¹⁴ STS programs have sought for many years to integrate new methodological approaches for the recovery of evidence but historians of science and technology have resisted this turn, sometimes for good reason. We must tread carefully the line between rethinking the archive (through literary criticism, ethnographies, interviews, and so forth) and abandoning it completely. Without being explicit, the papers in this volume all ask us to reconsider the importance and limits of the archive in provocative ways, a point made particularly explicit in Phalkey and Chattapadhyay’s essay which confronts and historicizes a seemingly recent challenge enabled by our transition from paper to the digital world, how ‘documents [are] disappearing from their online locations’ even as there are ‘no protocols for the archiving of digital correspondence … in place with the Government of India.’ In citing Anjali Arondekar’s work on the politics of ‘archival desire’ in histories of sexuality, Mitra also acknowledges here the challenge of moving from the European colonial imagination as it defined sexual norms and behavior to the ones imagined by colonized peoples.

A third critical conceit at stake here is the problematic of the co-production of nation and science. The identification with Nehruvian positivism, the institutional legacy of colonial science, developmentalist discourses, national security as a driver of science, monumentalism, and of course, the monopolization of science and technology by the nation-state (thus legitimizing and authenticating state power with the discourse of science and technology) have all contributed to this connection between the nation-state and science. Yet, a burst of relatively recent work in both the history of technology and STS on everyday technologies, users, publics, populist science, and so forth, invite us subvert this link, or at least seek new spaces to situate the production of knowledge.¹⁵ There is a corollary opening here, one that has to do with the literature’s undue focus on elite actors. South Asian scientific elites of the mid-twentieth century such as Meghnad Saha, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, P. C. Mahalanobis, and others have become so closely identified with the meta-narrative of South Asian science, technology, and development, that to resist the historicity of personality-driven science and technology risks elisions and lacunae in any given story.¹⁶ While conceding that elite actors were important in defining the nature and contours of science and technology in India, these papers reveal points where others were able to produce knowledge and artifacts without succumbing to the kind of ‘totality’ (to use the word favored by Sarabhai) of narrative that reduces all other activity to the margins. Both my essay on the multiplicity of interactions at the international level in the creation of a rocket launch range at Thumba, as well as Mukharji’s articulation of the ways in which a scientific instrument could offer a narrative of national racial development do this, paradoxically, by drawing from the ‘great man’ narrative of Indian science but situating their actions in contexts where their power and authority are not the main story.

A few brief words are necessary to introduce the central questions at stake in each individual essay. Mitra’s article explores how doctors in colonial Bengal in the early twentieth century used medical texts to establish the contours of ‘appropriate’ forms of behavior. Their translation of notions of women’s sexuality into the creation of a ‘vernacular science of sex’ was deployed as an instrument to articulate a kind of ‘scientific modernity’ in colonial India. Mitra argues that the regulation of female desire became crucial to Bengali imaginations of a progressive society although paradoxically, women’s sexual desire represented to these Bengali intellectuals both a relic of an ancient era and the manifestations of the intrusion of the European ‘modern’ colonial world. She notes, for example, that ‘[t]he use of prostitute as synonymous with a wide range of Bengali terms that … described “deviant” women outside of the conjugal home was no accident.’ It was, she suggests, ‘a techné – a process of meaning-making through which Bengali male intellectuals produced equivalence and commensurability between scientific ideas and culturally-specific social practices and categories that had become primary markers in colonial critiques of the difference of Indian society.’ Thus, we can see here translation functioning not only as a technology to abstract and redeploy in new ways the universalist scientific ideas identified with Europeans and Americans but also as a tool to reframe female sexuality as a metonym for the appropriate and idealized order of the (modern) social world within India.

Mukharji’s interrogation of the place of biometrics focuses on the particular uses and understandings of the profiloscope, an instrument – largely forgotten – that allowed a precise determination of an individual’s racial identity based on facial profiles. Whereas much of the literature on race and technology has been framed through the lens of imperial power, Mukharji explores how the science of race, instrumentalized through the profiloscope, could be used to articulate anti-colonial positions at odds with dominant European ideas. In other words, his article recovers a critical episode in the relationship between technology and the constitution of the nation in South Asia. Mukharji’s understanding of the political valence of ‘biometric nationalism’ puts the claims of key actors in a new light. We see, for example, how P. C. Mahalanobis was able to see the nation as a ‘dynamically racialized community’ that was ‘sufficiently united to point towards the historical inevitability of evolving into a [unified Indian] nation.’ Mahalanobis’ vision was, Mukharji argues, anti-essentialist and included a space for non-individual notions of nationhood, a compelling hybrid vision of the future of free India. Mukharji clarifies that ‘the political imaginary [of biometric nationalism] engendered in the profiloscope’ was one which ‘none of the competing nationalist movements … were willing to admit at the time, i.e. that the “nation” in South Asia was not a collection necessarily of individuals’ but ‘a collection of other, seemingly older, social groups.’

Sackley also invokes the work of P. C. Mahalanobis, but on his more well-known contributions to India’s second Five-Year Plan in the late 1950s. In looking at the debates among Indians and Americans in the 1960s about the proper role of the state in economic development, Sackley’s work is a provocative intervention into the roots of the global neoliberal economic order in the late twentieth century. Sackley shows how India was a kind of laboratory for economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, who favored Indian economic planning in the mode of Mahalanobis, and neoliberal actors such as Milton Friedman and B. R. Shenoy who advocated less domestic regulation, each side invoking rhetoric and creating narratives to support their respective positions. Sackley’s focus on the production of a kind of technical knowledge here in India draws into relief the ‘intersecting imaginaries’ played out in many of the other papers. On the one hand, we see here the ultimate ascent of neoliberal ideas as a ‘universal economic theory’ in the international economic order. But there is another, deeper story here about how actors also understood this episode as an explanatory variable to explain India’s economic woes in the 1960s and 1970s. There is an obvious tension here between the ‘global’ and the ‘local,’ but a no less important one between how technocrats imagined their brand of universalism in the face of evidence for more atomized and fragmented narratives. This imagination was manifested in ‘economic storytelling’ that weaved together the past, present, and desired future of India.

In my essay on India’s first rocket launch site, Thumba, at the southern tip of India, I argue that Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a rocket program within India. Since India lacked the infrastructure to create its own space program, actors such as Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai brought a space program to India by inviting foreign scientists to study in India what was not possible elsewhere, the study of cosmic rays above the geomagnetic equator, which passes over the southern tip of India. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context. We see this played most viscerally in the large-scale forced displacement of the fishing community at Thumba.

Finally, Phalkey and Chattapadhyay focus on Indian attempts to use technology as an instrument of mass education. Their focus is on the Aakash tablet computer developed in the early 2000s, but they situate the story in a longer narrative dating back to the 1970s when the first large-scale state-sponsored programs for mass education using modern technologies first gained traction. Their interrogation of the unquestioned assumption that technological solutions offer the most effective solution to poverty are articulated in the form of an investigation into the ‘failure’ of the Aakash. They argue that in such cases, the ‘devices become the desire,’ and as such, when the device ‘fails,’ it becomes a metaphor for the state’s inability to innovate. Yet, simultaneously, in the case of Aakash, the project paradoxically established a ‘popular imaginary of the tablet computer as an essential and familiar everyday object.’ In that sense, failure and success were measuring entirely different metrics. In an allusion to the problem of scale (e.g. the ‘local’ and the ‘global’), the authors ‘find … a number of key individuals who circulate through various nodes of the state structure, and shape, in the process, the negotiated manifestations of the technological imagination….’ Ultimately, in recovering a critical episode in ‘the technological imagination of the post-liberalization state in India’ through a study of the Aakash case, the authors contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between powerful individuals (‘technocrats’) and the state, where ‘the state apparatus often found themselves unable to create, effectively control, and deliver durable socio-technical imaginaries.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Martin Collins, Dina Siddiqi, David Ludden, and Anoo Siddiqi for their helpful comments in preparing this introduction.

Notes

1. Jaggi, History of Science and Technology in India; Kuppuram and Kumudamani, eds., History of Science and Technology in India; Bag, ed., History of Technology in India; Srivathsa and Narasimhan, eds., Science & Technology in India Through the Ages.

2. For representative examples of critical inquiry on the colonial period, see McLeod and Kumar, eds., Technology and the Raj; Baber, The Science of Empire; Prakash, Another Reason; Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India; Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India; Kumar, Science and the Raj; Raina and Habib, Domesticating Modern Science.

3. Here, the often-cited and critiqued reference point is George Basalla’s (in)famous ‘The Spread of Western Science.’

4. For a general survey of science and technology in twentieth century South Asia, see Chakrabarti, “Science in India in the Twentieth Century.” For a brief meditation on the problems and challenges of scholarship, see Kumar, “Developing a History of Science and Technology in South Asia.” For critical historiographical surveys covering similar periods and often beyond South Asia, see Arnold, “Europe, Technology, and Colonialism in the twentieth Century”; Raina, Images and Contexts.

5. For a recent overview on Nehru and science, see Arnold, “Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India.”

6. See the works of Robert S. Anderson, particularly his Nucleus and Nation.

7. See the special issues of: Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 15 (Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise), especially its “Introduction” by MacLeod; Science, Technology & Society: An International Journal Devoted to the Developing World 4, no. 2 (1999) and especially the “Introduction” by Osborne; and the special issue of Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009).

8. In addition to the works cited in Ref. 3, the most trenchant literature on the history of science, technology, and medicine in mid and late twentieth century South Asia includes: Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb; Gupta, Postcolonial Developments; Sur, Dispersed Radiance; Phalkey, Atomic State; Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern; Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body; and Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism, and Commerce. To these, one should add the special focus section in Isis 104, no. 2 (June 2013) edited by Phalkey on “Science, History, and Modern India.”

9. For postcolonial science and its problematics, see Anderson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience”; Moon, “Introduction”; Seth, “Putting knowledge in its place.”

10. Attentive readers will note that the three papers focused on the post-1947 era are largely about India, rather than the other South Asian nation-states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bhutan. This geographical demarcation was entirely accidental rather than deliberate. Our original goal was to include contributions that cut across large parts of the geography of South Asia, unfettered by national boundaries. However, due to a number of scheduling and logistical factors, we were unable to include those contributions.

11. I appropriate the term ‘an anthropology of intersecting imaginaries’ from Tsing’s ‘anthropology of intersecting global imaginaries.’ See her In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, 289 which is cited in Anderson, “Introduction,” 658 (Ref. 65).

12. For a useful meditation on the problem the ‘local’ in the history of colonial science, see Chambers and Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science.”

13. Anderson cites this quote in his ‘Introduction’ as do a number of other historians working on colonial and postcolonial contexts. For the original, see Pigg, “Inventing social categories through place.”

14. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Burton, ed., Archive Stories. See also Chowdhury, “A Historian among Scientists.”

15. See, for example, Arnold, Everyday Technology. For broader literature, see Edgerton, The Shock of the Old; Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds., How Users Matter.

16. In many ways, the literature on the history of science and technology in South Asia is one about biography. In lieu of an exhaustive list, the following constitute some of the more widely known works in this genre: Venkataraman, Bhabha and His Magnificent Obsessions; Deshmukh, Homi Jehangir Bhabha; Chowdhury and Dasgupta, A Masterful Spirit; Joshi, ed., Vikram Sarabhai; Shah, Vikram Sarabhai; Mallik and Chatterjee, Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan; Parameswaran, C. V. Raman; Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.