Everyday Technology
Machines and the Making of India's Modernity
232 pages
|
22 halftones, 4 tables
|
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
|
© 2013
In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday.
Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.
Arnold’s fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.
Andrew Robinson | Nature
“Everyday Technology organizes an enormous amount of unfamiliar detail on a hitherto largely neglected subject, reinforced with copious statistics and illustrated with some appealing historical and contemporary images. It is enlivened by apt quotations from novels and films of the period.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
“David Arnold’s brilliant and imaginative history of everyday technology effectively refashions the very story of India’s modernity. The ubiquitous bicycle, the once-popular mechanical sewing machine, the still extant typewriter, and the rice mill that straddles rural-urban divides have all found their historian in the author of Colonizing the Body. Arnold has, once again, broken new ground in South Asian history.”
Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Everyday Technology is a lucid, engaging work on acculturation of modern technology in India. Rather than focusing on the usual ‘big’ projects such as railways and hydroelectric plants that require large capital investment, David Arnold takes on the ‘small’ technologies of modern life that changed the everyday lives of millions of Indians. He thus shifts the focus on agency in the history of technology: from inventors to adapters and users, and from an emphasis on how the imperial West viewed its technological other to how India ‘imagined itself.’ Arnold’s erudition and imagination will be attractive to both scholars and lay audiences.”
Suzanne Moon, University of Oklahoma
“Exploring small technologies that swiftly passed into the realm of everyday life in India, David Arnold’s remarkable book offers nothing less than a new perspective on technology and modernity. Clear, insightful, and compelling from start to finish, Everyday Technology uses the sewing machine, typewriter, bicycle, and rice mill to offer us a history of the ‘subaltern engagement with the machine’ that brings to life the ways that ordinary people wove such new technologies into their everyday existence under conditions of colonialism. Arnold’s attention to the small allows a street-level view of the relationships between technology and race, gender, class, and authority. His focus on ordinary technologies in ordinary life paradoxically provides a deeper understanding of the profundity of the social and technological transformations taking place, adding texture to our understanding of the character and emergence of technological modernities in the twentieth century.”
Michael Adas, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
“In an age that has been captivated by the potential and perils of the large-scale, fossil fuel–driven technologies of the industrial watershed, David Arnold reminds us of the pervasive impact of more modest but nonetheless ingenious machines. Drawing on a diverse range of sources and compelling case examples, he explores the transformative effects of small-scale technologies, including bicycles and sewing machines, on the politics, production, social relations, and everyday lives of the peoples of India—and implicitly those of most of humanity over the past half millennium.”
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
India’s Technological Imaginary
India’s Technological Imaginary
Chapter Two
Modernizing Goods
Chapter Three
Technology, Race, and Gender
Chapter Four
Swadeshi Machines
Chapter Five
Technology and Well-Being
Chapter Six
Everyday Technology and the Modern State
Epilogue: The God of Small Things
Acknowledgments Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
History: Asian History | General History | History of Technology
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
