Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

Chapter 1

Introduction: Technology and Nationalism in India From Colonialism to Cyberspace

It was science alone that could solve these problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.

—Jawaharlal Nehru¹

Arithmetic, the number, have always had a decisive role in the State apparatus: this is so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy…It is even more true of modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social calculus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization of work, etc.).