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

Correspondingly, the Indian nationalist elite did not uncritically accept technology as proof of the inherent cultural superiority of the West.⁵⁷ The imputation of cultural neutrality to technology by the Indian nationalist elite meant paradoxically that they could adopt it as Indian without the fear that such adoption would have a negative cultural impact on Indian communities.

It is not too difficult to see the debt owed, respectively, by the Nehruvian and the Hindu nationalist perspectives to the Indian anticolonial nationalist elite’s understanding of the relationship between technology and nationalism. The Nehruvian framework took the obsession with scientificity as an embodiment of national identity and incorporated it into a socialist and secular nationalist definition of the Indian nation-state and society. The Hindu nationalist framework, as seen online, combines the statist emphasis on scientificity with anticolonial nationalist arguments about Hindu science and Hindu revival into an exclusivist definition of national identity. It also reworks these ideas into its projections of global ascendancy for the Hindu-Indian nation. In all three historical phases—the anticolonial nationalist, Nehruvian socialist, and neoliberal Hindu nationalist—science and technology operate as signifiers of service to the nation and markers of social and cultural status in Indian society. Similarly, what has endured across the anticolonial nationalist, Nehruvian, and Hindu nationalist paradigms is the multiple, if paradoxical, symbolizations of science and technology as simultaneously, or alternately, Western, universal, and Indian.

In each historical phase, the associations between technology and nationalism have condensed in ideas about self and other; they have been incorporated in imaginings of the state and the nation; and they have materialized as claims about identity, community, and society. From the nineteenth century onwards, Hindu elites have also defined scientificity as a Hindu quality to be cultivated within the individual and the cultural group. Technology, on the one hand, has enabled the conflation of Indian and Hindu identity. On the other hand, it has also stood for a transcending of particularist identities as a means of realizing a pan-Indian universal identity.