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

This arithmetic element of the State found its specific power in the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matter (raw materials), the secondary matter of worked objects, or the ultimate matter constituted by the human population.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari²

This book examines the use of the Internet by global Indian communities for the promotion of Hindu nationalist ideologies, a phenomenon that I term “technocultural Hindu nationalism,” with reference to the relationship between technology and nationalism in India from the period of British colonial rule in the mid-eighteenth century to the present era of an economically and technologically interconnected world. Since the introduction of Western science and technology under colonial rule in India in the eighteenth century, science and technology have been used as instruments of mapping, controlling, and transforming Indian society. Equally, scientific and technological expertise have been authorized as attributes of modern Indian selfhood––as markers, at once, of a universality and an essential Indianness. Since the colonial era, in the imagination of both state and society, the possessors of technological skills have been vested with the authority to speak for the nation. State and society have granted the holders of technological skills and qualifications economic opportunities, educational advantages, and social status. Even as the relationship between technology and nationalism has been marked by continuities and discontinuities over the passage of time, it has endured as fundamentally constitutive of Indian modernity.

As Gyan Prakash has compellingly demonstrated, in the nineteenth century, an upper-caste educated Hindu intelligentsia argued that the defining characteristic of ancient Indian civilization was its scientific and technological character—one that could be mobilized to effect an Indian renaissance and liberate India from the effects of Islamic invasions and British colonial domination.³ In elite Indian discourse, scientific expertise was valorized as a traditional Hindu attribute and the means to a unique Indian modernity. This conception of scientificity was inextricably woven into emergent narratives of anticolonial nationalism.