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

The models evaluated are Gandhi’s dream of an Indian nation of villages, premised on a radical critique of Western industrial modernity; the Hindu state theorized by V. D. Savarkar, the pioneering ideologue of Hindu nationalism; and the socialist scheme of an industrially advanced and socially progressive India proposed by Jawaharlal Nehru. The chapter also covers what may be called the era of Nehruvian socialism (1947–1991), given the triumph of Nehru’s vision over the other models at the moment of independence. In Nehruvian India, science and technology were expected to cure the nation of its economic and social backwardness. The idea of the scientific temperament as a highly desirable national characteristic was also strongly reinforced through state policies. I describe how Indian socioeconomic elites interpreted this statist discourse, accepting the state’s endorsement of scientific and technological capital but not necessarily the idea that science should serve the objectives of social justice.

Chapter 5 follows the relationship between technology and nationalism since 1991, with reference to the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy as well as the resurgence of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s. Each of these paradigms proposes a particular definition of the Indian nation and a blueprint for national progress that will help realize India’s potential in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. The convergence between the two paradigms reflects a new form of the relationship between technology and nationalism—technocultural Hindu nationalism—typically seen in Web sites addressed to a global Hindu audience.

I analyze the characteristics of technocultural Hindu nationalism with reference to wider historical, social, cultural, and economic contextual factors. I argue that the claim presented on Hindu nationalist Web sites that scientificity is a simultaneously Hindu, Indian, and global trait is strongly rooted in early Indian anticolonial nationalist consciousness. Similarly, technocultural Hindu nationalism draws significantly on the legacy of the statist logic of technological development articulated in Nehruvian India, even though Hindu nationalism opposes Nehruvian notions of socialism and secularism.