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

In the case of colonial and postcolonial Indian society, for instance, the limits are revealed with regard to the formulation of the religious field, the question of Eurocentricity, and the problematic of instrumentality. Inasmuch as there is a risk of a totalizing or mechanistic application of theory to context—which holds for any theoretical framework and not just that of Bourdieu—the use of other key theoretical ideas or concepts enhances the heuristic power of the framework, as well as the possibility of internal critique. Bourdieu’s framework, then, does not claim to be exempt from the play and logic of power structures, but vests its truth claims in a rigorously wrested autonomy that is necessary for social scientific inquiry.

Chapter 3 illustrates the Janus-faced roles of science and technology during the early period of colonial rule and anticolonial nationalism. The chapter covers the introduction of Western science and technology in India and focuses on interventions of the colonial state in educational, cultural, and other domains as it consolidated its presence in the Indian subcontinent. As instruments of the colonial state, Western science and technology played a key role in the upheavals wrought by the rupture of colonialism upon indigenous political traditions, economic structures, and modes of sociality in India. However, Western science and technology were also reconfigured and claimed as instruments of national empowerment by an English-speaking, educated Hindu elite. In elite Indian discourse, scientific expertise was constructed 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. The polyvalent status ascribed at this originary moment to science and technology in India—as Western and Eastern, national and universal, Hindu and Indian—set in place a template that recurs in later historical periods.

Chapter 4 traces the development of the technological field and capital in India over the course of much of the twentieth century. I approach the relationship between technology and nationalism in the phase prior to independence in 1947 through an assessment of three competing visions for the Indian nation-state, each of which offers a philosophical perspective about the nature of the state and proposes a corresponding role for technological development as a matter of state responsibility.