| Chapter 1: | Introduction: Technology and Nationalism in India From Colonialism to Cyberspace |
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They have benefited from the valorization of scientific education and occupations in independent India. And they have benefited from the notion—strongly endorsed by the Indian state and society—that working in technology-related fields is an act of serving the nation.
But there are other, still older, antecedents of the relationship between technology and nationalism whose shadows still fall on the 1947–1991 context of socialist industrial development and secular nationalism as well as the post-1991 context of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. Here, the more distant shores of the colonial past of the Indian nation beckon. Following the conquest of Indian territories by the British East India Company around the mid-eighteenth century, the nascent colonial state in India began the task of accumulating information about the native land and people through topographic, statistical, and other surveys, setting in place a relationship between Western science and technology and the act of defining the Indian nation and people.48 In the bargain, India was transformed from the heart of darkness to a “space constituted by technics,” a land primed for the functioning of roads, railways, and telegraphs.49 But there were other kinds of consequences, too. For example, Keay suggests that the tremendous human cost of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTS) and the activities related to the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian of the nineteenth century might have contributed to the tide of anti-British sentiment that culminated in the 1857 Rebellion, the first anticolonial uprising in India.50
It was only after 1835, when the colonial administration extended its patronage to scientific education in the medium of English, that Indians were granted the opportunity to prove their scientific abilities.51 Prakash has argued that the decision to extend scientific learning to Indians embodied a paradox with powerful consequences for a manner of thinking national identity.52 On the one hand, the decision reaffirmed the discourse of civilizational difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, which defined the European West as rational, enlightened, and civilized and the non-West as primitive and irrational. On the other hand, the decision was an indirect admission by the British that Indians were capable of rational scientific thought. Indians could stake a claim to a universal humanity and rationality via the medium of science, since science embodied universal and rationalist values.53