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

With independence in 1947, in keeping with the model of the Indian nation-state envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, science and technology in tandem with official philosophies of socialism and secularism were entrusted with the task of nation building. It was hoped that ambitious state projects of technological development would lead to economic prosperity and social justice for all segments of Indian society. The idea of the scientific temperament as a highly desirable individual and collective national characteristic was also strongly reinforced through state policies. Indian socioeconomic elites selectively internalized this statist discourse, for example, by delinking the imperative of social justice from the acquisition of scientific and technological skills. In 1991 the Indian state, through policy changes in favor of globalization and free market economic reforms, adopted economic neoliberalism as the official framework for governance and national development. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed the resurgence of the ideology of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva—the idea that India is essentially a Hindu nation and that minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, are outsiders—in Indian society. The domain of technology, especially the Internet, is a key area where these respective perspectives on the Indian nation converge. On Hindu nationalist Web sites addressed at a global Hindu audience, Hinduism is defined as ideally suited to the demands of a global capitalist modernity exemplified by free market ideologies and technologies such as the Internet. On these Web sites, Hindu religion and culture are also emphasized as the authentic foundations of Indian national identity. Technology, particularly the Internet, enables and symbolizes the conflation of the categories of Indian and Hindu into a new articulation of national identity and nationalism.

This book describes the historical negotiation between varied, often oppositional, discourses of technology and nationalism from the colonial era until the Internet age, with the objective of illuminating the complex dynamics of Hindu nationalist identity politics in cyberspace. This inquiry involves addressing four broad, related questions: