In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa
from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out
his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the
technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his
protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one
of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question
the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully
understand how India first advanced into technological modernity,
argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday.
Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines
and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became
objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies
such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the
assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing
machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the
ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and
the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not
limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold
demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new
ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the
politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold’s
fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of
modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what
modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of
people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small
technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.
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Machines and the Making of India's Modernity
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226922034
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter