Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India's Modernity

230 Pages·2013·1.97 MB·English

by  David Arnold

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Arnold’s fascinating book off ers new perspectives on ◆◆ ◆ ◆ “In an age that has been captivated by the potential and perils of the
the globalization of modern technologies and shows us ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ large-scale, fossil fuel–driven technologies of the industrial watershed,
that to truly understand what modernity became, we David Arnold reminds us of the pervasive impact of more modest but E
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need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all nonetheless ingenious machines. Drawing on a diverse range of sources
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walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ and compelling case examples, he explores the transformative eff ects Everyday
technologies to reinvent their world and themselves. ◆◆ ◆ ◆ of small-scale technologies, including bicycles and sewing machines, e Everyday
on the politics, production, social relations, and everyday lives of the
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peoples of India—and implicitly those of most of humanity over the Technology TECHNOLOGY
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past half millennium.” y
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ michael adas, Rutgers University
d Machines and the Making
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“David Arnold’s brilliant and imaginative history of everyday technology
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ a of India’s Modernity
eff ectively refashions the very story of India’s modernity. The ubiquitous Machines and
◆◆ ◆ ◆ bicycle, the once-popular mechanical sewing machine, the still extant y
DAVID ARNOLD
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ typewriter, and the rice mill that straddles rural-urban divides have all the Making of India’s

found their historian in the author of Colonizing the Body. Arnold has,
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u once again, broken new ground in South Asian history.” Modernity In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ o.ed dipesh chakrabarty, University of Chicago e back to South Africa from London, wrote his now cel-
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◆◆ ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ uchica “Everyday Technology is a lucid, engaging work on acculturation of modern c efubtruartee do ft rIancdti Ha ianndd S fwaamraoju, slalyy irnegje octuitn hg itsh vei stieocnh nfoorlo tghie-
ss. technology in India. Rather than focusing on the usual ‘big’ projects h cal innovations of Western civilization. Despite his pro-
◆◆ ◆ ◆ pre such as railways and hydroelectric plants that require large capital in- testations, Western technology endured and helped to
david arnold is emeritus professor of Asian ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ ww. vestment, David Arnold takes on the ‘small’ technologies of modern life n make India one of the leading economies in our global-
and global history in the Department of History at the w
University of Warwick. Among his numerous works are ◆◆ ◆ ◆ s ftohcaut sc honan aggeedn tchye i nev tehrey hdiasyt olirvye os fo tfe mchilnlioolnosg oy:f fIrnodmia innsv. eHnet othrsu tso s ahdifatpst tehres o itzeecdh nwoolrolgdy. Fpelawy sw ionu mldo qdueernst liiofne, tbhuet dtoo fmuilnlya unnt droerles ttahnadt
Science, Technology , and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ s l
e and users, and from an emphasis on how the imperial West viewed its how India fi rst advanced into technological modernity,
and The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, ◆◆ ◆ ◆ r technological other to how India ‘imagined itself.’ Arnold’s erudition o argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology
and Science, 1800–1856. p
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ o and imagination will be attractive to both scholars and lay audiences.” g of the everyday.
swati chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara
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a y Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ c “Exploring small technologies that swiftly passed into the realm of ev- small machines and consumer goods that originated in
i
◆◆ ◆ ◆ h eryday life in India, David Arnold’s remarkable book off ers nothing less Europe and North America became objects of everyday
For information on books of related interest or for a
c than a new perspective on technology and modernity. Clear, insightful, use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
catalog of new publications, please write: ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆
f and compelling from start to fi nish, Everyday Technology uses the sewing centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies
Marketing Department ◆◆ ◆ ◆ o machine, typewriter, bicycle, and rice mill to off er us a history of the such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold exam-

The University of Chicago Press ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ y ‘subaltern engagement with the machine’ that brings to life the ways DAVID ines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles,
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1427 East 60th Street ◆◆ ◆ ◆ i that ordinary people wove such new technologies into their everyday ex- ARNOLD rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India,
Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA s istence under conditions of colonialism. Arnold’s attention to the small and follows their impact on the ways in which people
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www.press.uchicago.edu allows a street-level view of the relationships between technology and worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the
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◆◆ ◆ ◆ v race, gender, class, and authority. His focus on ordinary technologies chicago kind of food they ate. But the eff ects of these machines
JACKET ILLUSTRATION A Singer trade card, dating from i in ordinary life paradoxically provides a deeper understanding of the were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society,
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the early 1890s, suggesting the early use of sewing machines by profundity of the social and technological transformations taking place, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale tech-
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women in India and the domestic intimacy of the everyday machine. ◆◆ ◆ ◆
adding texture to our understanding of the character and emergence of nologies became integral to new ways of thinking about
Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society, e
Madison, WI (# 57879). AUTHOR PHOTO Juliet Miller ◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ h technological modernities in the twentieth century.” D A V I D A R N O L D class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of
BOOK + JACKET DESIGN Jill Shimabukuro ◆◆ ◆ ◆ t suzanne moon, University of Oklahoma colonial rule and Indian nationhood.
ISBN-13 978-0-226-92202-7
◆◆ ◆◆ ◆ ISBN-10 0-226-92202-2
◆◆ ◆ ◆ 90000
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science * culture 999 77780226 922027
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Everyday
Technology
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Machines and the Making
of India’s Modernity
david arnold
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
dAvid Arnold is professor emeritus of Asian and global history in the
Department of History at the University of Warwick. Among his numerous
works are Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; and The
Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-92202-7 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-92203-4 (e-book)
A CIP record for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
This paper meets the requirements of
Ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 3
chapter one
India’s Technological Imaginary
15
chapter two
Modernizing Goods
40
chapter three
Technology, Race, and Gender
69
chapter four
Swadeshi Machines
95
chapter five
Technology and Well-Being
121
chapter six
Everyday Technology and the Modern State
148
Epilogue: The God of Small Things 173
Acknowledgments 179 Notes 181
Bibliographical Essay 207
Index 219

Everyday
Technology
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Frontispiece. A Singer trade card, dating from the early 1890s, suggesting
the early use of sewing machines by women in India and the domestic intima-
cy of the everyday machine. Reproduced by kind permission of the Wisconsin
Historical Society, Madison, WI (WHi-57879).
Introduction
In April 2011 the long-established Indian firm of Godrej and
Boyce produced its last typewriter. This is likely to have been
the last such machine to be manufactured in India and one of the
last to be made anywhere in the world. Based in Mumbai (previ-
ously known as Bombay), Godrej and Boyce had been making
typewriters since 1955, though the history of typewriters in India
extends far back before that to machines imported, mainly from
Britain and the United States, in the late nineteenth century. The
production of the last Indian typewriter can be taken as marking
the end of a technological era—the age of the typewriter—not
just for India but globally. It invites reflection on the part that
typewriters and other small-scale machines, many of them pio-
neered in the mid and late nineteenth century, have played in the
making of the modern world and in the process we now think of
as globalization. Although many of these global goods—bicycles
and sewing machines are other examples—were initially made
in the West, they came to have a profound social, economic, and
cultural influence on many other parts of the world. Indeed, one
could hardly speak of them as “global goods” and as being rep-
resentative of “everyday technology” unless they had found a
significant place in the daily lives of people not just in the West
but also in Brazil and Argentina, in Egypt and South Africa, in
China and India.
This book is a study of small-scale technology in India be-
tween the 1880s, when many of these new, industrially produced
goods first came into use and began to find mass markets, and
the 1960s, by which time they had become widely disseminated
and, like the Godrej typewriters, locally produced. How and why
did these machines come into general use? Who used them, who