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

by David Arnold

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.

Genres: History, Read For School, Nonfiction, Technology

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Biju P.R.]

Telling accounts of technology and its interfaces with India's modernity, the book takes us for a compelling look at the way India's modernity was constructed in reference to technology. The book portrays how the European technology which was imagined for the use of the Europeans, later adapted to couturiers like India. The apparels we wore, food we eat, machines we use, transport facilities we depend are all a product of Europe's modernity but later adapted into Indian situation. This book is a must read for all those scholars and enthusiasts who looks at the technological modernity in India. I recommend this book to all technology loves!

[User1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I started this book because I wanted to know about the type culture in India, and although not much about that topic is covered here, there were many many other wonderful things that I came across in this book.

One of my favorite quotes is

Unless one takes the antiquated view that technology is an autonomous feld of human endeavor and warrants study in isolation from the society around it, all technologies must in some way be grounded in the societies in which they are created, or, as is principally true in the non-West, in the societies in which they become embedded, within which they undergo adaptation, compromise, and assimilation, through which they acquire new meanings and usages.

And in the same spirit, through these pages I have come to understand the context of technology in India much more. The bibliographical essay in the end was quite surprising, since I have never seen something of this kind before, and I hope to dig into more literature from there soon.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid history of small-scale technology in India over the last couple of centuries. The argument--that smaller technology like sewing machines and bicycles are just as significant as "big technology" projects--was persuasive. The book was well written and well documented.