Everyday technology : machines and the making of India's modernity / David Arnold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Arnold, David, 1946-

Series:

Science.culture.

Science.culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technology transfer--India.

Technology transfer.

Technology--India--History.

Technology.

India--Social conditions.

India.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (230 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago, Ill. ; London : University of Chicago Press, c2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One. India's Technological Imaginary

Chapter Two. Modernizing Goods

Chapter Three. Technology, Race, and Gender

Chapter Four. Swadeshi Machines

Chapter Five. Technology and Well-Being

Chapter Six. Everyday Technology and the Modern State

Epilogue: The God of Small Things

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

Description based on online resource; title from title page (ebrary, viewed May 25, 2013).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226922034

0226922030

OCLC:

844235389