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This book traces the role of technology in shaping, curating, disseminating and archiving knowledge and life in South Asia. It focuses on empirical studies of transformative social processes unleashed by technological intervention in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
List of contents
Introduction: Understanding and Representing Colonial IndiaAryendra Chakravartty and Samiparna Samanta 1. The Making of a City: Impetuosity and Interpolations Shrimoyee Basu Thakurta 2. From Purity to Hygiene: Bhadralok Domesticity and the Restructuring of Bengali HouseholdSuparna Chakraborty 3. Knowledge Technology Contested: Cholera, Commerce, and Quarantine in Nineteenth-Century India Arabinda Samanta4. Preparing the "Veterinary Baboo": The Pupils and Pedagogy at Bengal Veterinary College, 1893-1920Aritri Chakrabarti5. The White Man As A Burden on History: A Centre Of Oriental Culture, 1942- 1947 Dharitri Bhattacharya6. Alternative Technologies: A Different Road to Development Kaushalya Bajpayee
About the author
Aryendra Chakravartty is Associate Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on World History, South Asia, and British Empire. His research interest focuses on identity and belonging, and regionalism and nationalism in modern South Asia. He has published in multiple academic journals, including
Modern Asian Studies,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, and
Indian Historical Review. He is currently completing his book
Region in the Making of a Nation: Bihar in Colonial India.
Samiparna Samanta is Professor of History at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. She teaches courses on global histories, British Empire, modern South Asia, and social history of law. Her research focuses on history of science, medicine, and colonialism primarily in the context of Bengal. In her recent book,
Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal 1850-1920 (2021) she disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to explore the nexus between race, class, and species in the history of colonial India. Her current book project investigates the many lives of the dead to write a history of the anatomical and spectral body in British India.
