A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi by Leo Coleman (review)

In what sense can technology be described as "moral"? Drawing in part on the anthropology of A. M. Hocart, Leo Coleman argues that the moral (or alternatively, "ritual") aspects of technology cannot be separated from its material presence. Expectations of how a given technology should operate are interlaced with questions of political ideology, with legal status and social participation: technology transcends its narrowly utilitarian functions. As Coleman puts it, "electricity … reshapes the space and time in which people live and creates new ways of making social distinctions and crafting judgments about life elsewhere" (p. x). To substantiate this argument, Coleman examines three "moral moments" (p. 178) in the history of electrification in Delhi, each corresponding to a different political era and to landmark legislative acts. The first episode centers on the durbar organized by viceroy Nathaniel Curzon in 1903, and his highly ritualized and political use of electric lighting to represent, symbolically and materially, British imperial authority and technological modernity, a theatrical display of power upstaged by some of India's remarkably "modern" princes.

The second episode relates to Delhi, from 1912 the imperial (and then national) capital, and so a "central place for a modernist politics of progress and planning" (p. 3) as India entered the era of post-independence politics. Electricity helped drive prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's grand moral and technocratic vision for a modern India, but the management of this and other public utilities also entered debates in the constituent assembly in the late 1940s about state mortality, democratic involvement, and how best to govern the fast-growing capital. Not the least interesting aspect of this part of Coleman's discussion is his comparison of Curzon and Gandhi who, for all their profound differences, are seen to share a common appreciation of the relationship between technology and moral authority.

The first two episodes draw upon archival material; for the third and most substantial part of the book, Coleman turns to his own ethnographic observations of Delhi, as its electrical supply and distribution became subject at the start of this century to neoliberal privatization and decentralization. Middle-class citizens, struggling with blackouts and power surges, dubious meters and inflated billing, are galvanized into action through residents' welfare associations as well by their own individual agency. Electricity shapes the ways in which householders understand—and try to rework—relations with society and the state, with the imagined past and material present, and with India's equivocal place in the world (glitzy, technological modernity on one side, dodgy wiring and dark pools of absent illumination on the other). It is in this final section that Coleman's ethno-graphic examination of urban morality politics and technological change is most finely explored, leading him into a close discussion of recent scholarship on politics and governance in India and a critical revisiting of the village anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s.

For a relatively short book, Coleman covers enormous ground. From the beginnings of colonial electrification to neoliberal privatization, his analysis encompasses the history of an exemplary technology, the anthropology of ritual performance and consumer activism, the politics of empire and the postcolonial nation. Electricity clearly emerges as both a material commodity and a site for complex and varied moralization: it is both instrument and affect. Coleman's engagement with the theory and politics of power is wide-ranging and probing. But for the historian of technology, how much of this is, in essence, new? Is the "rationalizing historian"—to borrow Hocart's disparaging phrase—really so materialistic as to treat all ritual as "frivolous" (pp. xiv–xv)? As Coleman himself observes, the ideological coupling of India's "moral and material progress" was "among the most clichéd elements in the colonial lexicon" (p. 2). And it would be hard to see the science and technology of the Nehruvian era as being anything but charged with compelling morality and meaning. The choice of Delhi...