Introduction

The history of technology of South Asia should justifiably reflect the particularities of South Asian colonial pasts and the trends that became palpable at its postcolonial moment. In what historically specific ways has coloniality intersected with technology in South Asia? The particular questions of colonial power and exclusions, the autonomy of the subaltern voice, and the imagined futures as India at independence grappled with a new socio-economic order in the midst of colonial legacies call upon historians to make purposeful selection of archives and to deploy specific methods. These choices should determine the nature of South Asian technological history. In other words, a technological history of South Asia cannot simply be a history of technology "in South Asia," a one-sided imposition of historiography of technology on a new geographical site.¹ The contributors to this volume agree that South Asia should not be treated simply as an empirical site to which the already existing analytics and methodologies of the broader field of history of technology can be "extended." Our implicit claim in writing these technological stories is that South Asia should be (and it already is) also a location to unravel new analytics and methods. The contributors thus aim to demonstrate how looking at the history of technology from South Asia changes what it means to do history of technology.

Calling the approach followed by the contributors to this volume post-Marxist and post-nationalist would be eminently inadequate, if a safe label. Just as much as they are distanced from older Marxist and nationalist approaches, the contributors are also heirs to standard critiques of modernity within a certain mode of analysis in South Asia. Readers will find in these articles a direct engagement with the question of the modern and the place of technology in the construction of the modern. Political modernity and its various institutions, Dipesh Chakrabarty told us, "all bear the burden of European thought and history."² In a sign that such questioning of modernity's universal claims have become mainstream, all South Asianists proceed with the assumption that the metanarrative of modernity may after all be inadequate to assess all of the lived experiences in South Asia. This reflexivity to "modern" defines all of the contributors' technological histories, and perhaps sets them apart. While questioning modernity is a staple in the historiography of technology, the contributors in this volume will critique modernity from a position firmly within South Asian scholarly conventions.

Approach and Themes

The articles in this volume display a distinctive crossdisciplinarity that is not out of sync with trends in the field of South Asia, and reflects the way the field has evolved and honed its disciplinary practices over the years. A distinct porosity of the discipline of history in South Asia can be traced to its earliest incarnations. The 1960s works of Bernard Cohn, a pioneer in the field, are instructive. Cohn's work is distinctive, among other things, for exploring conjointly the methods, practices, and theories of two disciplines, what Cohn referred to as "Anthropologyland" and "Historyland." Later, writing a foreword in an omnibus to Cohn's work, Dipesh Chakrabarty celebrated the ease with which Cohn was known to navigate the disciplines of history and anthropology and to call them both "home."³ The 1960s trend was further consolidated with the emergence of the subaltern studies in the 1980s that emerged as a critique of historicism across several disciplines. The active crossdisciplinarity of the subaltern and postcolonial arms of South Asian historiography accelerated the field's spread into disciplines of social sciences and invited the involvement of postcolonial theorists from multiple disciplines.⁴ The same crossdisciplinarity marks the approaches in South Asian technological history broadly, which have come to incorporate the practice of radical social history, a new political economy, historical and cultural anthropology, ethno-history, and literary and textual analysis.

Historians of technology in South Asia marshal this crossdisciplinarity to address a number of questions that can be seen as central to the historiography of technology. To review every pertinent question would be a herculean task even for a start. But in trying to keep the review of...