Inventive Indians: Technological Imaginaries and Patenting Activity in Late Colonial India (1911–48)

Abstract

The Patent Act extended to colonial India in 1859 introduced to Indians the right to file a patent for an invention. The article locates India as a site for invention and innovation, not by looking at the legal evolution of the law or the inventions themselves, but at the Indian patentees’ engagement with the law. The consistent but small number of Indian patentees is suggestive of patent-filing being a form of sustained engagement with technological modernity. The establishment of a Patent Office completed the bureaucratic structure and was an intrinsic part of the development of India as a technocratic and scientific state. Examining the nature of this colonial institution, the paper examines a parallel process which shaped patenting: Indianisation. The colonial policy of Indianisation shaped Indians’ access to employment and research in technical institutes. This had two visible but discrete consequences: in the number of Indian employees whose patents were acquired by the government, and the creation of a notable ‘patent culture’ with the Patent Office in Calcutta as a site and headed by an Indian. The paper uses the patent law as an axis to illuminate conversations around inventive activity in colonial India.