Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 by Suvobrata Sarkar

Abstract

Buttressing the limited scholarship on techno-scientific education in colonial India, Let there be Light studies the establishment and expansion of electrical infrastructure in colonial Bengal between 1880 and 1945. Sarkar analyzes how the growing interest in technical education, particularly engineering, combined with increasing entrepreneurial experimentation to drive indigenous industrial expansion across several fields, from electricity to chemical engineering.The book has much to commend it, not least its detailed review of critical shifts in scholarly understanding of the transmission, circulation, and reception of modern science and technology. Sarkar revisits the (well-established) limits of diffusionist models that posit unidirectional flows, emanating outward from European centers. In contrast, he grounds his research within contemporary postcolonial scholarship, which emphasizes the social construction of technologies, both big and small, while demonstrating how, conceptually and materially, science and technology in India synthesized colonial and indigenous concepts “of what created the modern world” (8–9, 13–14). Sarkar’s exposition of infrastructural development thus delineates colonial spaces as innovative “localities,” where techno-scientific knowledge is co-produced in the interaction “between special communities of diverse origins” (6–7).The book weaves together three interrelated but distinct strands of discussion about the dialogue between technical education and industrial expansion. Using case studies, Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the rise of degree-level technical education and of pioneering entrepreneurs as necessary preconditions for industrial growth in India. Sketching an institutional history of two important engineering colleges in Bengal—Bengal Engineering (Sibpur) and the College of Engineering and Technology (Jadavpur)—Sarkar emphasizes the debates and struggles involved in establishing techno-scientific education, especially given the theoretically saturated nature of academic engineering and the preference by educated Bengalis for law and medicine. To demonstrates how firms owned and managed by Bengalis transformed the industrial landscape, Chapter 2 traces the professional work of Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, “the doyen of Indian engineering” (21), and Prafulla Chandra Ray, founder of Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works.Chapters 3 and 4 hone in on how Calcutta became electrified, starting from the 1880s onward. with Sarkar asking what was “unique” about the city in that it was electrified “almost simultaneously with Western industrial nations” (117). Chapters 3 follows the work of the Calcutta Electric Supply Company, tracing how electricity became integrated into the Calcutta’s civic landscape, from overhead fans in government buildings to electric tramways and electrified public displays. It simultaneously delineates the challenges that beset the process, whether the highly capital-intensive nature of this technology or the technical issues surrounding its transmission and distribution. Chapter 4 discusses how this predominantly imported technology was domesticated, whether in being used to power large-scale industry like textile mills or in its integration with allied fields such as medicine (the x-ray for example). This utility, in fact, became a locus for demands about industrial nationalization and an end to colonial monopolies—the vein in which the book concludes. Chapter 5 offers wide-ranging examples from Bengali journals in which the educated debated India’s industrial future; what emerges are sketches of several “subaltern technologists” who remained devoid of formal technological training but who articulated emerging technologies in ways that demonstrated “social ownership and cultural belonging” (191).Let there be Light is not only a valuable addition to scholarship about the history of electrification in colonial India but also a deeply researched elucidation of how technology, education, and entrepreneurship shaped India’s industrial terrain, the last of which the book’s extensive contextualization is particularly helpful in clarifying. At times, however, the book veers away from the relationship between technical education and the development of electrical infrastructure. A similar tension dogs the book’s emphasis on restoring subaltern voices—those in the “House of Unknown Fame,” as Sarkar terms it (204)—teased out from his study of Bengali sources. Such discussions are as vital to recovering the everyday life of global technologies and to understanding them in social context. However, perhaps this aspect requires even more precise discussion of the relational aspects of subalternity—that is, of the entrepreneurs and technologists who collectively populate the book. Such minor quibbles notwithstanding, Let there be Light offers a rich exposition of the social life of technologies, its relationship to entrepreneurship and industry, and its role in shaping India’s colossal infrastructure map.