1st Edition

Technologies of Knowledge Rethinking the Archive in Modern South Asia

Edited By Aryendra Chakravartty, Samiparna Samanta Copyright 2025
156 Pages
by Routledge India

156 Pages
by Routledge India

156 Pages
by Routledge India

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, which have changed our everyday lives and created new sites of domination and resistance, and new archives of history.... Read more

Introduction: Understanding and Representing Colonial India

Aryendra 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 Household

Suparna Chakraborty 

3. Knowledge Technology Contested: Cholera, Commerce, and Quarantine in Nineteenth-Century India   

Arabinda Samanta

4. Preparing the "Veterinary Baboo": The Pupils and Pedagogy at Bengal Veterinary College, 18931920Aritri Chakrabarti

5. The White Man As A Burden on History: A Centre Of Oriental Culture, 1942- 1947 

Dharitri Bhattacharya

6. Alternative Technologies: A Different Road to Development 

Kaushalya Bajpayee

Biography

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.