Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency : A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850-1920

This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by India...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mukhopadhyay, Aparajita (auth)
Format: Book Chapter
Published: Taylor & Francis 2018
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Online Access:Get Fullteks
DOAB: description of the publication
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245 1 0 |a Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency : A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850-1920 
260 |b Taylor & Francis  |c 2018 
300 |a 1 electronic resource (254 p.) 
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520 |a This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India's colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised 'natives' were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated 'tool of Empire'. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces - a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre's idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power. 
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650 7 |a History  |2 bicssc 
650 7 |a Asian history  |2 bicssc 
653 |a railroads 
653 |a social aspects 
653 |a India 
653 |a history 
653 |a Bengal 
653 |a Bengali language 
653 |a Bengalis 
653 |a Colonial India 
653 |a Colonialism 
653 |a Hinduism 
653 |a Indian Railways 
653 |a Rail transport 
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