Conflict and Identity in the Social Life of Electricity in Colonial Calcutta, c.1880-1925

This thesis examines the multiple and multifaceted political and cultural meanings of electric supply and electric technologies such as lighting and fans in colonial Calcutta, as reflected in a range of English and Bengali newspapers, electrical trade journals, transcripts of public lectures, printed travel and domestic guide books, short-lived Bengali illustrated periodicals, scripts of Bengali satire, pamphlets, and legal and official documents. The thesis investigates from several different textual, cultural and political angles how diverse meanings of electricity emerged, and how such viewpoints were never confined to technological or scientific matters, but were deployed, often polemically, in discussions and debates between promoters, the colonial state, and varied sections of Anglo-Indian, and Bengali middle-class gentlemanly or bhadralok (gentlefolk) societies. Bringing into conversation strands from histories of technologies, science and technology studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and urban histories, this thesis examines how much was made of the connections between electricity, colonialism, and Western conceptions of technological modernity. Revealing electricity as a site for ideological contestations, this thesis will examine how such connections brought to the fore the internal conflicts between and within Anglo-Indian and bhadralok intelligentsia on varied perceptions of identity, domesticity, and nationalism. The thesis will then demonstrate how advertisements of electric lighting and fans, and writings of promoters presented electricity as a rhetorical and technological solution to social, moral and political issues in urban and domestic spheres. Finally this study asks what responses were provoked in contemporary Anglo-Indian and bhadralok householders, and the extent to which electric supply, lighting and fans were perceived by them to have material and social value within the domestic sphere. This critical history of electricity challenges and extends current historiography on electrification in the colonial context and, in essence, contributes to larger scholarship on histories of technologies.