Another Reason by Gyan Prakash

Author:Gyan Prakash [Prakash, Gyan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Technologies of Government

The more we thought about this planning business, the

vaster it grew in its sweep and range till it seemed to embrace

almost every activity.

Jawaharlal Nehru1

THE ESSENCE of modern technology, Martin Heidegger wrote, is not technology itself, but a form of revealing, an “unconcealment” that occurs as technology “sets upon” and challenges nature to yield energy, to be available as a “standing-reserve.” “The earth now reveals itself as a mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. . . . Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”2 The truth of modern technology, according to Heidegger, resides in an “enframing” (Ge-Stell) that not only encloses nature but also gathers human beings in the ordering and challenging of all beings as resources. “If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong ever more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?”3 Human beings form part of the enframing and are worked into the system of revealing and challenging that renders all natural, human, and technical forces into resources, always available and completely manipulable. To think of technology in this fashion, as an enframing that acts upon and organizes the world so as to make it available as a resource, is to situate power in the “setting upon,” and challenging of all beings. This is not technological determinism; it is not a claim that power and social hierarchies are reducible to the autonomous logic of technology, but rather that the rendering of the human and natural world as resources contains political imperatives.4

In British India, the political imperative unleashed by this “setting upon” nature and the gathering together of human beings can be identified at the level of the state, which, after the mid nineteenth century, acted as the primary instrument of India’s technological reorganization. Forging India into a productive, interlocking network of irrigation works, railways, telegraphs, mines, and manufacturing, the colonial state introduced and oversaw the establishment of modern technics. In an important sense, however, technology was not only the instrument but also the substance of state power. For, as the state’s shape and functions came to rest in constituting India as a productive colony—that is, as technologies of the state came to reside in the technological organization of the territory and its people—the rationality of governance acquired another definition. Increasingly, state power meant the growing technological configuration of the territory; it became inseparable from the modern India it engineered into existence.

Technology forged a link between space and state, making the newly configured India part and parcel of the institution of its technological configuration. This was of profound consequence because it meant that to press one’s claim on the one was also to demand a stake in the other. Thus, as Indian nationalism asserted its authority over the engineered space of colonial India as the territory of the nation, it also staked its claim to state power. Beginning

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