Technology from Below: Hi-Tech and Backyard Inventors - Hardcover

Kailash Narayan Sushil Kumar

9789387692336: Technology from Below: Hi-Tech and Backyard Inventors

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9387692337 ISBN 13: 9789387692336

Publisher: Viva Books, 2018

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The book illustrates the role of ’new subalterns’ in Indian history and contemporary development by focusing on the life story of the Late Mr K. Narayan of Bijnor in western Uttar Pradesh in India. It describes his inventions and emphasizes on his participatory engagements with his children aimed at realizing the desired results in problem solving through scientific thinking and action. His simple ways turned adversity into opportunity for them. Equally significant was his articulation of a discourse that the code for differentiating high technology from backyard science led to unacceptable notions about the status of science in India’s antiquity, while it was short on the practical value of blending the two in a market-led growth economy of today. For James Mill, Karl Marx and Max Weber India’s past amounted to a period of ‘no history’. Hence Muslim and British rule was taken as a point of India’s entry into a trajectory of historical development. This book is inspired by disagreement with such a reading of the situation and underlines India’s high level of artisanal craftsmanship during the so-called no history period as a source of cultural and technological development. It brings home this emphasis by narrating a recent story of a backyard inventor. As such, it is a call for a more balanced counter-history of technology in India.

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