INDIA'S TRYST WITH TECHNOLOGY

A newspaper report in early 1952, we learn from Midnight’s Machines, described Jawaharlal Nehru’s dinner: vegetables, steamed in a solar cooker.

- Srinath Perur

MIDNIGHT’S MACHINES

A Political History of Technology in India

By Arun Mohan Sukumar

PENGUIN

₹599; 236 pages

The cooker, made by the National Physical Laboratory, was, for a while, a sensation, a sign of independent India’s scientists coming forward to meet the country’s needs. But it soon became clear that the cooker was impractical for any real use and the project lost steam. Early embarrassments such as this led scientists to avoid mass-use products and, author Arun Mohan Sukumar writes, ‘The distance between citizen and technology grew.’

The relationship of citizen to technology in independent India has been almost entirely through the state, and Midnight’s Machines presents an account of that mediation. For the book’s purposes, the state is largely personified by prime ministers, who, until fairly recently, have tended to hold the portfolio of science and technology. And by energetic and influential technocrats, three of whom from different generations are briefly profiled near the end of the book—M. Visvesvaraya, Vikram Sarabhai and, ‘the technocrat who came in from the cold’—NandanNilekani.