Rethinking technology transfer in a colonial milieu: railways and shifting meanings of travel in late colonial India

The article reappraises nature of technology transfer in a colonial context by underlining how the colonised mediated and shaped what was ostensibly an imposition by the imperial administration. This wider point is illustrated by demonstrating the ways in which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different groups of Indians used newly introduced railways to reconceptualise meanings of travel by adding new categories of travel while significantly modifying the extant ones. Crucially deviating from both ‘technology as imperialism’ and ‘technology as subversion’ historiographical paradigms, this article argues for a more nuanced appraisal of technology transfer, especially emphasising the role of users in shaping the impact of technology. Examining a diverse range of sources, viz., railway records (Annual Railway Reports and railway passenger statistics), newspaper reports and travelogues and pamphlets written by Indian railway travellers, the article claims Indians not only mediated the impact of trains on travel in late colonial India; but they shaped the outcome of this technology transfer in ways that reveals agency and remarkable involvement with a new mode of transit. In short, the article demonstrates dynamic interaction between imperial policies and responses of the colonised through the lens of technology transfer.