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Swadeshi as epistemology: Subaltern Technological Resistance in India

Thu, August 21, 8:30 to 10:30am, Intercontinental Hotel, Monserrat II

Abstract

Epistemological Luddism is valued as a “way of recovering the buried substance upon which our civilization rests.” Drawing on Winner, Ellul, and Noble, this paper extends the arena of critical technological studies to investigate other forms of technological resistance in the global south, with a focus on India.

Swadeshi, literally “of one’s own country,” was borne of a similar resistance to technology as Luddism, seeking to assert (workers) economic control and cultural self-respect. The swadeshi movement in India, like Luddism, was a revolt against the colonial imposition of technology in the forced importation of Lancashire cotton.

I undertake a revisionist historical inquiry into the movement’s genesis, describe the kinds of political actions it promoted, and present a preliminary theorization of its subaltern technological politics.

I argue that while Luddism manifested resistance as anti-production (through destruction of the machine), swadeshi cast resistance to technological domination as counter-production, a larger project of nation-building and of social change. It involved a plurality of political actions, from civil disobedience to non-violent direct action with distinct ethical moorings, politics and “technics” employing particular scales, spaces, and stakeholderships. Further, it interrogated the internal hierarchies and divisions of Indian society, seeking, as Ramagundan points out, to “shape the content of freedom and determine the values at stake in post-independence rivalries over resource use. It gave character to politics as well as to protest. It was a roadmap to swaraj (self-rule).” Insodoing, I argue, swadeshi can be understood as a critical, alternative epistemology of technological resistance.

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