Abstract
In existing scholarship on economy, industrialization, labour, and, equally significant, on the transport and communication of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial South Asia, the histories of knowledge creation and technical expertise remain under-researched. In some ‘branches’ such as the medical history, which has now become a sub-field in itself, the state of research is better. In this regard, Aparjith Ramnath’s book is a new and welcome addition, particularly when it argues that ‘the practice of technology was as much a question of career, status and Indians’ desire for a role in government as it was about ‘knowledge’ or the building of a nation’. 1 The case studies in the book derive from the Public Works Department (PWD), railways and Tata Steel Works.
The two historical turning points, which the book uses as ‘organising principles’ for its narrative, are the debates on the Indianization of public services and the growth of industrialization. The former arose in the wake of the First World War (a theme that is consistently and, if one may add, repeatedly recalled in the book) and hence the author justifies the exclusive and ‘deliberate’ focus of the book on the first half of the twentieth century. The growth of industrialization, however, as the author himself mentions, had a long history, starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Industries of jute, textile, leather—to name a few—flourished in the period between the 1850s and the 1910s. Since the contribution of industrial income in 1900 was 15 per cent (which, surprisingly, the author considers a small number), the claim that ‘Large-scale private industry—and the engineers associated with it—played a minor role in the Indian economy’ is not justified. 2
Similarly, the author compresses the PWD history of the nineteenth century (1854 onwards) within a few pages but conceptually misses the chance to explore the continuities and shifts in the practice of engineering from this period into the twentieth century. An a priori justification is unwittingly provided because of this ‘deliberate’ (and narrow) focus on the first half of the twentieth century.
For instance, the author claims that ‘Mechanics’ institutes (set up in several railway workshop towns in the second half of the nineteenth century), were not professional institutions, and no large-scale society of engineers was established in India in the nineteenth century’. 3 While both parts of the sentence might be true, the author, because of his pre-given understanding of the term ‘professional’ and perhaps also of ‘institution’, misses the opportunity to trace the history of what it meant to be an engineer before the profession was ‘professionalized’ and ‘institutionalized’.
Some of his own examples suggest this line of thinking. Sir S. N. Mookerjee started his career as a contractor, became an engineer-businessman and finally the president of the Institution of Engineers (India) in 1920–21. Others must have started as apprentices and made their way up. While the institutional hierarchy and the possible upward mobility within the ranks of the profession is well described and clearly illustrated graphically (the author deserves commendation for including flowcharts to make the text easier to understand), the historical process of who an engineer was and how the technicalization of skill and work—if at all it happened between the 1850s and 1940s—affected the meaning of the profession is not explored.
The rank of the engineer is very likely to have narrowed to a definite set of skills and achievements as time progressed. We are told by the author, very rightly, that sports and ‘gentlemanly lifestyle’ mattered in the recruitment. The Raj was not simply looking for men appropriate for engineering work but also those who could represent the masculine form of the empire. While exploring the nature of this ‘gentleman generalist’, the author could have benefitted from anchoring his account in the practices of gendered-imperialism. How did professional institutions, both in metropolis and colony, and through them the newly-created professional identity of the engineer, affect the gendered nature of the profession as well as of the empire? While some of them lamented being burdened with ‘administrative’ and not purely engineering tasks, others called themselves ‘a mere cooly-driver’. 4 If administrative tasks loomed so large in the work profile of the engineer, 5 what did it do to the idea of the professional identity itself?
The biggest strength of the book is its detailed institutional history of professional engineering services. The modes of recruitment, the changes that happened over a period of time, the setting up of new professional bodies—all these are well accounted for in the context of political and economic changes.
Of particular interest to the present reviewer were the descriptions of ‘railway bureaucracy’, 6 the institutional tussle around the ideas of paternalism and nationalism within the body of Institution of Engineers (India) or IEI, 7 the department- and sector-wise layered meaning of Indianization, 8 and how, for instance, by its insistence on a ‘military nature’, the railway bureaucracy differed from the PWD bureaucracy.
For the railways, matters of loyalty and efficiency combined to determine the extent of Indianization, which meant a difficult transition as railways were also seen as instruments of state control. So, while the book gives us an account of the ‘birth of the engineering profession’—a profession which was largely imperial in its constitution—it also takes us through the history of ‘Indian identity’ and the growth of the Indian engineering profession through the politics of nationalization demands and Indian industrial expansion.
This Indian part of the story, while being covered for the PWD and railways in earlier chapters, also comes out well in the last chapter on Tata Steels. Here, as the account shows, the Tata Works started with a predominance of non-Indian experts and upper-level engineers, mainly drawn from the United States but also Germany, Austria and England. Gradually, Indians who returned with ‘foreign degrees’ also found their place in the system. Finally, with its own Jamshedpur Technical Institute (JTI) set up in 1921, the work gradually employed a greater number of Indians.
There are two aspects of Indianization to which the book time and again alludes, but required to put them out more explicitly. While being aware of the ‘sandwiched’ position of Anglo-Indians, the author does not adequately show how the debate on ‘Indianization’ forced the switch-over, or at least a grudging acceptance of the identity of ‘statutory natives of India’ by Anglo-Indians. In other words, if Indianization was crucial in the making of the Indian engineering identity, it was also crucial for tempering an exclusionary recasting of identity for certain other groups, who finally by the 1960s and 1970s left the country in significant numbers.
Second, Indianization at the upper levels, through technical institutes either at Tata Steels or in railway workshops, eventually created an elite class of cheaper ‘brown sahibs’ eager to replace their high-salaried ‘white’ colonial superiors. While the formation of the (Indian) national identity is explained, the accompanying class dynamics embedded in this process, and in the way Indianization was demanded and achieved, is not sufficiently explored. We do get to know, for instance, how the JTI emphasized that apprentice-engineers acquire practical knowledge in the factory, but we are also aware of the shop-floor tensions between the ‘mechanic’ and the ‘engineer’: the former accusing the latter of not bothering to take their hands out of their pockets and lacking an understanding of how technology works beyond engineering textbooks. 9 While the book insightfully takes its readers through the institutional and political parts of this history, which were firmly crucial in the making of this profession, the engineers as a ‘social class’—their social roots and locations, mobility and transformations—should perhaps be taken up by future scholars, for whom this work will be an essential reading.
Finally, and perhaps to this reviewer’s disappointment, the book does not completely do what it proposes: that is, to question the utility of essentialized categories of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. 10 While being extremely sympathetic to his claim and convinced of its partial fulfilment (in Chapter Five), in my reading, the spine of the book is still firmly attached to these two categories. Ramnath admits that Indianization was the ubiquitous theme of the period of his study, and race central to the experience of Indian engineers. 11 This ubiquity of demand for Indianization and centrality of racial differentiation is therefore symptomatic of the pre-eminence of colonialism and nationalism in the period of the study as well as in the author’s narrative. Indians’ willingness to work for the state does not necessarily demonstrate the binary of colonialism and nationalism dissolving. Essentialized or otherwise, the account of this book is firmly situated within the frame etched out by two ‘isms’.