Let There Be Light

Reviewed by: Let There Be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 by Suvobrata Sarkar Jonas van der Straeten (bio) Let There Be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 By Suvobrata Sarkar. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 294. Within the burgeoning historiography of electricity in the non-West, Sarkar's book stands out as one of the few written by authors educated and working at a non-Western university (Burdwan University, West Bengal). Besides the global audience, the book explicitly addresses local readership with the goal of creating a historical consciousness "for the rejuvenation of the techno-scientific base of India [which] is widely recognized today" (p. 2). Using the case of electricity, Sarkar seeks to understand the "techno-scientific advancement" of a society as reflected in the capacity to educate its youth in institutions to become engineers and entrepreneurs. The book's structure reflects this goal. Sarkar takes us through a history of "modern technical knowledge in Bengal," focusing on two engineering colleges, in Sibpur and Jadavpur, and tracing the careers of two academically trained Bengali engineer-entrepreneurs (ch. 1, 2). Sarkar then reconstructs the early electrification of colonial Calcutta before exploring the adoption of electricity in various spheres of urban life (ch. 3, 4). Finally, he returns to technical education within a wider discourse on industrial development and national self-reliance among the bhadralok (Bengali gentlefolk) community (ch. 5). The introduction's structure makes it slightly difficult to understand Sarkar's methodological or analytical positions, or his intended goals within the dispersed debates he covers. Rigorous editing would have been prudent here. The following chapters then enlighten the rich primary sources that Sarkar has unearthed (ch. 1-2). A monthly journal in Bengali published by students of Sibpur College between 1902 and 1908, for example, seems to be a rare gem of a source for understanding aspiring engineers' self-image. Sarkar cites three lengthy excerpts; however, it would have been good to know his interpretation of this source (p. 40). Next, the author provides a solid analysis of Calcutta's early electrification along the lines of Thomas Hughes's model of system evolution (ch. 3). When Sarkar turns to the impact of electricity on the material, cultural, and intellectual world of colonial Bengal, his commitment to techno-scientific advancement arguably stands in the way of historical analysis (ch. 4). Sarkar faithfully reproduces the mental universe of the official reports, characterized by thinking through inherent necessities and adequate measures. He assumes an inherent "superiority" of electricity as a technology, one that engineers just needed to uncover and unleash (p. 159). He uses the [End Page 550] wisdom of hindsight to assess late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal through the lens of modernization and industrial development, rather than try to understand it on its own terms. Arguably, the determinism that Sarkar reads into the energy landscape of colonial Calcutta does not stand historical scrutiny. In his account, the victory of electricity over gas was "inevitable" (p. 159); the carthorses of the tramcars "bowed their head to the progress of the 'modern wizard'" because the "next logical step was railway electrification" (p. 164); "the punkah-wallah (fan puller), along with his friend the lamplighter," are mere remnants of a vanishing lifestyle (p. 161); and, curiously, "[a]ll the pre-electricity sources of motive power gradually disappeared under the sway of electricity" (p. 156). They didn't. Remarkably, the chapter is titled "Domesticating Electricity," precisely the same as a book by Graeme Gooday (which Sarkar lists in the bibliography but does not cite), an outspoken critic of such determinisms in electricity history. In the footsteps of Gooday, Animesh Chatterjee's article "'New wine in new bottles'" (History of Retailing and Consumption, 2018) has critically revisited triumphal narratives of Calcutta's electrification, highlighting the decades-long, historically contingent and contested process of negotiating electricity's access into the domestic and public sphere. Rather than simply superseding non-electrical technologies, electrical technologies often enter novel configurations with them. Sarkar's book regains more solid ground in the last chapter on the "assimilation" of technological ideas in India, especially when he discusses techno-scientific

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