Completed Research Projects
Telecommunication and the Public Sphere in British India, 1850-1950
Prof. Michael Mann
To tell the story of “a century of progress”, the history of the telephone in British India has usually been lumped together with that of the telegraph and the wireless to indicate. Similarly, the introduction of the telephone is described simply as a part of urban his- tory. The slow growth of the British Raj’s telephone system, it is argued, was because India largely consists of villages. Even in post- colonial times the internalized “Orientalist” and therefore colonial notion of India as a land of villages became an excuse for the country’s backwardness with respect to the telephone. A closer scrutiny of the spread of the telephone in British India reveals that it was the requirements of the colonial regime for control, rather than the needs of Indian villages that determined the development of the new communication system.