Samiparna Samanta – författare

This book disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. It contends that the colonial project of animal protection in late nineteenth-century Bengal mirrored an irony. Emerging notions of public health and debates on cruelty against animals exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent Empire and a powerful imperial reality where the state constantly sought to discipline its subjects-both human and nonhuman. Centered around stories of animals as diseased, eaten, and overworked, thebook shows how such contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider discussions surrounding environmental ethics, diet, sanitation, and the politics of race and class. The authorcombines history with archive, arguing that colonial humanitarianism was not only an idiom of rule, but was also translated into Bengali dietetics, anxieties, vegetarianism, and vigilantism, the effect of which can be seen incontemporary politics of animal slaughter in India.

This book traces the role of technology in shaping, curating, disseminating, and archiving knowledge and life in South Asia. It focuses on empirical studies of transformative social processes unleashed by technological intervention in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which have changed our everyday lives and created new sites of domination and resistance, and new archives of history.Unraveling technology as an indicator of South Asia’s encounter with modernity, the chapters in the volume interrogate how technology was witnessed in the production of culture, historicizing and preserving the past, and establishing claims to heritage and history. In addition to examining the critical role of creative and commercial networks in establishing communities, the volume also scans the significant contribution of technology as a mechanism of social control. It highlights the pervasive nature of discourse that continues to assert its legitimacy, despite significant challenges to its structures of dominance, be it in the case of Bengali women or imperial dreams of curating a rapidly eroding past. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the discursive thoughts and practices that permeate the functioning of an empire and a postcolonial nation-state through narratives of resilience, appropriation, silences, and dissent.This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, digital humanities, South Asian studies, modern history, colonialism, and post-independence India.