The Case of Exploding Coconuts: Anti-colonial Violence, and Technology in 20th Century British India

Vortrag von Shaivya Mishra. Der Vortrag wird auf Englisch gehalten.

This talk takes its cue from the burgeoning field of Science and Technology Studies and traces the history of the bomb in South Asia. It focuses on the use of this technology by a particular group of individuals: the men designated as terrorists by the colonial state, a new kind of urban anti-colonialists who stood at the intersection of Gandhian non-violence and revolutionary violence, and whose deft fingers wove coarse cotton on Gandhi’s spinning wheel and assembled country bombs with equal felicity. Such men and women drew upon forms of technological knowledge with long histories in the region—technologies which, by the last decades of the 19th century, were woven into the fabric of everyday life in South Asia. The talk explores the relationship between society, technology and politics and foregrounds the technological world which made violent ant-colonialism possible, in particular against the backdrop of a series of bombing episodes during the Quit India Campaign of 1942—a facet starkly absent from an otherwise flourishing historiography. In so doing, it writes technology back into histories of violent anti-colonialism during the crucial time period when an incipient political culture of violence was taking a definite form and thus de-centers Eurocentric frameworks which disregard the history of non-Western technologies on the assumption that they are derivative and therefore unfit subjects of historical inquiry.

Shaivya Mishra is a historian of anti-colonialism and decolonization in British India, with a specific focus on revolutionary violence. She completed her PhD at the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley in 2023 and is now a Research Fellow at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. She is currently working on her first book The Bomb, the Bullet, and the Gandhi Cap: Violent Anti-Colonialism and Insurgent Technologies in British India. In addition, she is also developing a second book project on Gobind Behari Lal, an immigrant from British India and a science reporter in 20th century United States who won the Pulitzer in 1937 for his contributions to science journalism.