Animesh Chatterjee, University of Stavanger, Norway
Online Lecture: Wednesday, 22 May 2024, 17.30 (CEST)
Building on fragmented archives of esoteric sources as applications, bills, literary texts, and the occasional treatise on health and hygiene, this lecture explores the effectual interactions and engagements with electrical technologies in public and domestic spaces of colonial Calcutta. It focuses on the introduction of battery-operated and mains-powered electric supply and technologies in Calcutta and aims to show how the encounter with new means of lighting and power simultaneously enabled hopes and dreams, and introduced new senses of concern. Through the vocabularies of consumption, perception, taste, and the formation of identities, varied historical actors inscribed their own understandings, meanings and interpretations into electricity and electrical objects, accompanied by assumptions, imaginations and scrutiny of their possible uses and futures.
Overall, in braiding strands from the material world with the cultural, and encompassing human actions, affects and electricity’s agency in one dynamic tapestry, the lecture will argue for the place of personal and vernacular archives, a shift in focus from “technology” to “material culture”, and for approaches that give voice to different actors and perspectives within the history of technology.
The lecture is based on Chatterjee’s upcoming article “Everyday Interpretations of Transitions to Electricity in Colonial Calcutta c. 1875-1940s” in Regeneration, and research for his upcoming book manuscript The Social Life of Electricity in Colonial Calcutta, c.1875-1945 with Routledge.
Link: https://kit-lecture.zoom-x.de/j/6884631281?pwd=R3ZwaXVvQWhEaG5MTmlrdytTUXFPUT09
Please contact for further information: Stefan Poser, stefan.poser@kit.edu