Technologies of Knowledge: Rethinking the Archive in Modern South Asia

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.

Aryendra Chakravartty is Associate Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on World History, South Asia, and British Empire. His research interest focuses on identity and belonging, and regionalism and nationalism in modern South Asia. He has published in multiple academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Indian Historical Review. He is currently completing his book Region in the Making of a Nation: Bihar in Colonial India.

Samiparna Samanta is Professor of History at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. She teaches courses on global histories, British Empire, modern South Asia, and social history of law. Her research focuses on history of science, medicine, and colonialism primarily in the context of Bengal. In her recent book, Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal 1850-1920 (2021) she disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to explore the nexus between race, class, and species in the history of colonial India. Her current book project investigates the many lives of the dead to write a history of the anatomical and spectral body in British India.