Student profiles
Swagatalakshmi Saha
Email: swagatalakshmi.saha@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Mobile : +44 7405736236
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr Anindita Ghosh
Dr Aashish Velkar
Research Summary
My research addresses the mobility and exchange of ideas and practices of time keeping between colonial India and Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Amid diverse time keeping devices in early modern India (16th -18th centuries) like sun-dials, astrolabes and water clocks (gharis), jantar mantars or astronomical observatories built by Maharaja Jai Singh II (1686-1743) at Jaipur, Ujjain, Delhi, Varanasi and Mathura stand out as royal projects that incorporated manifold ways of time-keeping. It enabled both astronomers and ordinary people to observe planetary movements and plan agricultural and social calendars. With the advent of colonial rule in Bengal in the late-18th century, mechanical clocks and watches from Europe sparked interest among Indian elites as objects of value, which were reproduced by local artisans. In this context, my project seeks to understand how and why these mechanical devices gained currency in colonial India. The project will focus on Rajasthan where jantar mantars were erected and Bengal that became the seat for the imported ideas of clock time and discipline, especially Calcutta, the British imperial capital. It will investigate how jantar mantars and pre-colonial forms of scientific knowledge around temporality adapted with the emerging technology and trade of European clocks from the late 18th through the 19th centuries.
The objective of my research is to interrogate both the flow of ideas from the metropole to the colony and the counter-flow of knowledge and technology from India to Britain. Extending Kapil Raj’s argument where he identifies the participation of indigenous groups with Europeans in the making of scientific knowledge and practices, my work on clock-making will underscore that there was knowledge transfer and production at the material level, creatively co-opted and appropriated by local manufacturers. By exploring the material culture of clock manufacture and the history of its use and consumption that acted as registers of international trade and circulation of ideas, my project will make a major intervention in the current historiography of time and temporality. The project will demonstrate how indigenous time-keeping practices followed by different sections of the colonized population such as clerks, merchants, women, students, the working class and artisanal communities accommodated Western time-keeping methods across social, religious and administrative contexts in India from the late-18th through the 19th century.
Research Interests
South Asia, early modernity, colonialism, temporal histories, histories of science and technology, economic and social history, cultural history, gender, history of ideas, print culture, popular culture
Publications
Coming soon