FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2046635737> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2046635737 endingPage "719" @default.
• W2046635737 startingPage "719" @default.
• W2046635737 abstract "Reviewed by: Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility by Marian Aguiar Swati Chattopadhyay (bio) Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility, by Marian Aguiar ; pp. xxiv + 226. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, $75.00, $25.00 paper. The railways were among the most important infrastructural projects undertaken in British colonial India. Intended to strengthen British rule and facilitate an externally oriented trade by connecting the inner provinces with seaports, by the 1860s India’s railway network was the largest in Asia and the fourth largest in the world. Indian railways provided the British with a venue for large-scale investment that was guaranteed by the government of India, the risk being carried by Indian taxpayers. The railways were justified by generations of British administrators as a harbinger of progress: they were a social instrument that would dissolve the boundaries of the Hindu caste system—only to impose a new racialized structure of class that mimicked caste hierarchies. From the Indian point of view, the transformative effect of the railways—economic, social, and cultural—was seen both as an imposition of a colonial order that drained the wealth of the nation, and as a tool that promised the forging of national identity. The colonialists and nationalists both seemed to have agreed that it was a modernizing force. Marian Aguiar’s new book, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility, provides a cultural analysis of this transformation and is the first book-length treatment of the representation of the railways in India. Aguiar’s primary analytic is mobility: “the close relationship between images of mobility concerned with a specific technology and the notion of modernity within the Indian context.” Approaching modernity as a “rhetoric that has functioned through a cluster of representational and material practices,” her exploration begins with the nineteenth-century colonial context and concludes with contemporary representations of the Indian railways (xiii). Touching on well-known figures and events, the temporal breadth of this study allows us to follow the legacy of colonial tropes and their mutations. In chapter 1 Aguiar focuses on the colonizer’s perception of the railways as bringing mobility to an ostensibly stagnant India. Mobility, equated with economic and social advancement, framed the traveler’s experience of the Indian landscape as a panoramic unfolding. The railway coach promised the British traveler in India an insular introspective space protected from the chaos of Indian life. She notes that this insularity was a fantasy, enabling certain narrative strategies about the appropriate use of public space “that elaborated features of Indian difference—the bodily, the religious, and the domestic” (26). Here the key examples are Rudyard Kipling’s and Flora Annie Steel’s works from the 1890s that demonstrate the difficulties of wishing to maintain the logic of colonial difference within a rhetoric of empire that professed to surpass caste and religious differences. At the same time Aguiar notes that these writers inaugurated an “early counternarrative of modernity” that was expanded upon by later critics (47). It is difficult to see Kipling’s and Steel’s works as counternarratives. Merely recording cultural difference does not amount to a counternarrative; what matters is its deployment. Indeed, literary works in other Indian languages, such as Durgacharan Ray’s Debganer Martye Agaman (1880), had invoked these motifs to produce countervisions of modernity more than a decade before Kipling’s and Steel’s works were published. In chapter 2 Aguiar turns to the critics of the railways who enlarged the symbolic parameters of the railways. Here she distinguishes between two groups: the [End Page 719] “social critics” who operated “within a post-Enlightenment theoretical framework” and pointed out the failure of the railways to bring prosperity to Indians, and the “spiritualists” who challenged the moral premise of Enlightenment science and turned to Indian “traditions” to produce their critique of colonialism (49). To nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Ranade, and Romesh Dutt, railways represented the crisis of India’s political economy as they relentlessly pointed out its role in de-industrializing India, and the social costs of a racialized railway system. Social reformers such as Florence Nightingale and Vaughan Nash wrote about..." @default.
• W2046635737 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2046635737 creator A5037119374 @default.
• W2046635737 date "2013-01-01" @default.
• W2046635737 modified "2023-09-26" @default.
• W2046635737 title "<em>Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility</em>, by Marian Aguiar" @default.
• W2046635737 doi "https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.55.4.719" @default.
• W2046635737 hasPublicationYear "2013" @default.
• W2046635737 type Work @default.
• W2046635737 sameAs 2046635737 @default.
• W2046635737 citedByCount "1" @default.
• W2046635737 countsByYear W20466357372020 @default.
• W2046635737 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2046635737 hasAuthorship W2046635737A5037119374 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C136264566 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C144024400 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C162324750 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C199539241 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C24667770 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C2778682666 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C2779509574 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C46610780 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C531593650 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C6303427 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C136264566 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C138885662 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C144024400 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C162324750 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C166957645 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C17744445 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C199539241 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C24667770 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C2778682666 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C2779509574 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C46610780 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C531593650 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C6303427 @default.
• W2046635737 hasConceptScore W2046635737C95457728 @default.
• W2046635737 hasIssue "4" @default.
• W2046635737 hasLocation W20466357371 @default.
• W2046635737 hasOpenAccess W2046635737 @default.
• W2046635737 hasPrimaryLocation W20466357371 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W1982556741 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W201704687 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W2050219773 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W2074989308 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W2479119634 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W2912417840 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W3081446134 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W3215679684 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W4240957198 @default.
• W2046635737 hasRelatedWork W4280554619 @default.
• W2046635737 hasVolume "55" @default.
• W2046635737 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2046635737 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2046635737 magId "2046635737" @default.
• W2046635737 workType "article" @default.