Abstract
Digital Independence: India’s Path Towards the Computer Age: An International History: The translated title of this contribution to India’s political and social history in the digital age hints at its multilayered analysis. Published in German, this 500-page work represents Homberg’s second dissertation (‘Habilitation’), the highest university degree possible in German academia. For a German historian, Homberg’s choice of topic is highly original and of interest to scholars from India, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany alike: The carefully researched monograph presents the first source-based account on how and with what impact the computer came to post-1947 India. Moving beyond existing hagiographies, Homberg—one of the heads of department at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, Germany—explores India’s complex, often contradictory, path into the digital age. He bases his findings on research in around 40 archives visited in India, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and France, among them state archives, university archives, enterprise archives, museum archives, and archives of international organisations like the UNESCO and the ILO. Digital archives, periodicals, and a plethora of printed sources complete the rich corpus.
Homberg’s central claim reads that the quest for digital independence shaped India’s technology policy since 1947. The computer, in this narrative, is more than a technical device; it is a symbol and instrument of postcolonial nation-building, or, as Homberg aptly puts it, a Swadeshi [of one’s own country] machine (p. 13). Adopting perspectives from entangled history, political and social history, and the history of knowledge, Homberg ‘decentres’ the history of computing away from purely Western-centric viewpoints. He situates India’s digital journey within a dynamic international constellation. This includes the currents of the Cold War, where both the United States and the USSR were keen to offer technical aid for their own interests, turning India into an arena for geopolitical competition and development politics. The British colonial legacy, the search for decolonisation against the backdrop of a growing north–south divide after 1960, and the rise of a diaspora of Indian technocrats and information technology (IT) professionals are equally woven into the narrative.
In six chapters, the book answers the question of how the computer assumed a central role in processes of Indian nation-building and became a vehicle for global development policy in the ‘Global South’. While a basic chronology is discernible, the narrative is structured mainly thematically. The first chapter, ‘Decoding India’s digital source code’, explores the period of 1947 to around 1970, with recourse to British science policy in the era of colonial Raj. It details the early efforts to build and acquire computers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Indian Statistical Institute, highlighting the emerging debates around national technology policy and the link between data processing and state-building. Here, Nehru’s vision of a ‘scientific temper’ intersected with the Mahalanobis-led planning regime. The second chapter shifts to the international sphere, putting the ‘programmes and programmers’ centre-stage and showing how they were influenced by global forces. The author dissects the motivations behind technical aid from competing Cold War powers (the United States, the USSR, the United Kingdom, and West Germany) and international bodies such as UNESCO, showing how development discourses and technocratic ideals influenced the promotion of computer education and infrastructure in the ‘Global South’, primarily India. The third chapter, ‘(Post-)colonial encounters’, zooms in on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), as sites of geopolitical negotiations. Distinct international partnerships shaped the IITs in Bombay (USSR-aided), Kharagpur and Kanpur (US-aided), Delhi (supported by the United Kingdom), and Madras (Germany-aided). Homberg retraces the struggles over curriculum, research priorities, and the very definition of relevant expertise, often marked by friction between Indian and foreign actors. Tensions emerged between the objective of Indian national evolution and the realities of reproduced elite privilege. The fourth chapter, ‘Autonomy’, explores how ‘digital autonomy’ was viewed with both hope and fear in India during the 1960s and 1970s. Society worried about automation taking jobs, which fuelled protests against companies such as the International Business Machines Corporation and temporarily drove them out of the country. India also joined international efforts against what was considered ‘electronic colonialism’ through the ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ debate. Homberg shows how the government under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pursued two paths: promoting Indian companies such as Electronics Corporation of India Limited under a self-reliance campaign (‘Buy Indian!’) while simultaneously using computerisation to enhance state surveillance—especially during the 21-month emergency period. The fifth chapter, ‘New pathways, new markets’, brings to the fore the multifaceted appearance of technological India in the 1980s. It assesses Rajiv Gandhi’s high-profile computerisation initiatives, the slow diffusion of personal computers and the beginnings of economic liberalisation that spurred the IT services sector and the rise of Bangalore as a tech hub—all the while acknowledging the persistent digital divides. The final chapter, ‘Between the worlds’, explores global repercussions. It analyses the transformation of the ‘brain drain’ anxiety into a narrative of worldwide success, while also probing the complexities of migration. Precarious labour conditions (‘cyber coolies’) and the challenges faced by Indian professionals abroad are illustrated in case studies on Silicon Valley and Berlin.
The strengths of Digitale Unabhängigkeit are considerable. Homberg moves beyond simplistic narratives of inevitable progress or mere technological diffusion and reveals instead a history full of ‘ambivalences, antagonisms and asynchronicities’ (p. 45). The reader encounters a panorama of the international forces shaping India’s path—from Cold War development rivalries funding institutions such as the IITs to the global flow of labour that saw Indian engineers become central to Silicon Valley’s rise and simultaneously created anxieties about brain drain back home. The author’s attention to detail is remarkable: Simple yet clear tables provide a sense of the quantitative rise and distribution of the IT sector, while evocative pictures and caricatures illustrate contemporary sentiments around India’s stride into the computer age.
However, the book is not without minor weaknesses. The thematic structure, while exploring topics like planning or the IITs across different periods in-depth, inevitably leads to some repetition as certain events and actors reappear in various contexts. Furthermore, the title, Digital Independence, while emblematic, gives only a partial sense of the book’s actual scope. Homberg’s concept of the ‘age of the computer’ is expansive, encompassing developments in telecommunication technology such as telephone, television networks and satellite coverage, and broader questions about India’s place in the postcolonial technological and economic order. Amidst the manifold geographical and technical reference points, one can easily lose sight of the research object at hand—India’s computer history.
In sum, Digital Independence reshapes our understanding of the role of information and telecommunication technology not only in a modern Indian history but also in an international history setting at large. The monograph offers a well-researched, theoretically informed and thoroughly contextualised account of the pull and push factors that made India a major player in the digital world. It is relevant for historians working on the subcontinent, the sociopolitical history of technology, the Cold War and decolonisation in South Asia. One can only hope that this fine piece of scholarship will be translated into English. This would open an important chapter of India’s digital past to readers worldwide—particularly in India itself.