Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India's Lost Technological Revolution tells a compelling history of a newly independent India, struggling to define itself as a sovereign nation after casting off Britain's colonial rule from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s.At the heart of this narrative lies the nascent field of computing, undergoing a phase of expansion after World War II and exerting a transformative influence across multiple scientific disciplines.Banerjee traces the trajectory of a cohort of influential figures who were seeking to establish computing as a foundational element within the scientific and technological infrastructure of post-colonial India.Alongside India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they pursued an "autonomous technocratic governance with direct regulatory authority" (p.159) to bring the country in line with its aspirations.Banerjee makes his argument clear from the start that this vision was unfulfilled.The book explores the questions of what might have happened differently and what mechanisms instead led to the computing industry that India has today.The narrative draws on a case study of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), led by nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, and its years-long attempts to gather enough political influence, financial backing, and, crucially, equipment to create an industrial infrastructure for computing in Mumbai (Bombay), at which both theoretical and applied contributions could be made.Banerjee describes several ambitious attempts, variously interrupted by geopolitical conditions and interventions from both foreign and domestic entities.The expense of early computing hardware was extremely challenging to finance for post-colonial states, which created pressure to accept foreign investment.The influence and extraction of multinational corporations like IBM, looking for captive markets, made it nearly impossible to compete in early hardware development.More generally, the meddling of Western powers, particularly the United States, impacted India's ability to gain access to scientific knowledge, equipment, and materials.Crucially, all of this was entangled in a Cold War dynamic in which India did not pursue alignment.There is an implied tension in the book between two related theories of political economymodernisation and world systemswhich provides a productive lens through which Banerjee's analysis can be discussed.Modernisation theories of socio-economists like Seymour Lipset, Walt Rostow, and, later, Francis Fukuyama that emerged after World War II proposed that industrialisation leads to stability, democratisation, and social progress.In the first part of the book, this theory may help to explain the early motivations of Nehru and Bhabha to pursue self-reliance through industrialisation as a pluralistic
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