Making Modernity: Inside the Technological Space of the Railway

Making ModernityInside the Technological Space of the Railway Marian Aguiar (bio) The recent critical turn to the topic of the modern has questioned the homogeneity of modernity. Reflections have brought to the fore particular contexts, highlighting the conditions represented within those contexts. For this current scholarship, the pertinent question seems less "What is modernity?" than "Where is modernity?" and "What experiences characterize its uneven locations?" This essay considers both latter questions in the decolonizing context represented by South Asian partition literature. In approaching modernity in a global context, it is useful to think of modernity as rhetoric and then to explore the material history of this rhetoric as it functioned through representational forms. By doing so, one may see both the history of modernity as a fluid concept and its role as an instrument of empire, in which its meaning was and is taken as given. In the first part of this essay, I situate modernity theoretically in terms of both its rhetorical and material expression in places where its history has been inculcated with a colonial past and the promise of a national future. I consider how modernity retains its attraction, a phenomenon some recent critics of alternative modernity (e.g., Gaonkar) have explained by considering how the concept may be opened up to cultural specificity. I argue that this theorization does not adequately address how modernity continues to be reduced to equivalents. One main equivalent is technology, which becomes a metonym for modernity. The equation fosters a conceptual reduction of technology itself, for technology appears a self-evident testimony to a series of interconnected ideologies, including rationality, progress, and secularism. But technology, looked at as an imaginary, can actually bring us back to the concept of a fluid modernity. To demonstrate this, I look at the reconceptualization of modernity [End Page 66] in the context of South Asia's partition by evaluating the representations of what is often taken as material evidence of modernity: technology, specifically the railway. Partition literature spans over fifty years and includes three works I discuss in this article: Khushwant Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan, Bhisham Sahni's 1950s story "We Have Arrived in Amritsar," and Mukul Kesavan's 1995 novel Looking through Glass.1 Representations of the railway in this literature reveal how an important rhetoric of modernity becomes mobilized. Technology emblemizes certain principals of Western modernity, yet, somewhat surprisingly, representations of technology also cast the very antithesis of these seemingly self-evident associations. Images of the railway slip in and out of such equivalents as nationalism, rationality, secularism, and deterritorialization. Counternarratives of modernity emerge from the very heart of narratives of technology. These counternarratives turn time backwards, transform technology into a body, ascribe the machine with an uncanny presence, mark the train carriage as a communal space embedded in the local world around it, and reverse the narrative of progress. The technological imaginary includes these counternarratives of modernity, which are produced by the dialectical expression of modernity. The narratives are carried alongside the colonial rhetoric of modernity, destabilizing the seemingly self-apparent equation of modernity and technology. Although these counternarratives exist alongside representations of technology across all cultural contexts, they highlight the particular expressions of modernity outside of a Western context. Modernity in a Decolonizing Context The term "modernity," in theory, is wide open. Modernity's master narrative was never whole, in the sense that the evolving philosophical conception of the modern consistently posited the negation of its every expression as fundamental to its very existence. An early notion simply designated a transition between antiquity and the new, but the term underwent a significant shift in meaning during the period of Enlightenment. Modernity became a mode of relating to contemporary reality. In this mode, the present is continually interrogated by [End Page 67] self-conscious subjectivity (Habermas 16), creating a forward-driving paradigm that rejects both the immediate past and, perhaps more importantly for the decolonizing context, the present (Lazarus 18). New approaches to the history of colonization have exposed how modernity has been deeply embedded within colonial and neocolonial projects (e.g., Prakash). Corrective theories of modernity map terrains based on uneven power relations in such conceptual locations...