Buttressing the limited scholarship on techno-scientific education in colonial India, Let there be Light studies the establishment and expansion of electrical infrastructure in colonial Bengal between 1880 and 1945. Sarkar analyzes how the growing interest in technical education, particularly engineering, combined with increasing entrepreneurial experimentation to drive indigenous industrial expansion across several fields, from electricity to chemical engineering.
The book has much to commend it, not least its detailed review of critical shifts in scholarly understanding of the transmission, circulation, and reception of modern science and technology. Sarkar revisits the (well-established) limits of diffusionist models that posit unidirectional flows, emanating outward from European centers. In contrast, he grounds his research within contemporary postcolonial scholarship, which emphasizes the social construction of technologies, both big and small, while demonstrating how, conceptually and materially, science and technology in India synthesized colonial and indigenous concepts “of what created the modern world” (8–9, 13–14). Sarkar’s...