As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700.Footnote
1
However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands.Footnote
2
And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.
Finnane's concluding comment that the sewing machine has “deservedly attracted attention from historians” because it “stood at the heart of innovative and globally influential practices in manufacture and distribution in the United States” is clearly warranted, but the sewing machine was also part of a cluster of modern, small-scale technological goods, originating in the West, that impacted around the globe during this period. Mark Twain, traversing the Pacific in the mid-1890s, remarked that the bicycle was now to be found everywhere. Of Fiji he noted, somewhat prejudicially: “Only sixty years ago they [the Fijians] were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle” (Twain [1897] Reference Twain2005, 48). Many of these machines originated in the United States and so demonstrated the long reach of American industrial capitalism and its impact on Asia even before US intervention in the Philippines in 1898, though other Western powers, including Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, were also important players. What Mullaney's article interestingly underscores, with respect to another of these machines, the typewriter, are the regional limitations of that increasingly global presence, for although Remington and other makers developed typewriters with South Asian scripts, and so helped to preclude local competition within the Indian subcontinent, they had far less success in finding a solution to the “puzzle” presented by East Asian characters. This left the problem to Japanese, and later Chinese, typewriter engineers and manufacturers to solve. In India—fixed, through its long history of British colonialism, far more firmly within the Anglophone world, by contrast with the East Asian “Kanjisphere”—the typewriter remained, to a large degree, an instrument for English-language communication, documentation, and, one might even add, domination. The adaptation of the numerous South Asian scripts to fit modern technological requirements was perhaps more profoundly influenced by the earlier needs of the printing press and the standardization of fonts (a process that went back to the late eighteenth century in Bengal) than by the later requirements of the typewriter. The challenge of adapting the Devanagari script for keyboard use seems to have prompted few official concerns before the formal adoption of Hindi as India's national language in 1950 (Government of India 1958).Footnote
3
Equally, the early success of Singer and other Western sewing machine brands in Japan and subsequently China was less durable than their continuing dominance in South Asia—a hegemony that lasted well into the 1950s—and where local manufactures were less able, in a colonial environment, to make much headway against American and other foreign manufacturers. Like Yu Binqi in 1930s China, India, too, had its amateur inventors and local entrepreneurs seeking to produce and market sewing machines, typewriters, and bicycles; but, until political and economic circumstances changed in the late 1940s with Indian independence, they found it hard to develop and promote their goods in competition with well-established British, German, and American makes. They even found it hard to acquire the raw materials and the precision engineering skills required to produce such intricate machines. Mullaney and Finnane seem to suggest that Japan and latterly China had few technical problems of this kind: it would be interesting to know more about how, in often adverse circumstances, such goods were made and circulated, for instance, in the Communist-held areas of northern China during the war against Japan or in the besieged Nationalist regime in Chongqing. The military associations of the small machine are implicit in both essays—the heroic typist stationed near the battlefront, the sewing machines made in factories that once produced machine guns—but, in an era of imperial contestation as well as the Cold War, the militarization of the small machine, its employment in the making of war as much as in the manufacturing of peace, surely informs and contextualizes much of its regional history.
It was not until the 1950s, or even later, that Indian typewriters began to command even a modest market in India and then in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East. From the South Asian perspective, the sheer number of machines, as given by Finnane with respect to sewing machines, being produced in East Asia by the 1950s is staggering. Far from having a sewing machine in every home, or a bicycle for every worker, in India, as late as the 1970s, there were fewer than 4,000 bicycles per million of the population and barely 500 sewing machines, an index of India's far slower development, its enduring poverty, and low levels of consumption.
On the other hand, despite their relatively small numbers, room certainly existed for the small machine, as Mullaney puts it with respect to typewriters, to be “a machine with a politics,” a vehicle for national and anti-colonial sentiment, in the tradition of India's swadeshi movement, and as an icon of the nation as much as of modernity. But this does raise the fascinating question of what makes a machine “foreign” or “national,” and, as Mullaney shows, the distinction may not be at all clear and straightforward. Even after independence in 1947, India's small machines closely copied foreign designs or continued to rely heavily on foreign components and expertise (for instance, in the case of typewriters, from East Germany). Clearly the identity politics assigned to the machine mattered, especially at a time of national self-assertion and the Cold War, but to whom exactly and for how long? Did most users much care, so long as their machine was reliable and worked as well as it should? Did the foreign identity and provenance of a machine in fact as often signify technical superiority and greater practicality rather than merely triggering the rhetoric of the politically undesirable?Footnote
4
At what point does a foreign machine (like the Toyota pickup trucks driven today by Taliban or Islamic State militants) lose its alien associations and become acculturated by convenience? Equally, one might ask, what exactly is it that makes a machine “modern”? Is it the allure of the technology itself—the appealing, almost familial trade-name; the gleaming, stylish surface paintwork and decoration; the smooth-running, labor-saving, work-enhancing interior? Is it its association, as in Mullaney's “Kanjisphere,” with other harbingers of the modern, such as “linguistic modernity” or with other forms and instruments of techno-modernity like the automobile or the cinema? Does modernity reside less in the machine itself than in the novelty of its physical environment and social milieu or its place within the new (capitalist or socialist) economic order?
Perhaps modernity is seldom just one of these alone but a dynamic and ever-changing combination of technical and social factors. In academic scholarship, modernity often seems to communicate a self-explanatory authority of its own, and yet, the closer we look, the more problematic that modernity becomes. The machine might have the effect of entrenching gender and class differences rather than erasing them. It might fail to displace forms of calligraphy or types of embroidery that stubbornly retain their utility or command continuing cultural prestige. The modern machine might come to epitomize (rather than overturn) traditions of corruption, inefficiency, and exploitation. One of the complaints made about typists in India was not just their boredom and ineptitude, but the fact of their having been given the job because they were someone's son or nephew. Do we, with hindsight, see modernity where contemporaries experienced only drudgery?
Mullaney and Finnane give fascinating insights into how their respective machines were introduced to users and consumers. We begin to see these not just as economic goods and political machines but as intimate, everyday objects that required new skills, engendered new sites and ways of work, infiltrated domestic scenes and family relationships, and created new domains of social interaction. The novel, the short story, the advertising poster, the machine manual—these become as important a guide to their impact and use as any more conventional archival sources. We begin to see education and the transfer of knowledge in a different light.
In India, too, typing institutes and sewing schools had sprung up across the country by the 1930s and 1940s and helped to impart new skills and occupational opportunities, though in South Asia they were more likely to be segregated between men and women than the “mixed gender spaces” to which Mullaney alludes and, in a society where levels of illiteracy remained high, especially among women, the learning of new skills often occurred in a more basic and informal way—by watching and copying. It would appear that in Japan especially there was far less difficulty than in India in bringing “respectable” women into the workplace, in “feminizing the labor force,” and making the office (as in North America and Western Europe) a socially acceptable place of female employment. In India, too, the tradition of the male tailor remained strong, though (as in China) part of the eventual appeal of the sewing machine was in allowing—or, closer to Finnane's line of argument, obliging—women to work from home.
The transformative presence of these everyday machines—at home, in the street, in the workplace—helped to make modernity a matter of quotidian experience and to endow it with local meaning. But, as well as becoming vehicles for a kind of technology-fueled nostalgia, like the battered American cars of communist Cuba, they could also become emblems of the obsolete, markers of inferior status, and unwelcome reminders of a less prosperous and less permissive age. If a kind of technological optimism informs Mullaney's typewriter story, Finnane presents a more pessimistic tale of the sewing machine's meaning and uses. The downside of these once new machines is perhaps only gradually becoming evident to us—the disruption caused to domestic life; the reinscription of negative gender roles; the accidents and indebtedness; the creation of new networks of subordination and dependency; the loss of preexisting, less technologically versatile, modes of employment. Small machines can tell a fascinating story of common trends across a given region, and even around the globe: the “modern girl,” for instance, so often a typist or office worker, who appears, as if overnight, in Bombay and Calcutta, in Shanghai and Tokyo, in the early part of the twentieth century (Weinbaum et al. Reference Weinbaum, Thomas, Ramamurthy, Poiger, Dong and Barlow2008).Footnote
5
And yet the differences between how various kinds of machines functioned in any given society are as important as their regional or global commonalities. In that sense, there cannot be a generic, global history of the typewriter, the bicycle, or the sewing machine, only a locally informed set of interconnected histories that revolve around and spiral off from a single technological object. Machines, especially small machines, came to have “lives” that are as much Japanese, Chinese, or Indian, as they were universal, and in that lies no small part of their scholarly appeal.
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As studies of technology in modern Asia move from production to consumption, and from big machines to small, so they confront increasingly complex and nuanced issues about the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global; between political economy and culture; and, perhaps most crucially, between technology and modernity. From a South Asian perspective (and perhaps from a Southeast Asian one as well), many of these issues are inescapably bound up with the Western colonial presence, decolonization, and the post-independence quest for national self-sufficiency and economic autarky. In East Asia, as the articles by Antonia Finnane and Thomas Mullaney demonstrate, the issues play out somewhat differently, not least because of the pivotal role of Japan as a major regional force, an industrial nation, and an imperial power. In South Asia in the period covered by these essays, Japan was a far more marginal presence, with only some industrial goods—such as textiles, bicycles, or umbrella fittings—finding a market there by the mid-1930s. At their height in 1933–34, some 17,000 Japanese bicycles were imported into India (out of nearly 90,000 overall), and in 1934–35, barely 1,400 sewing machines (out of 83,000); within three years this had fallen to less than 700.Footnote 1 However, as Nira Wickramasinghe has recently demonstrated with respect to Ceylon (colonial Sri Lanka), Japan had a significance that ranged well beyond its limited commercial impact: it inspired admiration for the speed of its industrialization, for its scientific and technological prowess, and as the foremost exemplar of an “Asian modern” (Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2014, chap. 5). One other way in which Japan figured in postwar regional history was through demands for compensation made in 1946 for sewing machines destroyed by Japanese bombing (or the looting that accompanied it) and the occupation of the Andaman Islands.Footnote 2 And yet, relatively remote though Japan and China might be from South Asia's consumer history, across much of the Asian continent there was a common chronology to this unfolding techno-history, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and dictated less evidently by the politics of war and peace than by the influx of small machines, of which sewing machines and typewriters were but two conspicuous examples.
Finnane's concluding comment that the sewing machine has “deservedly attracted attention from historians” because it “stood at the heart of innovative and globally influential practices in manufacture and distribution in the United States” is clearly warranted, but the sewing machine was also part of a cluster of modern, small-scale technological goods, originating in the West, that impacted around the globe during this period. Mark Twain, traversing the Pacific in the mid-1890s, remarked that the bicycle was now to be found everywhere. Of Fiji he noted, somewhat prejudicially: “Only sixty years ago they [the Fijians] were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle” (Twain [1897] Reference Twain2005, 48). Many of these machines originated in the United States and so demonstrated the long reach of American industrial capitalism and its impact on Asia even before US intervention in the Philippines in 1898, though other Western powers, including Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, were also important players. What Mullaney's article interestingly underscores, with respect to another of these machines, the typewriter, are the regional limitations of that increasingly global presence, for although Remington and other makers developed typewriters with South Asian scripts, and so helped to preclude local competition within the Indian subcontinent, they had far less success in finding a solution to the “puzzle” presented by East Asian characters. This left the problem to Japanese, and later Chinese, typewriter engineers and manufacturers to solve. In India—fixed, through its long history of British colonialism, far more firmly within the Anglophone world, by contrast with the East Asian “Kanjisphere”—the typewriter remained, to a large degree, an instrument for English-language communication, documentation, and, one might even add, domination. The adaptation of the numerous South Asian scripts to fit modern technological requirements was perhaps more profoundly influenced by the earlier needs of the printing press and the standardization of fonts (a process that went back to the late eighteenth century in Bengal) than by the later requirements of the typewriter. The challenge of adapting the Devanagari script for keyboard use seems to have prompted few official concerns before the formal adoption of Hindi as India's national language in 1950 (Government of India 1958).Footnote 3
Equally, the early success of Singer and other Western sewing machine brands in Japan and subsequently China was less durable than their continuing dominance in South Asia—a hegemony that lasted well into the 1950s—and where local manufactures were less able, in a colonial environment, to make much headway against American and other foreign manufacturers. Like Yu Binqi in 1930s China, India, too, had its amateur inventors and local entrepreneurs seeking to produce and market sewing machines, typewriters, and bicycles; but, until political and economic circumstances changed in the late 1940s with Indian independence, they found it hard to develop and promote their goods in competition with well-established British, German, and American makes. They even found it hard to acquire the raw materials and the precision engineering skills required to produce such intricate machines. Mullaney and Finnane seem to suggest that Japan and latterly China had few technical problems of this kind: it would be interesting to know more about how, in often adverse circumstances, such goods were made and circulated, for instance, in the Communist-held areas of northern China during the war against Japan or in the besieged Nationalist regime in Chongqing. The military associations of the small machine are implicit in both essays—the heroic typist stationed near the battlefront, the sewing machines made in factories that once produced machine guns—but, in an era of imperial contestation as well as the Cold War, the militarization of the small machine, its employment in the making of war as much as in the manufacturing of peace, surely informs and contextualizes much of its regional history.
It was not until the 1950s, or even later, that Indian typewriters began to command even a modest market in India and then in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East. From the South Asian perspective, the sheer number of machines, as given by Finnane with respect to sewing machines, being produced in East Asia by the 1950s is staggering. Far from having a sewing machine in every home, or a bicycle for every worker, in India, as late as the 1970s, there were fewer than 4,000 bicycles per million of the population and barely 500 sewing machines, an index of India's far slower development, its enduring poverty, and low levels of consumption.
On the other hand, despite their relatively small numbers, room certainly existed for the small machine, as Mullaney puts it with respect to typewriters, to be “a machine with a politics,” a vehicle for national and anti-colonial sentiment, in the tradition of India's swadeshi movement, and as an icon of the nation as much as of modernity. But this does raise the fascinating question of what makes a machine “foreign” or “national,” and, as Mullaney shows, the distinction may not be at all clear and straightforward. Even after independence in 1947, India's small machines closely copied foreign designs or continued to rely heavily on foreign components and expertise (for instance, in the case of typewriters, from East Germany). Clearly the identity politics assigned to the machine mattered, especially at a time of national self-assertion and the Cold War, but to whom exactly and for how long? Did most users much care, so long as their machine was reliable and worked as well as it should? Did the foreign identity and provenance of a machine in fact as often signify technical superiority and greater practicality rather than merely triggering the rhetoric of the politically undesirable?Footnote 4 At what point does a foreign machine (like the Toyota pickup trucks driven today by Taliban or Islamic State militants) lose its alien associations and become acculturated by convenience? Equally, one might ask, what exactly is it that makes a machine “modern”? Is it the allure of the technology itself—the appealing, almost familial trade-name; the gleaming, stylish surface paintwork and decoration; the smooth-running, labor-saving, work-enhancing interior? Is it its association, as in Mullaney's “Kanjisphere,” with other harbingers of the modern, such as “linguistic modernity” or with other forms and instruments of techno-modernity like the automobile or the cinema? Does modernity reside less in the machine itself than in the novelty of its physical environment and social milieu or its place within the new (capitalist or socialist) economic order?
Perhaps modernity is seldom just one of these alone but a dynamic and ever-changing combination of technical and social factors. In academic scholarship, modernity often seems to communicate a self-explanatory authority of its own, and yet, the closer we look, the more problematic that modernity becomes. The machine might have the effect of entrenching gender and class differences rather than erasing them. It might fail to displace forms of calligraphy or types of embroidery that stubbornly retain their utility or command continuing cultural prestige. The modern machine might come to epitomize (rather than overturn) traditions of corruption, inefficiency, and exploitation. One of the complaints made about typists in India was not just their boredom and ineptitude, but the fact of their having been given the job because they were someone's son or nephew. Do we, with hindsight, see modernity where contemporaries experienced only drudgery?
Mullaney and Finnane give fascinating insights into how their respective machines were introduced to users and consumers. We begin to see these not just as economic goods and political machines but as intimate, everyday objects that required new skills, engendered new sites and ways of work, infiltrated domestic scenes and family relationships, and created new domains of social interaction. The novel, the short story, the advertising poster, the machine manual—these become as important a guide to their impact and use as any more conventional archival sources. We begin to see education and the transfer of knowledge in a different light.
In India, too, typing institutes and sewing schools had sprung up across the country by the 1930s and 1940s and helped to impart new skills and occupational opportunities, though in South Asia they were more likely to be segregated between men and women than the “mixed gender spaces” to which Mullaney alludes and, in a society where levels of illiteracy remained high, especially among women, the learning of new skills often occurred in a more basic and informal way—by watching and copying. It would appear that in Japan especially there was far less difficulty than in India in bringing “respectable” women into the workplace, in “feminizing the labor force,” and making the office (as in North America and Western Europe) a socially acceptable place of female employment. In India, too, the tradition of the male tailor remained strong, though (as in China) part of the eventual appeal of the sewing machine was in allowing—or, closer to Finnane's line of argument, obliging—women to work from home.
The transformative presence of these everyday machines—at home, in the street, in the workplace—helped to make modernity a matter of quotidian experience and to endow it with local meaning. But, as well as becoming vehicles for a kind of technology-fueled nostalgia, like the battered American cars of communist Cuba, they could also become emblems of the obsolete, markers of inferior status, and unwelcome reminders of a less prosperous and less permissive age. If a kind of technological optimism informs Mullaney's typewriter story, Finnane presents a more pessimistic tale of the sewing machine's meaning and uses. The downside of these once new machines is perhaps only gradually becoming evident to us—the disruption caused to domestic life; the reinscription of negative gender roles; the accidents and indebtedness; the creation of new networks of subordination and dependency; the loss of preexisting, less technologically versatile, modes of employment. Small machines can tell a fascinating story of common trends across a given region, and even around the globe: the “modern girl,” for instance, so often a typist or office worker, who appears, as if overnight, in Bombay and Calcutta, in Shanghai and Tokyo, in the early part of the twentieth century (Weinbaum et al. Reference Weinbaum, Thomas, Ramamurthy, Poiger, Dong and Barlow2008).Footnote 5 And yet the differences between how various kinds of machines functioned in any given society are as important as their regional or global commonalities. In that sense, there cannot be a generic, global history of the typewriter, the bicycle, or the sewing machine, only a locally informed set of interconnected histories that revolve around and spiral off from a single technological object. Machines, especially small machines, came to have “lives” that are as much Japanese, Chinese, or Indian, as they were universal, and in that lies no small part of their scholarly appeal.