Diffusions, Relocations, and the Permeative Process of Coalescence

Accounts of the first stationary engine in Bengal, at the Baptist Mission Press, and the public launch of the first steamboat to navigate the Hugli River show how the depiction of steam as sublime firmly fixed technology as a power that would diffuse European civilization. Against this ideology, the chapter positions accounts of the engine built by Golak Chandra, a blacksmith who took the Mission’s engine as a prototype. Displayed at an exhibition of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, this engine and the context of its exhibition capture tensions within the period’s cultures of science and interracial sociability between what Kapil Raj has called “diffusion” and “relocation.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Society’s membership, a politically diverse, “cosmopolitan” group of Europeans and elite Bengalis including Dwarkanath Tagore and other figures intimately connected to Goodeve and Parker. Before turning to their futurist fictions in the next two chapters, I propose that Goodeve should be associated with what Uday Singh Mehta has called the “cosmopolitanism of reason,” which was rooted in utilitarianism, while Parker embodied Mehta’s “cosmopolitanism of sentiment,” a Burkean perspective informing Parker’s vision of future home rule for India and his skeptical depiction of maximalist global capitalism in “The Junction of the Oceans.”