The state of the internets: Notes for a new historiography of technosociality

This chapter looks at the three different entry points that introduce new locations, objects, and frameworks by which the history of the Internets in India can be told. These are histories which are not about names and numbers, dates and events, gadgets and usage. Different attempts at historicizing the Internet in India have pointed at the electrification of the country, the telecommunication revolutions, and the mass adoption of the personal computer and the mobile phone as landmarks where it can all be supposed to have begun. Achuthan argues that the history of the Internet will have to begin with the history of the body, not in its use of technologies, but as it is written by the technological apparatus and the scientific industry of the nation state. With the Internet and networked technologies, though, the Indian state seems to be able to escape this paradox for the first time.