Zakir Hussian Centre for Educational Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru Unievrsity
ZHCES Seminar Series
TOPIC: Rural Development, Televisual Pedagogy and Managerialism in Western India, 1960s-1970s.
SPEAKER: Dr. Kena Wani,
Postdoctoral Fellow, ICAS: MP & the University of Göttingen, Germany
DATE: 7 April, 2021 (Wednesday)
TIME: 4:30 pm
Link to join online talk: meet.google.com/npa-ansp-qbb
About the Speaker: Kena Wani is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow at the ICAS:MP and the University of Göttingen, Germany. She completed her Ph.D. in History from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. She works in the areas like Science, Technology and Society Studies, Global Developmentalism and the Cold War, Visual Culture, Business History, and Histories of Capitalism.
Abstract: Over the 1960s and the 1970s the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) and its successor programme, the Kheda Communication Project (KCP) were initiated in villages of western India in the region of Gujarat. These programmes involved the deployment of communication satellites towards the objectives of agricultural education and rural community development. My paper will develop a historical account of SITE and KCP. It will narrate how the promises of India’s Outer Space Programme prominently interfaced with the postcolonial state’s ambitions of reforming the feudal setup as well as the productivity of the Indian village. I will trace the braiding of these two objectives through the collaborations between agencies moulding the world of international developmentalism in the Cold War period and certain individuals like Vikram Sarabhai who had transitioned from a background in the textile business community of Ahmedabad to becoming an “expert” and an advocate of introducing new technological and managerial reforms within the activities of the Indian postcolonial state. These collaborations plotted the role of the satellites in rural development as a typically acontextual and place-neutral mode of crossing between temporal and cultural differences—thus the perfect chariot of a potential “leap-frogging.” I will show, however, that the actual functioning of SITE and KCP was rather predicated upon a palpable reactivation of existing rural contexts, whereby lines of inequality and social strife were brought into sharp relief within the activities constituting these programmes. My paper will further consider how newer models and imaginaries of understanding rural development that were borne of such technologically focused programmes came to terms with their experiences on ground, and how in spite of probable “failures” they faced, these programmes sought out a new life through the emerging discipline of “rural management.”
(All are Welcome)
