Changing Ontology of 'Electricity' in Colonial Calcutta(1899-1937); From 'Blood-sucking Monster' to 'Scientific Innovation for Emancipation' in Female Utopia 'Ladyland"-Multiple Perspectives of 'Colonized' Bengali Women on Electrification and Domesticity

 

Electricity, undoubtedly, remained as significant scientific innovation in the sphere of technology and human history. However, the ontological concern around ‘electricity’ or in other words, ‘what constitutes electricity?’ or ‘what is electricity?’ all these questions had actually gone through diverse discursive historico-socio-politico-cultural epochs and contexts. The concern further becomes intriguing when the intersectioned gendered world starts to respond to that. This paper, in relation with the larger theme, ‘Women, Gender and Science’, tries to locate the ontological shift that had taken place from the era of installing electricity under colonial ‘sahebs’ (the white British men), roughly, 1899 to initiations of the ‘Babus’ (upper caste, upper class male Bengali intelligentsia) and simultaneous, mostly unnoticed, responses of ‘Bibis’ from domestic world to such innovation. Hence, tracing that ontological shift through different metaphors (dismissive, deceptive like ‘blood sucker’ monster and ‘evil spirit) to later on, R.S. Hossain’s fascinating fictional story, Sultana’s Dream(1905), an imagination of liberated women’s utopia ‘Ladyland’, where electric machine used for land yielding tool in agricultural practices. Therefore, new meaning came about intermingling of electricity with women’s liberation or Purnima Debi’s (1900) intriguing response to her father, Gaganedranath’s Tagore’s initiative in bringing electricity to the household. In other words, the gendered ontological history of electricity in a colonized space provides diverse debates that pose challenge to the take-it-for granted meaning of Eurocentric, very recent, singular quantum meaning of electricity, discarding long moments of deception, as well as imagination among colonized against colonizers.

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