University of Heidelberg

Amelia Bonea: ‘The cable […] was not in my words’: Telegraphy and Press in Nineteenth-Century India

My doctoral research project explores the complex interplay between global electric telegraphy, news reporting and press in nineteenth-century India. Previous research in this field has frequently pointed out that the introduction of electric telegraphy into colonial India had a significant ‘impact’ on the movement of information within this region, as well as on information flows between India and the imperial metropolis. Some scholars even argued that the use of telegraphy for news distribution generated a veritable ‘revolution’ in newspaper reporting in the Indian subcontinent.

My research project questions this ‘technological impact’ approach and attempts to examine the nexus of telegraphy and press within a more nuanced theoretical and methodological framework in which the telegraph is regarded as only one among many other technologies which mediated the flow of news between various actors in India and Britain. Such an approach has the advantage of taking into account both the possibilities and the limitations of the telegraph as a medium of communication and shows that the social relations mediated by this new technology were shaped not only by its technical characteristics, but also by the socio-cultural, political and/or economic positioning of the actors between which it was mediating.

These theoretical insights will be illustrated through a content and form-oriented analysis of a selection of nineteenth-century Indian newspapers. Within the broad framework of the history of communications in India and the British Empire, the project will show how human agents and various technologies, such as the telegraph and the steamer, combined to make possible the reporting of international and local news in Indian newspapers. Each technology mediated a certain ‘framework of interpretation’ of reality with the result that the same news content – for example war – was realized differently in different media of communication. Such differences were visible not only in the content and form of news, but also in the various ways of experiencing news, time, space, power and language which these technologies made possible.

This project aims, therefore, to provide an insight into how technologies mediate information and cultural flows, but also to emphasize the importance of examining news and telegraphy within the global and local socio-economic and political context of the period under study. Such an approach allows us to distinguish between the actual mediational power of technology and its ideologically-constructed power of mediation, while also showing that the use of technological artifacts is always enmeshed in a web of complex interdependencies and interactions.

Paul Fletcher: The telegraph and governmental communication in colonial Sri Lanka, circa 1857-1900

The purpose of this subproject is to analyze the uses and practices of telegraphic communication by colonial Sri Lanka's government during the second half of the nineteenth-century; to determine not only the impact of the telegraph on political decision-making but also how the telegraph and politics became embedded together, impacting on colonial government and its decision-making and on everyday administrative processes. In so doing, it examines telegraphic messages alongside other forms of correspondence, such as letters and memos, to gauge the extent to which the telegraph was used to communicate information between Whitehall and Colonial Sri Lanka and the role that the telegraph played locally, within colonial Sri Lanka, between the governor general and the island's regional officials.