Abstract
It may be surprising to find an essay about India in this book. When the atom bombs were dropped on Japan, India was still a colony, and after it gained independence in 1947, it remained for a long time what in the West was called a “developing country”: predominantly agrarian, with little industry, and a poor infrastructure. For millions of Indians, cow dung remained the most important source of energy. The majority of the population was extremely poor and illiterate. High-circulation illustrated magazines similar to those published in industrialized countries did not exist.
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Notes
The circulation of the ToI at this time was about 140,000 copies; cf. Annual Report of the Registrar of Newspapers for India (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961), 66–67; on the illiteracy rate, The Cambridge Economic History of India, ed. Dharma Kumar (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), vol. 2, 948 and 965; for the history of ToI and IWI, N. S. Jagannathan, Independence and Indian Press (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1999), 143; John V. Vilanilam, Mass communication in India (New Delhi: SAGE, 2005), 85
K. C. Sharma, Journalism in India (New Delhi: Regal Publications, 2007), 142.
See Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (2nd ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 294–295
Manjunath Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 18.
This did not at all fit into Gandhi’s ideas of India’s future. But at this time, Gandhi was a political icon only. The leader of the independence movement and, after independence, of the Congress Party was Jawaharlal Nehru. His vision of India’s future was influenced by European models, particularly by the Soviet combination of industrialization, socialism, and a centrally planned economy. With regard to economics, the vast majorirty of the Indian elite followed Nehru, not Gandhi. For Gandhi’s relationship to Nehru and the differences in their respective ideas cf. Dietmar Rothermund, Gandhi und Nehru. Zwei Gesichter Indiens (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010).
See interview with him in Bombay on June 6, 1946, quoted in Lorne J. Kavic, India’s Quest for Security. Defence Policies, 1947–65 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 28, note 19.
See ToI, November 27, 1954; Dhirendra Sharma, India’s Nuclear Estate (New Delhi: Lancers, 1983), 19
Prashant Agarwal, India’s Nuclear Development Plans and Policies (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1996), 22–23.
See Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univerity Press, 1948), 7, 27, 38–42.
For India’s early nuclear policies cf. Robert S. Anderson, Building Scientific Institutions in India: Saha and Bhabha (Montreal: McGill University, 1975)
Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb (New York: Zed Books, 1998)
George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)
Hans-Joachim Bieber, “Zur Frühgeschichte der indischen Nuklearpolitik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005): 373–414
Robert S. Anderson, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 169–275.
It is unlikely that an analysis of other Indian media would produce substantially different results. Cartoons were well known in India since the 1930s, but as illustrations of newspapers and magazines only, not as an independent type of publication; see G. N. S. Raghavan, The Press in India (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House 1994), 165–170. (“Cartoon as Commentary”). Films dealing with social and political issues were rare still in the 1950s. They would hardly have found a producer and, in addition, have passed censorship rules, which had been adopted from colonial times.
An Indian film historian, therefore, has referred to Indian cinema as “the most apolitical cinema in the world” (Chidananda Das Gupta, Talking about Films (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1989), 7. “It is impossibile in films to go openly against the basic attitudes of the establishment”; ibid.).
Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi; London: British Film Institute—Oxford University Press, 2002), 222, 238, and 579, list films entitled “Atom Bomb” by Homi Wadia (1947), Taru Mukherjee (1954) and P. Subramanyam (1964).
But none of them is mentioned in the major histories of Indian film histories like Kishore Valicha, The Moving Image. A Study on Indian Cinema (London: Sangam, 1988)
Dinesh Raheja and Jitendra Kothari, Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2004)
Sushi Arora, Cyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Anmol, 2004).
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© 2012 Dick van Lente
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Bieber, HJ. (2012). Promises of Indian Modernity: Representations of Nuclear Technology in the Illustrated Weekly of India. In: van Lente, D. (eds) The Nuclear Age in Popular Media. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086181_8
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