The historians of technology, dealing with colonial South Asia, mostly discuss the new infrastructural and transportation technologies, and the modernization narrative from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly enough, this scholarship is not very vocal about perhaps twentieth century's most dynamic technology – electricity. The saga of electrification and its interface with colonial society is mostly unwritten. Sunila Kale explains this gap – electric power emerged as a new technology only near the end of the nineteenth century and thus left a tiny record in the colonial archive, unlike the long histories of canal irrigation and railroads, to document the recent past. Although this technology arrived in India just after it was first introduced in London and New York in the 1880s, the electricity networks expanded here only in the early twentieth century. Akhil Gupta remarks, as there is no ‘sensual way’ to experience electricity, thus from the beginning it is a social and cultural thing, ‘not something that belongs to the natural world, however that might be constructed’. Historically a young form of power, electricity became conducive for lighting purposes, and thus gradually outshined other forms of energy.

A technology is not merely a combination of machines with certain purposes, but part of our society.