An Interview with S. Prashant Kumar on Telegraphy and Time

As I ask Prashant about the assumed connectivity and speed of telegraphy, my internet connection breaks down. I ask again: How are you complicating the imaginary that telegraphy sped up communications in a linear and direct way?

Prashant: Yeah, no, that's a great, and I think it's a really complicated question, right? I mean, usually it's sort of narrated linearly, especially in narratives of technological progress. People talk about these things like, well, you know, the train gets there, the telegraph gets there, and there is an acceleration immediately. And that's true. But for most of the 19th century, if you were, say, some kind of a trader, and somebody's telegraphing you price information, you are not going to bet on that being reliable until, honestly, about 1870, 1880, in most of India. Before that, telegraphs were fairly unreliable, errors would creep in. If you think about sending a message between Bombay and London in, let's say, it's 1865, right? So this is just after this thing called the Indo-European telegraph, which passes through Persia, and then through the Ottoman lands and then, you know, up through the Caucasus, that opens up.

It's passing through multiple different languages, multiple different systems, right? There are all kinds of delays. And really, it's not useful for everybody in the way that we think about until the last few decades of the 19th century. So that speed up is definitely, it's part of the myth around it. But really, a lot of the myth needs qualification. Especially in India, telegraphy for the British Empire becomes such a technological priority and a preoccupation, because during the mutiny of 1857, it's popularly believed that telegraph messages indicating that rebellions had broken out in the Northwest, allowed reinforcement of troop. And in fact, mutineers specifically tried to cut telegraph lines.

As he was being executed, one mutineer famously said, it's not the British that hang us, but those wires. So there was a consciousness that these systems allowed the British to exist in a different temporal register, right? There's a kind of simultaneity between the zone of the crisis and the imperial centers in Calcutta that the telegraph allows for. In fact, the first use of the word telegram was during the mutiny of 1857, but before they were called telegraphic messages. So there is a real political use for it, but that is very far away from a reality in which the technology is totally reliable.