Telegraphy and Time: An Interview with S. Prashant Kumar

Prashant S. Kumar is a scholar of science and empire, and a Honorary Fellow at the Archives at NCBS. During one of the delicious lunches at the NCBS canteens, we began chatting about an image of maps that I had presented during a public talk at the Goethe Institute at the beginning of my bangaloREsidency. This image overlays and combines two maps: One of telegraph cables and one of today’s internet submarine cables. Prashant had just worked with a similar looking map in his seminar at NCBS on the history of science. The maps he presented showed the significant overlaps between historic trade and telegraph networks.

Throughout our conversations, I became very interested in Prashant’s research on telegraphy, time and materiality. It is often a speeding up of communications that is thought together with the invention of the telegraph, and during my visual search through the telegrams stored at the Archives at NCBS, one design of a telegram header from 1933 shows exactly that: In the center, a hand is holding an hourglass.

Some weeks later, Prashant and I met online on a video call for an interview on Prashant’s work. That ideas about smooth and linear times need some reconsidering became apparent when my internet connection cut out right at the beginning of the interview. Below, you can read more about our conversation and Prashant’s thinking.

Imaginations of Speed Meet Realities of Delays

Iz: Thank you dear Prashant for sharing your work with us. How are you complicating the imaginary that telegraphy sped up communications in a linear and direct way?

Prashant:

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.

Like, as we just saw, right, when you were talking about speed ups, and then the internet very, you know, right on cue, great comedic timing, cut out just there, right? So yeah, the question of reliability is necessary for acceleration, and that takes time.

Labour, Material, Hacking

Iz: Questions of labour and material are often omitted in discussions of internet infrastructure and even telegraphy. Can you talk a bit more about the labour that went into building the telegraph network in India? What kinds of materials were used?

Prashant:

One of the differences between the Telegraph network in other places is that it was a government monopoly. It's really built under the East India Company, the first operational lines are in the 1840s. This is different from the situation in Europe where the telegraph and the railway are sort of funded together. And that's mostly done by sort of joint stock, private enterprise. In India, there is a Railway Telegraph that's funded that way. But the government Telegraph is used for mostly political intelligence and for, you know, transmitting reports within the East India Company government. So there's a difference in the use of it.

There's a difference at the level of materiality as well, because at least for the first few decades, the wires are built totally different. In monsoon and hurricane prone regions, it's basically, these three eighths of an inch thick rods that are suspended on top of bamboo poles, with the idea that they will sway in the wind. Most Telegraph sort of infrastructure in Europe and in other places, like North America, by the middle of the 19th century, it's reasonably high tension, thin wire.

I mean, you know, like today. So the Indian infrastructure proves kind of hardy, but it also, it's subject to lightning strikes. I'm actually working on a paper at the moment about this group of opium dealers that decide to hack the Telegraph. So what they do is, they pay a recently fired Telegraph signaler to steal a morse code machine. They cut the wire, and they wait until opium prices are being transmitted, and they falsify the prices. And they can do that because the wire is this like thick rod. And it's largely being manufactured in bazaars by local craftsmen, as are the bamboo poles.

So to answer the question about labor, right, like it's, you know, you think of this as a kind of Western structure, but in practice, the technological solutions that end up working under Indian conditions are a kind of iron rod that's anyway manufactured in the bazaar. But that allows some local stock speculators, in effect, to hack the Telegraph. So this is one paper I'm writing at the moment, which kind of gets to those questions of materiality and labor in constructing the Telegraph in India.