Keywords
Imperialism
Modernity
Nuclear Energy
Science
Secularism
How to Cite
Abstract
This article intends to highlight the political and intellectual implications of nuclear energy in India beyond “traditional” security approaches. It elicits the process whereby local postcolonial elites felt identified and characterized scientific and technological research as a tool for boosting “progress” and national development. That explains why nuclear energy came to represent not only the most evident expression of “European modernity”, but also a mechanism capable of producing secular knowledge, and thence, a modern space. Through the analysis of the personal files of Jawaharlal Nehru and Homi J. Bhab – “fathers” of the Indian nuclear program – and a critical dialogue with earlier literature on the subject, it is argued that nuclear energy produced a semantic field in the discursive space of the nation, which development and refinement acquired the condition sine qua non to achieve “European modernity”.The journal Memoria y Sociedad is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
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