Cement, Rayon, Stainless Steel, and Rubber: Toward a Sensory Microhistory of Twentieth Century India

Abstract

This paper uses the Telugu translations, writings, and autobiography of Dr. Wuppala Lakshmana
Rao (1898-1985) to trace the emergence and impact of four twentieth-century materials and
commodities—cement, rayon, stainless steel, and rubber—on urban life in India. Born in
Berhampur in what is today Orissa, Lakshmana Rao earned his PhD in Botany from the
University of Tübingen in Germany in 1924. He went on to serve as manager of the Andhra
Cement Company in Vijayawada before being recruited to Moscow by the Soviet Foreign
Languages Publishing House, where he worked as a Telugu translator from 1958 to 1970. Using
his Soviet translations into Telugu and original Telugu writings, this paper focuses on the
portrayal of the dramatic shifts in the substances, textures, surfaces, raw materials and their
qualities that transformed everyday urban life in the first half of the twentieth century.