Gods in the “Man–Machine”: A Posthumanist Analysis of Shankar Ramaswami’s "Souls in the Kalyug"

Addressing the unit’s special emphasis on religion and labor in South Asia, this paper will analyze an important, though implicit, connection between two main threads of Shankar Ramaswami’s Souls in the Kalyug: on the one hand, the close relationships between Delhi metal polishers and their machines, and on the other, divine presences in the factory and even within the machines themselves. As this paper will show, the resulting “god–man–machine” imbrication bears important implications not only for how the workers see themselves, their machines, and their gods, but also more broadly as a corrective to posthumanist frameworks which ignore or deny the crucial roles of the divine. This paper will thus contend that Ramaswami’s analysis, through its attention to the dynamic interactions among metal workers, their machines, and deities, pushes posthumanists to consider how the divine works alongside and in concert with technology in humans’ quest to be “more-than-human.”