Abstract
American-educated Indian engineers are most prominently associated in the public mind with recent developments in Silicon Valley and Bangalore. In his latest book, historian Ross Bassett shows that India and Indians’ relationship with the world of technology in America has a much longer history, beginning as early as the nineteenth century. Tracing the nuances of this relationship over around 120 years, Bassett argues that it led to the emergence of ‘the technological Indian’, working at the frontiers of the research and corporate worlds—although the consequences for India as a society were more ambiguous.
Bassett examines this connection through the lens of a single institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and its Indian engineering graduates (including research scholars) from the 1880s to the 2000s. Using an uninterrupted run of MIT commencement programmes to build a detailed database of these students, the author expertly traces their backgrounds and career trajectories, always keeping in view the social and political context in which they lived and worked. MIT, he demonstrates, had a disproportionately large influence on the technological landscape of India through its Indian graduates and through its mentorship of elite Indian engineering institutions. What is more, the influence ran both ways—Indian MIT graduates also contributed significantly to the growth of American firms and technologies.
The book is organized chronologically in 10 chapters. The narrative begins in the 1880s, when Indian intellectuals began to draw inspiration from the USA in imagining a progressive, industrial nation. The USA was not only replacing Britain as the premier industrial power but also a more palatable exemplar, not involved directly in an imperial relationship with India. In Poona, the pages of the nationalist newspapers Kesari and Mahratta were full of admonitions to increase facilities for technical education and insisted that the best model to follow was MIT. In Bengal too, students began to see an American education in engineering as a way of transcending their colonial situation. The goal in both cases was to bring back one’s expertise to set up indigenous industries in India—a vision buoyed by the rising tide of the Swadeshi movement. Early attempts by Indians in this direction did not always go well, although there were some successes, such as Ishwar Das Varshnei, who helped set up the Paisa Fund Glass Works near Poona (1907) and other glass factories. Ironically, given the Indian enthusiasm for American education, ‘America as a country did not love the students back’. 1 Racism was by no means absent, and discriminatory immigration laws were enacted in 1917. Despite this, the appeal of America remained largely undimmed.
In the interwar years, as more Indians headed to MIT, a disproportionate number came from the Kathiawar peninsula in Gujarat. They were sponsored variously by local princely rulers and industrialists. In a series of chapters, the author deftly reconstructs the overlapping worlds of these Gujarati students, showing that many of them were connected either individually or through family networks with Mahatma Gandhi, his Ashram in Ahmedabad and his evolving philosophy of right living. Gandhi, whose views are often reductively seen as anti-technology, gave these students his blessing; but once at MIT, some of them found it increasingly difficult to reconcile their professional worlds with the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and village-based industry. Eventually, they had to sacrifice either professional satisfaction or political conviction. The author brings these dilemmas to life through the careers of Anant Pandya, who worked within the colonial establishment, serving as head of a government engineering college and later overseeing the production of munitions during World War II, and T.M. Shah, who risked his technical job at the Tatas’ steel plant in Jamshedpur by helping the workers organize a large-scale strike during the Quit India movement of 1942.
World War II put the Indo-American relationship on a more formal footing, as the colonial government in India awarded scholarships to accomplished students for further study at various institutions, including MIT. Some winners of these and other scholarships returned to take up prominent roles in Nehruvian India. They included M.N. Dastur, who set up a firm that made a successful bid to build the Bokaro steel plant (although its role was later much diminished); Brahm Prakash, who worked in the Indian nuclear and space programmes; and Darshan Bhatia, a scientist at the Central Food Technological Research Institute and later Coca-Cola. However, Bassett argues that bureaucratic hurdles, a habit of relying on foreign technical aid, and the increasing militarization of research placed a limit on how much these MIT-trained engineers could contribute.
In one set of fields—information technology and software consulting—Indian firms achieved considerable success. Here, too, the author identifies MIT alumni who played crucial foundational roles. When Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) began as an in-house wing of the Tata group in the 1960s, it was headed by three youthful MIT-returned Indians. It later rose to maturity (winning contracts to develop software for companies outside the Tata group) under the electrical and electronics engineer F.C. Kohli, also an MIT alumnus. The seven-member team that founded Infosys in 1981 included no MIT alumni, but they had previously worked for one (Narendra Patni). Furthermore, one of them had had MIT-trained mentors at IIT Kanpur. Bassett explains the recurring MIT motif by the fact that MIT played a leading role in computer science research in the post-war years, which meant that many Indian students, once there, were attracted to the field.
MIT and the USA also influenced Indian engineering at an institutional level. That MIT was invoked as a model when the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) were first mooted in the 1940s is fairly well known. In practice, the IITs were mentored not only by America and MIT (which was part of a group of nine American universities that worked with IIT Kanpur) but also by the USSR, UK and West Germany (in the cases of IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras respectively). Nevertheless, as Bassett convincingly demonstrates, they all eventually ‘converged on the IIT Kanpur/MIT model’. 2 This was evident in the soaring popularity of American universities among IIT graduates seeking to study further.
Private players also courted MIT. Industrialist G.D. Birla made a determined, and ultimately successful, effort to get MIT to help him transform the engineering college he had set up in his hometown of Pilani into a full-fledged technological university (the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, or BITS). Through an analysis of Birla’s correspondence with MIT officials, Bassett gives a flavour of the negotiations, demonstrating that MIT officials saw BITS as an opportunity to work relatively free of government controls, which they would be subject to when they mentored an IIT, for instance.
Significantly, from the mid-1960s, American law became more favourable to Indians wanting to settle in the USA. Consequently, around 80 per cent of the Indians who completed doctoral programmes at MIT in the period of 1961–2000 worked or settled in the USA after their studies. 3 The ‘technological Indian’ had started to have a more direct impact on American society than Indian, whether as an academic, entrepreneur or corporate research and development head.
Although it may be read that way by some, this book is not a panegyric to Indian technologists, MIT and the USA. While acknowledging the achievements of his protagonists—both individuals and institutions—Bassett develops a thoughtful critique of the larger system of education they were a part of. To quote from the dust jacket: ‘The MIT-educated Indian engineer became an integral part of a global system of technology-based capitalism and focused less on India and its problems—a technological Indian created at the expense of a technological India.’ This was as much a result of the IIT system as it was of changing immigration laws. This system, the author argues, created engineers whose professional interests and reference points were out of place in India, but found full expression when they migrated to the USA. The IIT ‘brain drain’ debate is a familiar one in the Indian public sphere, and there exists an opposing view too: that by contributing to cutting-edge science and technology irrespective of location, the system eventually benefits all humanity, including the Indian masses. This book may not have settled the issue entirely, but its wealth of historical detail will contribute to a better-informed debate.
It is worth asking whether MIT was indeed as exceptional in its influence as it would seem from this narrative. Bassett acknowledges that the post-Independence MIT graduates he has studied ‘stand in for the tens of thousands of other Indians who did not go to MIT, but made the decision to come to the United States for engineering training and made their careers in America’. 4 The question is relevant for earlier decades too. By the early twentieth century, Indians were studying engineering in a wide range of American universities. Had the author chosen another institution as his focus—Cornell or Harvard or the Illinois Institute of Technology—would the story have been similar? It is difficult to say without examining the data for the graduates of those institutions. Furthermore, starting with a database of MIT graduates is likely to accentuate the impression that their influence was pervasive. But this is a minor point, for the author’s larger argument is not about MIT per se, but about two countries and how they envisioned technology in the twentieth century.
The Technological Indian stands out for its innovative methods, empirical richness and lucid, almost conversational style. Bassett uses an impressive array of sources from personal, corporate and institutional archives in addition to government ones. (This reviewer’s only quibble is that there are no photographs.) He ventures boldly beyond 1947 and up to the end of the millennium to write a very contemporary and up-to-date history. This is facilitated by the book’s extensive use of interviews with the protagonists and/or their family members over a number of years. On the flip side, as a result of some biographical passages that rely largely on the interviewees’ memories, the later chapters arguably read less authoritatively than the earlier ones. On balance, though, the book deploys oral history with confidence and flair. It is also unusual in its continuous historical treatment of pre- and post-Independence periods, in its catholic interpretation of ‘technology’, and in the fact that the state is not its sole focus. It will open fresh ground in the history of science and technology, the history of business and South Asian history.