SOUTH ASIA

RESEARCH
Vol. 42(2): 1–18
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DOI: 10.1177/02627280211073181 Copyright © 2022
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DEVELOPMENT SCIENCE: LINKING

POSTCOLONIALITY AND INDIAN
INSTITUTES OF TECHNOLOGY
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
IIT Madras, Chennai, India

Abstract  Post-independence Indian science as a medium of

national development offers an opportunity to engage with the
West beyond the straightjacket of domination and subordination.
This ambivalence is reflected in the conception and materialisation
of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), established under the
guidance of Western powers to strengthen India’s technological
progress. Being delivered from the West, IITs created conditions
of sameness and difference, leading to a situation where the West
and India transformed each other, with major implications for
ideas of development and nationhood. This article focuses on IITs,
particularly IIT Kanpur, as a site of collaboration and contestation,
where engineering and politics often crossed, negotiated and resisted
each other. This also led to situations where science’s materialisation
through machines, such as computers, blurred the experiential
difference between the West and India. Such boundary crossings
created new scientific subjectivities that traversed beyond the nation
and de-territorialised the practice of science.
Keywords: computers, development, IITs, India, postcoloniality, science

Introduction
An academic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working as
programme director at IIT Kanpur (IITK) in the 1970s, Bob Halfman (cited in
Leslie & Kargon, 2006: 116), once stated: ‘I have come to realize that Indian cul-
ture…is in many ways only superficially responsive to the objective techniques of
science and engineering. The capable, modern, imaginative engineer with initiative is
a misfit…in the face of endless frustration’. By contrast, the established Indian engi-
neer and policy maker Kirit Parikh, cited in Bassett (2016: 269), asserted that ‘IITs
were India’s most generous gifts to the US’.
2 South Asia Research  Vol. 42(2): 1–18

This article occupies and explores the space between these two articulations. The
first indicates condescendence and dismissal by an American academic during the
early days of the IITK. The second, by a highly successful Indian, expresses triumph
and suggests a reversal of the first statement, long after India’s IITs had established
themselves as centres of technological excellence. The content and tone of these state-
ments betray slippages in the conception and realisation of IITs as spaces of collabora-
tion that went beyond science and redefined development and nationhood. The first
quote offers a unique insight to understand how science is imagined as territorial and
cultural by those who supposedly possess it, suggesting why it can work only in places
conducive to its circulation and growth, such as the West. The second quote turns
Western anxiety on its head, suggesting that rather than India being the beneficiary
of its scientific association with the West, it is actually the other way around. I return
to this topic at the end of the article, after critical engagement with IITs vis-à-vis the
West and what this meant for postcolonial development science in India.
Though there are significant tensions within science itself (Feyerabend, 1987;
Hind, 2008; McDermott, 2003; Zelinsky, 1975), in a development-obsessed country
such as India, it was perceived as a near monolith with clean foundations and univer-
sal applicability, its ‘objective’ nature seen as panacea for the evils of poverty and
underdevelopment. This determinism presented a ‘decontextualized, self-generating
technology as the unique foundation of modern society’ (Feenberg, 2003: 654). This
belief creates an impression that there may be many cultures and peoples with various
life-worlds, but there is only one modernity, seen through science and technology, so
that knowledge transfer (as in the West’s mentoring of IITs) becomes a simple matter
of finding institutional pathways. In this narrative of development, suspicion of sci-
ence will remain confined to stray critiques from scientists like Meghnad Saha soon
after independence, who had his own reasons, shown to be motivated by jealousy
(Abraham, 1997: 2138–9). It required a few decades for academic critiques of science
to arise (Alvares, 1988; Nandy, 1988; Shiva, 1988). This postcolonial condition will
continue to see science as a practice uncorrupted by cultural, historical and political
factors, so that all facets of national life can benefit from science’s pursuit. The com-
mon-sensical belief was that science in the hands of practitioners will be guided by its
principles of objectivity, or what has been called the singularity of science, integrated
by an ‘internalist epistemology’ (Harding, 1998: 2) or the ‘unity of science’ (Harding,
1998: 3).
My use of the term ‘science’ is broader than its common currency, taken here as an
umbrella term under the rubric of development modernity, as a method of enquiry,
as institutions of innovation and design, and also a motley of subjects including
applied disciplines in engineering and medicine. Two distinct strands of science and
technology in the service of the nation have dominated discussions of literature on
science and development. One is modernist in nature, dominated by national and
international development institutions and represented as an a-cultural universal,
through which development can be realised. Secondly, a critical strand dominated by
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 3

postmodern thinkers offers an opaque picture of science, characterised by secrecy and

malevolence. Both positions, while offering interesting insights into how science
matters, often ignore the cross-pollinating spaces and contact zones between the two
approaches and avoid acknowledging the spillages of such contact.
With the objective of problematising the delivery of Western science in non-
Western societies, this article highlights the ambivalent space between them, and sees
both cooperation and conflict in that relation. The article first seeks to move beyond
the understanding of Western science pitted against postcolonial development and
makes a case for science’s provincialisation, a condition not dissimilar to the provin-
cialisation of Europe in colonised societies (Chakrabarty, 2000). The discussion then
focuses on India’s drive towards collaboration with Western nations for IITs, their
place in the Indian development imaginary and how such a vision was an effect of the
complex relations between India and the West. The article then proposes IITK as
illustrative of such a collaboration and its articulation at the interstices of participa-
tion and dissension. The conclusion summarises the arguments and reiterates IITs as
a postcolonial space beyond the binary of West-and-India. For the sake of clarity in
framing, the article limits itself to the evolution of the first five IITs (Kharagpur,
Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi).

The Ambivalence of Postcolonial IITs

Jawaharlal Nehru had imagined science and technology as the solution for India’s
problems during the development decades, with some help through UNESCO and
the Colombo Plan (Yokoi, 2015), resulting in the establishment of IITs, intended to
create a pool of talent that would launch India into the future. One of the tropes of
a postcolonial state given to the mission of development is the omnipotence of sci-
ence to address the problems of a newly independent country. Science as the passport
to development is as uncritically understood in such a scenario as the belief in sci-
ence’s innocence and benevolence. Science’s coevalness with the growth of colonial-
ism or its collusion with anti-Semitism did not dilute the postcolonial state’s faith in
science’s ability to create better lives. In the aftermath of independence and the parti-
tion of 1947 that created suspicion among communities and threatened the fabric of
the nation, science was an idea and practice that transcended such fractures and
became the symbol of everything that India should do to secure a bright future. It was
less of a choice, more an imperative, a metaphor of development, hence was consist-
ently depoliticised and projected as an inclusive space.
By immunising science from political problems, the Indian state was imagining
underdevelopment as a chain of technical problems waiting for the right innovation to
overcome them. Thus, science was a symbol of ‘freedom and enlightenment, power and
progress’ (Prakash, 1999: 3). The halo around the scientist was so glaring that after
becoming India’s Prime Minister, Nehru called an inter-ministerial meeting on science
in which he fondly remembered his days at Cambridge and his fascination with its

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4 South Asia Research  Vol. 42(2): 1–18

laboratories. He added that he wanted to be the director of a laboratory rather than

becoming Prime Minister (Narasimha, 2008: 331). This implies the idea of science as
a transcendental space, which can be practised also in the face of political unrest, assum-
ing that scientists are better equipped to substantially change the fate of the nation. It is
another story that for some, Nehru was not a true believer of science and kept himself
surrounded by Congressmen who were anti-science (Ahmad, 1968: 1214). Also, with
the exception of the Atomic Energy Commission, founded already in 1948, and the
related creation of the Department of Atomic Energy under the Prime Minister’s office
in 1954 (Abraham, 1997), most research institutions were extensions of colonial pro-
jects (Ahmad, 1968: 1214). Similarly, IITs as we know them today were imagined long
before Nehru became Prime Minister and had received institutional backing during
colonialism. What is less doubtful is that, regardless of modern science’s colonial origin,
it produced an idea of India as a coherent, unified and internally consistent nation.
Though anxiety remained about how India can be scientific without being
Western, Indian leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak tried to domesticate Western
science to advance India’s ends by indigenising modernity’s core values, referring
prominently to Ayurveda, which had a scientific attitude in making use of the envi-
ronment to cater to human needs. As Chakrabarty (2011: 664) proposes, India could
not have accepted Western science and modernity in totality, because that would
have made India a deviant example, reducing it to the ‘waiting room of history’.
Science had to be delinked from the West and had to be projected as universal,
though the West by virtue of having used it earlier could help Indians in mastering it.
Thus, after independence, modernity and science (and their seductions) were ways of
escaping from the present (Lushaba, 2006: 49), which meant deprivation, hunger
and underdevelopment. Science as imagined in IITs would not have removed poverty
directly, but combined with innovations in agriculture, irrigation and immunisation,
science created a ready-made complex of believable thought.
If scientific modernity used the universal reason of science, it was done in ways
that did not always pay obeisance to the master (Prakash, 1999: 5). In his study of
everyday technologies such as typewriter or sewing machines, Arnold (2013: 4) tells
us that it was not always big things like dams or bridges that created the technological
imagination. Rather, these small machines and their everyday uses created a popular
imagination through which a new way of thinking emerged. Though these machines
were developed in the West to meet Western needs, their histories in India were not
mere extensions of Western experience (Arnold, 2013: 6). In the act of translation
from one geographical space to another, we see both the power and vulnerability of
science. We also sense science’s dislocation in its camouflage of postcolonial hues,
which decentres Western science to be effective. Though commonsensically science
can only be the effect of the state, for Nandy (1988: 4) it was the state’s new ‘justifica-
tory principle’. In a way, scientific innovations produced the state, because through
their performativity, like satellite launch, missile test or entrance test for IITs, they
presented an idea of the state that is modern and forward-looking.
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 5

Modern science may have its origin in the West and may have become a tool of
colonial control, but to hyphenate it with the West denies the agency of the postco-
lonial world to use science for its own future and in its own ways. Long before Nehru
‘discovered’ India or the N.R. Sarkar Committee, established in 1945, recommended
higher technical institutes such as IITs, Tilak had suggested duplication of institu-
tions such as MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was confident that
industrial education can help India in increasing agricultural productivity and that
mechanical and scientific laboratories were required to ensure material prosperity
(Tilak, 1922: 86–7). As early as 1884, he saw MIT as the technological destiny that
India should aspire for. At a time when Indians did not even know what MIT is, or
how technology can help India in realising its potential, Tilak had the vision of main-
streaming an American institution as an Indian replication to help India’s cause. The
idea of a scientific and technologically superior West found expression outside India’s
colonial master and was concentrated in one of its former settler colonies, the USA.
Tilak was not just using MIT as a model to emulate but was also contriving to shift
the locus of scientific progress away from England.
Tilak’s short shrift of the British model was not only based on MIT’s annual
reports that he was receiving from some Indian students studying at MIT but also
reflected realisation that the British were not the leaders of science anymore. The
famous economist Alfred Marshall, too, had told an Indian student, Devchand
Parekh, that Indians should not come to Britain to study liberal arts but should go to
the USA, MIT in particular, to study engineering and then return to India to set up
industries (Bassett, 2016: 218). It must not be lost on us that Tilak’s vision of an
international scientific community was not a movement away from the nation or the
reality of colonial servitude. Rather, it was meant for creating a consciousness that
science can give India a guarantee of freedom. Training of Indians at MIT would cre-
ate a positive sense of the self, which could then be used against the colonial infanti-
lisation of India. Though the craft skills Tilak expected from an MIT-like school were
not offered by MIT in reality (Bassett, 2016: 34), his invocation of MIT served
another purpose. It was a reference point outside Britain and also a way of creating a
scientific community, not as the loose scientific temper that Nehru would promote,
but a real and actually existing place where scientific training was imparted.
The territoriality of science as seen in conventional postcolonial critiques imagines
peoples in their specific places. That is what expressions like ‘ethno science’ and
‘Western science’ mean. This ignores co-production of values, co-constitution of
skills and the mutual dependence of local and global factors in the circulation of
ideas. It will be productive to draw from recent interventions in postcolonial studies
to focus on the decentring of science and its travel across cultures. Instead of perceiv-
ing science as a form of Western dominance, it will be useful to see it as a contact
zone, a space of hybridity and impurity (Anderson, 2002: 644). That said, India’s
postcolonial experience is deeply ambivalent to Western modernity and science.
Though science was believed to be the harbinger of material benefits and comforts, it

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was equally perceived to be a source of decadence and degeneration. India wished to

be like the West as far as technological innovation, better per capita income,
infrastructure and quality of life were concerned. Yet it could not ignore its crass
commercialism, devaluation of an organic order or soul-destroying individualism
as markers of that developed state. Indian postcolonial science was caught
between these two contradictory impulses of development, as both better life and
meaningless life.
The establishment of IITs offered an opportunity to move beyond this doubt to
find India’s future in the West, while retaining its own cultural specificity. Unlike
atomic research, which focused on secrecy and concerns of national security
(Abraham, 1997: 2136), IITs provided alternative spaces where science could opera-
tionalise itself through transparency and public participation. IITs were spaces of
compromise between the superiority of Western technology and the ability of Indian
scientists to develop science for the nation’s needs. Though during India’s freedom
struggle, it became easy to target colonialism and its technology for de-developing
Indian industry (such as textile) and link the expansion of Western science to the
disappearance of local skills, the postcolonial state had no such qualms about adopt-
ing technology from the West. Postcolonial Indian science, as a hybrid space of the
indigenous and the foreign, was best captured in the IITs, which would be founda-
tionally Indian, but guided by the West, though this exercise would complicate the
one-dimensional understanding of postcoloniality as an unambiguous interrogation
of Western instrumental science.

IITs as Contact Zones

IITs provided a site where India and the West shared a common future and rein-
vented their earlier relationship of domination and subservience. The World Wars
had shattered the myth of a singular West and had made the West discover barbarism
within itself, rather than in the underdeveloped world. Scientific collaboration in the
establishment of IITs meant a bracketing of Western civilisational superiority and
Indian moral authority. Regarding India’s desire for technology, the West offered a
kind of Lacanian mirror that would help India recognise itself as desirous of entering
into the symbolic order of modern technology. Reading IITs as a space of develop-
ment meaning making is a meaningful exercise, because this is where India’s relation-
ship with the West was recalibrated in a fast-changing international context. After the
colonies were gone, and along with it the aura of the West as the highest stage of
human evolution, combined with the pragmatism of a postcolonial state like India in
attracting Western technology, IITs signified a spatialisation of that new hybrid
development practice.
IITs were contact zones where ‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,
often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt,
2008: 7). But this was no longer a colonial contact zone, where relations of inequality
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 7

were the norm. Now it was multi-accentual and in these contact zones, stability
around easy binaries like colonial/postcolonial, India/West, tradition/modernity
were challenged, and certainties around Self were reversed. IITs were a contact zone
with a difference, because this connection was mutually beneficial and constitutive of
each other’s future. It created new developmental subjectivities and made the pro-
tagonists imagine themselves as carriers of technology that knew no border. The very
idea of IITs had a national objective, to be later negotiated and transcended by the
elite group of faculty members from IITs and the Western professors who came to
mentor them. The exchanges and encounters between the West and India produced
spaces of negotiation and resistance at the same time. They were sites of divergent
narratives, multivocality and competing significations (Anderson, 2002: 651).
Though it is common knowledge that Western disciplines and their practitioners
colluded with colonialism, recent postcolonial scholarship has been increasingly
vocal about the slippages in such an unequal relationship of power. The power of sci-
ence does not always apply evenly, nor does it respond with compliance to advance
Western causes. They are interrogated, resisted, appropriated, co-opted and redi-
rected to create conditions that establish the freedom of non-Western people to
choose their own destiny, using science to reach that state. The IITs were contact
zones in a very substantive sense, unlike the research laboratories engaging with
nuclear and strategic research. If the labs were one approach to Western domination
that relied on opacity or even indigenous knowledge to counter global science with a
subtle message that ‘we can also do on our own’, institutions like IITs believed in a
common future through knowledge circulation and sharing.
As noted, before Nehru’s investment in IITs, they had already been institutionally
sanctioned by the British through the Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee of 1945. The
need was pressing, given that importing manpower from Europe after the World War
would be next to impossible, since the personnel demands in Europe’s post-war
reconstruction would leave little scope for using Western manpower in India. Despite
the conception of IITs in the writings of Tilak in the late nineteenth century, the rush
with which the Sarkar Committee’s interim report (Sarkar, 1946) was submitted and
the whole architecture of technical institutions was accepted is striking. This docu-
ment remains the crucible of IITs as a system. The IITs were products of a particular
moment in India’s history, connected to the history of the world. The Sarkar
Committee’s objective was to explore the possibility of technical institutes for the
country’s post-war industrial requirements. More specifically, the aim was to see
which model was desirable: (a) a central institution modelled after MIT with a few
subordinate affiliated institutions, (b) many such institutions on a regional basis or
(c) any other institutions (Sarkar, 1946: 2).
An independent nation could not have made a fresh beginning by depending on
old symbols of dependency and inferiority, such as the Thomason College of
Engineering at Roorkee or the Bengal Engineering College at Shibpur, as they could
not have successfully carried the aspirations of a new class of citizens. Thus, the

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acceptance of the second proposal, to establish a few MIT-like institutions on a

regional basis, is unsurprising. In this connection, Nazir Ahmed’s dissent note in the
Sarkar Report regarding establishment of higher technical institutes becomes even
more interesting. Ahmed rightly felt that a few institutions thus proposed are insuf-
ficient to meet India’s needs after independence. Rather, care should have been taken
to consider and upgrade existing facilities and build upon them (Sarkar, 1946: 14).
Ahmed’s warning was that without upgrading them, ‘existing institutions are likely to
stagnate and decay while the newer institutions will work in an atmosphere of isola-
tion’ (Sarkar, 1946: 14).
IITs were futuristic spaces because their very existence was to fulfil future needs.
IIT Kharagpur, or Eastern Higher Technical Institute as it was called then, was the
first to come up in 1951, with assistance from Americans, Russians and West
Germans. Afterwards, IIT Bombay (1958) received financial and human resource
support from the USSR, IIT Madras (1959) from West Germany, IIT Kanpur (1960)
from the USA and IIT Delhi (1961) from the UK.
Though this tutelage and mentoring may be interpreted as continuation of
Western scientific hegemony, it may be more appropriately viewed as collaborative
exercises, though the transfer of knowledge and expertise was moving from the West
to India in the early days. In fact, the Indian government went far to persuade MIT
to mentor IITK and expressed its willingness to meet all conditions (Leslie & Kargon,
2006: 115). This was in line with the Sarkar Committee report, which had proposed
an MIT-type of engineering education, where courses on mathematics, fundamental
sciences, humanities and social sciences will be part of the curriculum, rather than the
narrow range of engineering education prevalent in India (Yokoi, 2015: 57).
Among the five older IITs, Kharagpur is the one which was not hyphenated with
any specific country and took off with foreign assistance from the UK through the
Colombo Plan (Yokoi, 2015) and from the USA through the Technical Cooperation
Programme. The first specialists visiting Kharagpur came from the USA, the UK, the
USSR, West Germany, France and Poland, among others. The subsequent IITs in
Bombay and Madras were as much derivatives of IIT Kharagpur as they were of MIT.
Yet unlike Kharagpur, the institutes in Bombay, Madras and Kanpur received direct
guidance from the USSR, West Germany and the USA respectively. As IIT Bombay
was being constructed, Nehru visited West Germany, which expedited the establish-
ment of the third IIT at Madras. Though it was clear that the northern institute
would be supported by the USA, due to various delays during negotiations, IITK
started without US assistance. Later, a consortium was formed and eight institutes
came on board: MIT, California Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Princeton
University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon
University and Case Western Reserve University.
With the completion of IITK, the objective of the Sarkar Committee report had
been achieved. Four IITs in four corners of the country had successfully reconfigured
the idea of India as a scientific state given to innovation and future-building.
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 9

The heyday of IITs as MIT’s double had culminated with IIT Kanpur, but the desire
of further expansion had not yet subsided. One of the most interesting facets of IIT
Delhi is the collaboration between a former colony and a colonising power, coming
together to produce a techno-utopia. The British had helped build many educational
institutions. Despite indulging in plunder and extraction of resources, and leaving a
trail of destruction on Indian industry by the time they left, in education the British
had some claim to Western benevolence. Unlike other IITs, which were greenfield
sites, IIT Delhi was an upgrade from the earlier Delhi College of Engineering and
Technology, marking a departure from the kind of IITs seen so far. As Gautam (2013:
9) says, Imperial College London as the mentoring Institute resisted the easy tempta-
tion of creating a carbon copy of its own academic and administrative architecture,
maybe because the Institute in Delhi had already developed its own identity and the
institutional mechanisms required.
As a set of material practices, postcolonial development science was a derivative,
though theoretically directed at India’s rather than Europe’s progress. Imagining sci-
ence along the lines of Western masters does not seem to be an original way of being
a modern nation and does not invest in the potential of postcolonial people to imag-
ine nations in their own ways. This science was not a total surrender to an idea
already imagined elsewhere as in MIT, nor was it a radically alternative narrative.
Science was that catalyst of development, which normalised, structured and institu-
tionalised the expressions of the new nation. While being guided externally by
constitutional provisions, postcolonial India was still convinced about its cultural
foundation as a community. It is a project where past and present, India and the
West, did not relate in a sequential fashion, but fed into each other. Though Nehru
is often seen as an uncritical apologist of Western modernity, he was also mindful of
the miseries wrought by industrialisation and saw them as unsuitable for India
(Prakash, 1999: 203). Similarly, one of India’s greatest statisticians, P.C. Mahalanobis
(1963: 67) believed that science was not external to India, as significant progress had
been made in ancient India in chemistry, medicine and astronomy.
Soon IITs became the expression of a popular scientific imaginary. More than real
education and training, these institutions promoted a kind of symbolic meaning,
where a slogan like ‘dedicated to the service of the nation’ (engraved at the main
building of IIT Kharagpur) genuinely created the impression of science’s national
role and its metaphor of merit and aspiration. King (1970: 1463) offers a fascinating
analysis of IITs’ symbolic significance when he speaks about their ‘demonstration
effects’, which justify the nation’s commitment to science and technology and pro-
vide visitors an ‘instant impression of progress and development’. They are variously
called elite establishments, centres of excellence or Institutes of National Importance.
Use of such select vocabulary produces the idea of a scientific nation. Interestingly,
the Kakodkar Committee report by 11 members (Kakodkar, 2011: vi) recognised
that the limited number of IITs contributed to their excellence, while their mindless
expansion in the recent past has diluted the quality and caused strain on the system.

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This is against the backdrop of Government efforts to open numerous new IITs to
cater for growing demand all over the country.
Regardless of their West-mentored background and contribution to multinational
corporations, IITs continue to do research for common people, exemplified in devel-
oping low-cost drugs, low-cost housing or various rural technologies to bring people
out of deprivation and drudgery. While being modern and internationalist, these
institutions take their national and local functions quite seriously. This simultaneous
performance as national and international, local and global, in a very material sense,
makes IITs such a potent development imaginary. Reiterating IIT Kharagpur’s cen-
trality in the nation’s progress, Nehru (1956) had said in its first convocation that
‘here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands the fine monument of India,
representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making. This picture seems to me
symbolical of the changes that are coming to India’. What is remarkable is the
national character of IIT Kharagpur as the location of India’s development, its
performativity as quintessentially Indian, and its positioning in a time yet to come.
By integrating IIT graduates’ lives into national development, Nehru converted
them into protagonists in the narrative of India’s scientific development. More
importantly, he imagined an India in its developmental fulfilment, its future foretold
in IITs.

IIT Kanpur as Indian MIT

Ardeshir Dalal, a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, had announced in
1944 the need for an Indian MIT, subsequent to which the N.R. Sarkar Committee
was formed in 1945. The difference between an Indian MIT and an MIT in India
should not be underestimated, because an Indian MIT would be fundamentally
Indian, designed to address Indian problems, while maintaining MIT’s work culture
and professionalism. This was echoed in the report of the Kanpur Indo-American
Program (KIAP) prepared by Norman Dahl, which declared that IITK is not a mere
imitation, but a truly Indian institute engaging with Indian problems and addressing
them through Indian technology (Dahl, 1972: 28). Though IITK was literally men-
tored by MIT and so is the real Indian MIT, the formal request for aid from UNESCO
for IIT Bombay had mentioned that IIT Bombay would be patterned after MIT
(Kargon & Leslie, 1996: 154).
Yet the delivery of the MIT idea was not a matter of seamless integration of the
global with the local. There was growing anxiety from the US members for whom
MIT is a typical product of its environment, and so cannot be transplanted bodily,
though they believed that some defining features of MIT can be replicated. Though
certain academic models were directly imported from the USA, the second joint
conference at UC Berkeley clarified that the pattern of education would reflect Indian
traditions and changing needs, while being innovative and drawing from Western
experience (Halfman, 1972: 35).
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 11

When Dalal spoke of an Indian MIT in 1944, the proposal was not unchallenged.
A professor of history from Jadavpur University, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ridiculed the
idea of an Indian MIT and argued that Jadavpur University is an equivalent of MIT
(Bassett, 2016: 180). But regardless of resistant voices, Western technology was seen
as the passport to prosperity or, as Bassett (2016: 196) says, technology was imagined
as a Kalpavriksha or wish-fulfilling tree. Soon the idea of the state as the mediator
between science and its rewards would be questioned by G.D. Birla, another illustri-
ous industrialist, who would establish the Birla Institute of Technology and Science
(BITS) at Pilani. In fact, Prof. Thomas Drew, a professor of Chemical Engineering at
Columbia University, sincerely believed that BITS was the rightful heir of MIT
(Bassett, 2016: 237), one of the reasons being that BITS, unlike IITK, is a private
sector enterprise. But before agreeing to mentor BITS Pilani, Gordon Brown, the
Head of Electrical Engineering at MIT, had expressed reservations about using the
name of MIT indiscriminately and hoped that the IITs will continue to uphold
MIT’s ideals.
A consortium led by MIT, facilitated through USAID, came forward to help India
establish IITK, and later BITS Pilani. Since the scope of the American support was
intended to be huge, no single US university could have taken this up on its own.
Hence a consortium was proposed, to be led by one university, and this was accepted,
leading to the KIAP consortium, which was formally launched in May 1961 with
MIT as its leader and Norman Dahl as representative of the president of MIT. The
exportability of MIT and its ability to create spaces of technology in a postcolonial
state reveals the transferability and travel involved in such an enterprise. For Gordon
Brown, the key figure in this endeavour, the MIT idea meant national and interna-
tional leadership (Leslie & Kargon, 2006: 111). Interestingly, W.W. Rostow, the
architect of the modernisation theory of development (Rostow, 1971), headed the
Centre for International Studies at MIT at the time. Though Western science did not
deliver itself in a top-down manner, for Brown and his colleagues, engineering was
always global and linear, and developing countries had to learn from the developed
world (Leslie & Kargon, 2006: 112).
The MIT experiment in India wrestled with the idealism of American and Indian
leaders to create a better world through science and the pragmatism of abandoning
thriving research careers and coming to Kanpur. Relocation of American professors
with family was a challenge that could have been overcome not just with creation of
basic facilities like housing or electricity, but an enormous amount of conviction that
comfort can be sacrificed for fulfilling the universality of science. Though many were
ready to compromise to live in a visibly different world, it was understood (if not
articulated) that in contrast to America, which was changing rapidly in its march
towards material prosperity, India was static, though beginning to sense technological
revolution (Halfman, 1972: 36). These academics, driven by a missionary
zeal (Oakley, 1972: 88), had the satisfaction of being the change agents of a country
rising from the yokes of colonialism and trying its best to secure its people’s future.

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12 South Asia Research  Vol. 42(2): 1–18

When Prof. P.K. Kelkar joined as director of IITK in 1959, IITK existed in his mind
only. Later he would say that he was driven by ‘a sense of historical necessity’
(Mehrotra & Sah, 2015: 14). Dahl and Kelkar shared a relationship that bordered on
spirituality, even kinship. They exchanged many letters and kept enquiring about
IITK. Kelkar’s daughter, Madhura Gopinath (2009: 12), reflected later that ‘[i]t is
apparent from these letters, reinforcing the strong ties of friendship that the Dahls
had formed with PKK (P.K. Kelkar), that they had become a surrogate family’.
IITK was an experiment in American foreign aid, economic development and
expertise transfer, with a very clear Cold War background. Under the guise of helping
other nations grow, there was recognition that the USA was also interested in wean-
ing India away from the USSR (Bassett, 2016: 274). It is no surprise that despite the
technological superiority of American universities, USAID developed a work plan
first and then signed the contract, indicating willingness from the American side to
compromise. India with its commitment to non-alignment was the most prized catch
to establish American inevitability. The USA went out of their way to spend 13.5
million dollars on IITK, more than double the amount West Germany spent at IIT
Madras, or the Soviet Union on IIT Bombay. So IITs, imagined as Indian MITs, were
a process of constant negotiation around what constituted each other’s interests and
how they can be leveraged or bracketed not just on the basis of national interest but
also for the practice of a universal science.
Though every aspect of development has some political dimension to it, IITK
provided a space where international collaboration in science and technology did not
follow the same trajectory as Indo-US political relations. Even when American assis-
tance stopped during the Indo-Pak war in 1971, scientific collaboration continued
between MIT and IITK, as technological elites from both sides were aligned techni-
cally rather than politically (Bassett, 2009: 786). However, there were also some
apprehensions and misunderstandings. If some Indians believed that the CIA had
infiltrated the IITK establishment, Americans worried that Indian officials were coz-
ying up to the ‘superior’ Soviet models of technical education (Leslie & Kargon,
2006: 116). At times the USA needed India to get the better of the USSR, while on
other occasions India attempted to get the most out of the USA. When after the
Indo-Pak war in 1971, the USA refused to grant visas to IITK scientists, India retali-
ated by refusing visas to US engineers. The Indian government’s levying of customs
duty on equipment also irked American professors.
To begin with, short courses in computer programming were conducted, almost
entirely by KIAP faculty, going way beyond their mandate to reach out to the society
which they called home, however briefly. Dahl (1972: 24) is honest in admitting that
the IITK and KIAP faculty had both consensual and conflictual relationships, though
Dahl justifies this by reference to different cultures and mindsets. There was imbal-
ance on both sides: ‘The years were not without tensions, some of which erupted
into passion but most of which were kept in check with civility and grace’ (Dahl,
1972: 24). On many occasions, the US faculty took the initiative without close
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 13

collaboration with Indian faculty. When the digital computer came, it was mostly
due to the professional efforts of US faculty (Halfman, 1972: 58). But within three
years, Indian faculty had started guiding the computer centre. Computers also
became a rallying point to attract qualified prospective faculty with leadership
qualities.
IITs are the places where, in popular imagination, computers do everything, being
a carrier of phantasmatic desires. Bassett (2009: 791) notes how the computer became
an externalisation of Indian development dreams and was an embodiment of a new
attitude towards use of ideas. The centrality of computers in the scientific imaginary
of India and technology education cannot be underestimated. But there was ambiva-
lence around the delivery of computers and their symbolic values. If computers were
veritable machines of omniscience that will get everything right in offering solutions,
they were also seen as replacing human labour, which was abundantly available in
India (Bassett, 2009: 798). While computers were insignias of superior technology
among students who saw in them their passports to a better future in India and
abroad, their value and appeal were limited to those who used them. If some per-
ceived them as enablers of a better future, for others they were threats. The first ever
computer at IIT Bombay was a gift from the USSR, the Minsk II in 1967. By then
other IITs had already procured third generation computers such as IBM 7044.
Manchanda (2008: 156–7) notes that IITK students looked at their Bombay coun-
terparts in a condescending manner for using steam engines instead of electric
locomotives.
The computer was not mere equipment, but embodied a new attitude towards
utilisation of ideas. The urge of a whole scientific community was cathected onto it.
More than its use value in the curriculum, the computer (IBM 1620 and later IBM
7044) had a compelling power over students and faculty and was an object of admira-
tion and desire. When the IBM 1620 was introduced to IITK in 1963, American
professors talked about its range of possibilities and many students got hooked to it.
But getting hooked to the computer meant locking into an American system, as the
computer was not merely a machine but a cultural metaphor of American science and
exceptionalism. The machine was as much civilisational and political as it was scien-
tific (Bassett, 2016: 281).
No doubt, there was some glamour associated with computers, the reason for
prospective faculty to get attracted to IITK. India was the most unlikely of places for
a computer, because of its heat, dust and power shortages, as well as the fact that it
was a capital-intensive and labour-saving device. It is unsurprising that Brigadier S.K.
Bose, the first Director of IIT Bombay, had refused the Soviet Ural computer in
1961, believing that the money could be better spent elsewhere. This resistance to
computers was manifested in an article ‘Ram Raj or Computer Raj’, which appeared
in the leftist publication New Age in 1968. The article wondered if the computers
were wired for the CIA and was convinced that it will abolish many clerical jobs
(Bassett, 2016: 255).

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14 South Asia Research  Vol. 42(2): 1–18

The IBM 1620 and its subsequent advanced forms in IITK was not just an engi-
neering marvel that would catapult IITK into the very heart of Western modernity,
but an emblem of power that ascribed to it some sort of fetishism and envy from
those who did not have such a machine. That said, a computer was not a linear way
of transferring Western knowledge to India and establishing the superiority of the
West. There were some minor conflicts between Indian and American faculty relating
to the use of equipment such as computers, CCTV or low temperature labs. The
Director had clearly stated that no department or faculty can claim ownership of
equipment, which will be treated as an institute facility. Though some faculty
members were possessive about computers, there was an air of cooperation (Dahl,
1972: 20).
In the very delivery of such knowledge and its translation into Indian condition,
we see simultaneous assertion and refutation of the computer. The very idea of an
Indian MIT or an IBM in India disavowed the authority of these institutions and
confirmed their repetition and displacement. The inauguration of science in India is
also the moment of its erasure. Like the English book during colonialism, an imported
machine like a computer was both ‘a moment of originality and authority, as well as
a process of displacement that…makes the presence of the book wondrous to the
extent to which it is repeated, translated, misread, displaced’ (Bhabha, 2006: 38).
Indian science emerges at a moment of compromise between the singularity of the
West and its endless repetition. What this means is that both India and the West
constantly became each other’s other. The West must continue to pass on ‘civilisation’
and live elsewhere to retain the meaning of ‘the West’, as much as India must proac-
tively and strategically reach out to the West even after decolonisation to justify its
independence. In the act of hybridisation of MIT and its disavowal as authentically
Western, it remained genuinely Western. Leslie and Kargon (2006: 118) mention the
mentality of IITK students, reflective of 1980s reality, when they say that when one
enrols in IIT, one’s spirit ascends to America, and after graduation one’s body follows
there. This further complicates India-West differences and finds salvation of Indian
science in the West, whose innovation and progress can be engineered by Indians.

Conclusions
If the West displaced itself to stay authentic in its endless transfers to India, India also
disavowed its authenticity in mimicry. However, such imitation was not an unadul-
terated homage. It was equally a performative action that made the West develop
some sort of anxiety that Indians are not that different from Westerners insofar as
their scientific attitude is concerned. When the MIT-appointed three-men delegation
led by Prof. Norman Dahl visited other IITs and laboratories before coming to
Kanpur, one of them exclaimed that ‘they pray to the same gods we do’ (Leslie &
Kargon, 2006: 115), thereby betraying the realisation that science unifies two visibly
different cultures but also indicating that the West cannot claim superiority for long.
Tripathy: Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian IITs 15

Postcolonial mimicry as in the West’s tutelage is not slavish imitation, because IITs
were originally established not to advance Western causes, but Indian ones. In this
act, India was not getting completely co-opted into Western discourses. As we know,
India retained its autonomy in foreign policy despite knowledge flows from the USA.
IITK, too, retained its independence during the tumultuous relationship between
India and the USA.
Thus, hundreds of Indian engineers were swearing by the quality of US education
and many Directors could maintain relationships with the USA against governmen-
tal bans during the war with Pakistan. This did not destabilise the Western institu-
tions, as their doubles were getting produced in Indian IITs. Rather, it created a sense
of triumph to see science scoring over state. Unlike colonial mimicry, which depended
on ‘the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other’ (Bhabha, 1994: 86), postcolonial
scientific mimicry was characterised by a desire on the part of Indian scientists for a
compromised, translated and transgressed other, the Western scientist, who can make
the Indian appear the same and thus bridge that structural inequality.
The later idea of brain drain from India and Indian scientists populating US uni-
versities meant that such a project produced some unforeseen results. This was the
slippage of postcolonial science, because instead of enriching the country, Indian
scientists preferred to go to greener pastures and strengthened Western scientific
establishments. Today we know that the idea of brain drain that survives on the old
national and territorial imperative is being replaced by a post-national attitude, cap-
tured in the expression ‘brain-circulation’ (Shin & Moon, 2018: 4).
Returning to the first quote at the start of the article, we may say that it iterated a
framework for modern science that was assuredly Western and led to a situation
where science could either be withheld from those culturally and attitudinally infe-
rior, or else those spaces could be manipulated or upgraded for the seamless delivery
of science as practised in the West. The second quote reverses that logic and claims
that once the initial phases of Western delivery were over, science moved from the
East to the West, so that the ‘Indian’ in Indian IITs produced America as we know it
today. In the preceding pages and between these two conflicting approaches we saw
constant boundary crossings and negotiations. The slippages of such scientific con-
tact, which this article dealt with, highlight how India and the West, particularly the
USA, circulated, transgressed and reinterpreted themselves outside easy binaries like
West and India, or scientific and political, so much so that the very idea of science got
transformed.
The axiomatic certainty in the first quote by an American programme director
raising doubts about the incompatibility between Indian culture and scientific pur-
suit is negated by the counter-confidence in the second quote from an accomplished
Indian engineer. One may situate this article at the interstices of these articulations
that highlight the evolution of IITs from a moment of difference to the experience of
sameness. IITs did not remain strictly national spaces, nor did they exist experien-
tially in India. They were those transgressive spaces that produced as much of India

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16 South Asia Research  Vol. 42(2): 1–18

as of the West. Long before the Indian economic policy regime turned towards glo-
balisation, IITs epitomised cross-cultural and cross-national contact and interna-
tional collaboration towards a common future that defined India as a leading
scientific nation. The second quote may be a little exaggerated, but the fact that
Indian engineers have become the most sought-after human resources in the West
and now occupy highest leadership positions in academia and industry confirms that
IITs were indeed designed to help the world excel by drawing top labour from India.
Though the institutional mandate for IITs was to be national and Indian, during and
after their delivery and circulation, they became both Indian and Western. These
multiple ways of being and becoming were not IITs’ weakness but were at the heart
of their evolution as centres of excellence.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article.

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Jyotirmaya Tripathy holds a PhD in cultural studies and works on the cultural
dimensions of development practices and contemporary India. He is Professor at the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu,
India. [e-mail: jyotirmaya@iitm.ac.in]