The Technological Indian

Ross Bassett

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674495463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

In the late 1800s, Indians seemed to be a people left behind by the Industrial Revolution, dismissed as "not a mechanical race." Today Indians are among the world's leaders in engineering and technology. In this international history spanning nearly 150 years, Ross Bassett—drawing on a unique database of every Indian to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between its founding and 2000—charts their ascent to the pinnacle of high-tech professions.As a group of Indians sought a way forward for their country, they saw a future in technology. Bassett examines the tensions and surprising congruences between this technological vision and Mahatma Gandhi's nonindustrial modernity. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to use MIT-trained engineers to build an India where the government controlled technology for the benefit of the people. In the private sector, Indian business families sent their sons to MIT, while MIT graduates established India's information technology industry.By the 1960s, students from the Indian Institutes of Technology (modeled on MIT) were drawn to the United States for graduate training, and many of them stayed, as prominent industrialists, academics, and entrepreneurs. 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.

1

The Indian Discovery of America

IN 1884 THE Mahratta, a Poona-based newspaper controlled by Indian nationalist Bal Tilak, ran a three-part series under the title “Model Institute of Technology,” in which it printed excerpts from the annual report of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and noted its relevance for India. In its analysis of this twenty-three-year-old institution, which was still struggling to establish itself, the Mahratta somewhat prematurely asserted that “for ourselves, we are quite convinced that this Institute is the best conducted institute in the world.”¹ Shortly thereafter, the publication of the report of the British Royal Commission on Technical Instruction gave the Mahratta occasion to compare systems of technical education in England and the United States. The Mahratta, recognizing British anxiety about whether it was ceding leadership in science and industry in an increasingly global environment, mischievously and subversively suggested the report’s inadequacy to remedy Britain’s lagging position in technological education. The Mahratta’s editors first allowed that the commission’s recommendations were “highly useful at the present stage of technical education in England.” However, the condescension contained in that statement became clear in the next clause, which asserted that the suggestions “cannot fairly compare with the masterly regulations of the great Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. America.”² If machines were to the British “the measure of men,” as historian Michael Adas has suggested, here was the periphery, itself behind in technical education and technology, using its global knowledge to ridicule the metropole on those very grounds.³

Britain’s colonization of India occurred in stages. In the seventeenth century the British had come as traders, largely content to operate within Indian society as it was. But by the nineteenth century, the British increasingly sought to transform India, introducing British practices into India in ways that were designed to serve Britain’s interests. Britain sought to make India an agricultural state that purchased its manufactured goods. The British started English-language schools to train Indians so they could work within the colonial system as clerks and other subordinate positions under British supervision. They built telegraph systems to strengthen their control over the land. They built irrigation systems to open more land to agricultural production. They built railroads, with components imported from Britain, to enable India to more effectively ship its agricultural products to ports.⁴

The way that the British sought to connect India and Britain created tensions, some of which can be seen in the small group of Indians who had received an English-language education. English gave this group access to a vast array of information available worldwide, which they used to understand the world and India’s place in it. They saw India’s poverty and understood it in a global perspective. They saw Europe and America developing industrially, while India did not. They saw characteristics of Indian society that they saw as incompatible with modern industrial society. But they also saw a Britain that was at variance from the Britain their rulers wished them to see. It was not an omnipotent Britain, but a Britain with a strain of anxiety about its own position in the world, fearful that Germans and Americans were catching up, wondering if British technical institutions were adequate to face global challenges.⁵

In the western Indian city of Poona, Bal Tilak and a group of English-language-educated Brahmins sought to interpret this world to their people and provide them a way forward. His newspapers, the English-language Mahratta and the Marathi-language Kesari, informed their readers of global trends, such as the increasing role of mechanization in the West, the rise of global trade, and the growing role of science in industry. But it did so in a way that sought to undermine the ideas of English technological and economic superiority that lay at the heart of empire. It framed news in a global rather than a colony-metropole perspective. Britain’s status as an advanced country seemed far less secure once the United States and Germany were in the picture. Their economic rise suggested that India’s position was a problem to be addressed rather than a fate to be accepted.

The Mahratta did not just report on global events: it called for changes in India consistent with what it saw around the world. Specifically, it called for India to establish industrial enterprises based on the latest developments in science and technology to enable it to compete in the world economy. While the Mahratta saw many examples throughout the world that India might follow, the Mahratta increasingly looked not to Britain but elsewhere, especially to the United States.

To industrialize, the Mahratta argued for the necessity of technical education, calling it “India’s greatest need.” In fact, when Queen Victoria died, the Mahratta wasted no time in asserting that a proper tribute to her would be a technical institute. Furthermore, the Mahratta called for the reform of Indian society, asking Indians, and Hindus in particular, to develop global bourgeois values. It called for them to interact more broadly with the rest of the world. It claimed that Indians needed to be more enterprising and self-reliant. In a paradoxical way, it saw individualism as the key to building an Indian nation.

Scholars now see the nineteenth century as a distinct period of globalization, both with respect to trade and the flow of information. The pages of the Mahratta drew attention to a rich informational environment coming into place in the late nineteenth century. The telegraph was merely one component of an information distribution infrastructure that included steam ships, railroads, postal services, printing presses, books, journals, and newspapers—all revealing an increasing information intensity of European and American societies. Information was frequently accessible through a global network, at times making its way to the Mahratta and other Indian newspapers. Once the Mahratta’s editors got this information, they could interpret it in their own way.⁶

Getting MIT’s annual report was one thing; taking advantage of MIT in India was something else. Even though the Mahratta could appreciate MIT, the career of Keshav Bhat, the first Indian to attend MIT, would show how difficult it could be to use knowledge from the West to develop industrial enterprises in India. Bhat studied sporadically at MIT beginning in 1882. But his efforts at establishing technology-based industries back in India failed. A cursory, skills-based education in the hands of a single individual provided precious little leverage in the effort to bring industrial enterprise to India. The complexities of technological enterprise were further shown by the fact that the meanings of Bhat’s failure were contested. Did it show the futility of sending Indians to America? Was the problem with Bhat? Was it a problem of Indian opposition to an Indian entrepreneur? There could be no definite answer, and while Bhat was soon forgotten, the questions his failure raised would remain.

Poona, the Mahratta, and the World

Poona (now Pune) is a city in western India that in 1881 had a population of 130,000. Its original importance came from its status as the seat of the Peshwas, the last major Indian polity in western India, subjugated by the British in the early 1800s. Not coincidentally, thereafter Poona was the site of a large military garrison. After being brought under British control, Poona was economically and politically a tributary of Bombay, the capital city of the British administrative unit known as the Bombay Presidency, which encompassed much of western India. The two cities, separated by one hundred miles and the mountains of the Western Ghats, were joined by rail with the 1863 opening of the Bhore Ghat Incline. Later Poona became the summer residence of the governor of Bombay. In 1885 Poona employed 25,000 people in crafts, with the largest contingents being in metalworking and weaving. Poona’s schools and colleges made it a regional education center, attracting young Indians from its hinterlands.⁷

In the late 1800s, a small group of English-educated Brahmins made Poona one of the most activist cities in India. To call their activism “political activism” would not be untrue but would underestimate its breadth. They started a political society. They started a private English-language school. They started newspapers. They started an organization for the promotion of industry. They started businesses. They wrote.⁸

One of the leading figures in this movement was Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak is best known for gathering public support through a series of provocative acts, such as the revival of the cult of Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior, and the establishment of the Ganapati festival. He challenged the British more openly and more aggressively than his contemporaries in the still-nascent nationalist movement, serving multiple prison terms and making an early assertion of India’s right to independence. Historian Richard Cashman has claimed that a key part of Tilak’s success as a leader was his ability to “speak in different social and religious terms to various groups.”⁹ One of the terms in which he spoke, not so clearly heard by historians, was technological.

Tilak, born in 1856, was the son of a schoolteacher turned minor educational inspector for the British. Tilak’s great grandfather had a more exalted post serving the Peshwas as the administrator of a town, but had to relinquish it when the British came to power. When Bal was ten, he came to Poona with his father, who had accepted a job there. Bal entered the Deccan College in 1873 earning a BA in 1876. At a time when very few Indians had a college education and when the most obvious way to use that education would have been in service to the colonial state, he and a small group of fellow Brahmins chose another path. In 1880 they established a private high school, the New English School. The next year, they founded two newspapers, the English-language Mahratta and the Marathi Kesari.¹⁰

The two papers had different audiences and, to an extent, different purposes. The Mahratta was aimed at English-speakers, the British as well as Indians in other parts of the country. The Kesari had a much more regional audience. The Mahratta had the tiny circulation of 460 copies a week in 1885, while the Kesari throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had the largest circulation of any Indian-owned periodical in the Bombay Presidency (4,350 in 1885, rising to 17,500 in 1906). The Kesari carried large amounts of advertising that subsidized the money-losing Mahratta. Both papers consistently argued for the need for the industrialization of India and for technical education.¹¹

Even though it was an English-language newspaper with a small circulation, the Mahratta could indirectly reach both English-reading and vernacular-reading Indians throughout the country by being read and excerpted by other Indian newspapers. Indian papers, like many newspapers worldwide, operated in a system where they exchanged news among themselves. In its early years the Mahratta had a feature titled “Our Contemporaries,” in which it briefly commented on reports from other newspapers.¹²

Another regular heading of the Mahratta in its early days was “What the World Says,” a section of global news. The Mahratta regularly carried stories from both British and American periodicals, but the exact provenance of those stories is unclear. It is possible that the system of exchange worked here, but the Mahratta specifically mentioned in 1881 that “London friends” had sent it copies of periodicals that had information of relevance to India.¹³ The Mahratta occasionally wrote of British or American publications coming in the latest mail. Many stories were likely secondary or tertiary references, with sources coming from another paper within a paper the Mahratta had received. The Madras-based Hindu had a London correspondent and occasionally reports from British papers were explicitly attributed to him. Whatever their source, the Mahratta regularly cited articles from a wide range of English publications, including popular publications such as Nineteenth Century or Fortnightly Review. It occasionally cited pieces from more technical journals, such as Nature or Engineering. The American journals it cited most regularly were the North American Review and Scientific American. The range of periodicals the Mahratta had access to through this system of secondary and tertiary citation is evidenced in its 1881 reproduction of a column of business advice, which originally appeared in the Philadelphia-based Confectioner’s Journal.¹⁴

Rising America, Declining England

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain was the home of what historians now call the Industrial Revolution. Technological change came to the fore. While not immediately or uniformly, factories increasingly replaced small-scale production, steam engines replaced animate power sources, machines displaced human skill, and iron displaced wood. Up through the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain had been the unquestioned leader in this process. But by the late nineteenth century, there were signs that Germany and the United States were catching up. Partially this was due to the fact that, as economists and histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Indian Discovery of America
• 2. American-Made Swadeshi
• 3. Gandhi’s Industry
• 4. From Gujarat to Cambridge
• 5. Engineering a Colonial State
• 6. Tryst with America, Tryst with MIT
• 7. High Priests of Nehru’s India
• 8. Business Families and MIT
• 9. The Roots of IT India
• 10. From India to Silicon Valley
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index