From Technological India to Technological Indian Ross Bassett
In October 1949, during his first visit to the United States, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stopped at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was met by MIT President James Killian and a crowd that included eighty to ninety Indian students. The Washington part of Nehru’s visit had been marked by tension between America’s cold warriors and the nonaligned Nehru. In Cambridge, Nehru found a more receptive audience, where he discussed a subject everyone there agreed upon: the role of technology in society. Nehru asserted that the history of a nation “must be looked at from a technological viewpoint.” He went on to claim that India’s technological lag had led to its colonization. As he considered India’s future, he said: “It is most important not only that our country advance along known technological lines, but that our technicians should show initiative and add to the existing fund of knowledge.” He expressed his happiness that so many Indians were studying engineering and stated that “India has too many lawyers and too few engineers.” He urged the students to “work hard to make India once again a first-class nation.” To an elite few in India, MIT was not new in 1949. The first Indian had gone to MIT in 1882, and in 1884 both of nationalist leader Bal Tilak’s newspapers, the Kesari and the Mahratta, suggested that MIT had something to offer India. In 1893, at the prodding of Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall, Devchand Parekh, a young student from Gujarat, visited MIT, inspiring a dream of sending Indians to study there with the hope that they This essay is based on Ross Bassett’s forthcoming book The Technological Indian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
Harvard South Asia Institute 59