Mahatama Gandhi and MIT

There is a connection strange as it may seem between Mahatama Gandhi and MIT. I came to know of it in a rather strange way myself. A few months ago I received a call from a professor at the University of North Carolina who said he was writing a book about Indians who had graduated from MIT and had made major contributions to India. Prof Ross Basset said that my name had been given to him by some alumni from MIT during his research as one of those.

During the colonial period, roughly one hundred degrees were awarded by MIT to Indians.One of them was Kalelkar who was then not an occasional satyagrahi, but a committed freedom fighter and Gandhian. Yet Bassett revealed that this young man would later go to the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and take a degree in engineering. In fact families associated with Mahatma Gandhi sent a total of nine sons to MIT during the nationalist movement. Their importance to India and to the historical understanding of India is disproportionate to their numbers. These men—and they were all men—often from elite families, formed a technological elite in the last days of colonial India. Their careers show a technological nationalism in India and represented an important foreshadowing of the period after independence.

Perhaps one reason Indians were drawn to MIT was that it was based on a notion of
engineering and engineering education largely antithetical to that held by Indian engineering colleges.The first engineering college in India began operation in Roorkee in 1847. The British established the engineering college at Roorkee and the later engineering colleges in Sibpur, Poona, and Madras, as a way to produce intermediate grade engineers for the British Public Works Department, which had control over the schools. As a consequence, these schools had a very limited curriculum, focused on civil engineering, the discipline most needed by the Public Works Department, and within civil engineering, focused on narrow vocational training in such areas as surveying and estimating.

Although the first Indian attended MIT in 1880, only in the twentieth century is it
possible to trace the lives of Indians who went to MIT with any specificity. The first MIT student to play a significant role in the technological development of India did so through a larger social movement. In 1908, after two years of study at MIT, Ishwar Das Varshnei came to Poona to set up a glass factory under the umbrella of a nationalist organization, the Paisa Fund. The Paisa Fund, so called because it raised money by asking for donations of a paisa each (a paisa was a sixty- fourth of a rupee) from a broad spectrum of Indian society, was supported by Tilak and sought to develop indigenous Indian industry.

During the 1930s, a small princely state in Kathiawar, Bhavnagar, was the leading source of Indian students at MIT. In fact, Bhavnagar, representing less than 2 percent of the population of India, produced almost half the Indians who earned degrees from MIT in the 1930s. This concentration in Bhavnagar was further concentrated in the family of a lifelong friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Devchand Parekh. Parekh had a vision of a technological India built around Indians trained at MIT and worked to realize this vision within his family.

Between 1920 and 1939, MIT had enrolled on average 7 Indian students per year. By the fall of 1944, that number had increased to 24. But in April 1945, with the Indian government’s offering unprecedented funding for graduate training abroad, MIT had 271 applications on hand from Indian students, a number representing over half of the scholars the Indian government was planning to send to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Although MIT was able to admit 16 for the fall semester, it had placed 180 Indian students on its waiting list, implicitly stating that the students were well qualified for MIT but that there was no room for them.

MIT made another little known contribution to the technological development of India after independence. The Sarker Committee, after its chair, N. R. Sarker, has become well known in India for its role in laying out the framework of the Indian Institutes of Technology. This committee of twenty- two had nine Britons and thirteen Indians. Among the Indians were some of India’s leading scientists, such as J. C. Ghosh and S. S. Bhatnagar, and representatives of India’s leading industrial enterprises, such as A. D. Shroff, who worked for the Tatas. On the committee also, but unnoticed before by historians, were two young Indian engineers with doctorates from MIT: Anant Pandya and M. D. Parekh.

In the decades after independence, the Indians did have means and opportunity. The sons of Indian elites—lawyers, civil servants, educationalists, businessmen, and engineers—went to MIT in increasing numbers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And this trend has continued. The contributions of these Indians who returned from MIT to rebuild the nation are manifold and hopefully Prof Basset's research will be provide us the details.