The birth of Indian Institute of Science

CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 94, NO. 1, 10 JANUARY 2008 5

CURRENT SCIENCE

Volume 94 Number 1 10 January 2008

EDITORIAL

The Birth of the Indian Institute of Science

A weakness for history and the temptation to retreat into the

past, in order to escape the pressures of the present, has

drawn my attention to two books which have appeared over

the last year or so. Ramachandra Guha’s compelling account

of our history in the post-Independence era (India after

Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy,

Picador, 2007) and Rajmohan Gandhi’s uniquely personal

view of Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas: A True Story of a

Man, his People and an Empire, Penguin/Viking, 2006) relive

much that has happened in India over the 20th century.

Both books, formidably sized and extensively researched,

are a testimony to the ability of talented authors to bring the

past alive, permitting ordinary readers to be informed, educated

and, at times, inspired. A key element in writing history

is the passion to hunt for long forgotten records in

libraries and archives. It is this fondness for things past that

has nudged me into thinking about the birth of the Indian Institute

of Science (IISc), which will soon enter the hundredth

year of its existence. The history of IISc is intimately linked

with the story of the evolution of higher education, research

and science and technology in India, over the course of the

turbulent years of the 20th century. It is a story that begins

in the high noon of the British Empire and spans the entire

period of the nationalist movement that culminated in Independence.

It is also a story of the birth and growth of the

science and technology enterprise over the last half a century.

It is a story that begins with an act of philanthropy, unprecedented

for its vision and unmatched for its generosity

in the years that have followed. This journal, like many

other institutions which would appear in later years, was

conceived and midwifed into existence on the IISc campus

in the early 1930s. This column, therefore, seems to be an

appropriate place to remember the past.

IISc was the second scientific research institution to be set

up in India. The distinction as the country’s first research

centre, in the modern era, must be accorded to the Indian

Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), which

was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1876, the brainchild

of Mahendralal Sircar, ably supported by Father Lafont. IISc

was founded somewhat later, in 1909, after a long and difficult

period of gestation, but developed on a pattern entirely

different from IACS over the course of the century. Indeed,

a comparative study of the growth and development of these

two institutions may prove educational for those who seek to

build new institutions today. In trying to piece together an

authentic historical record of the institution, where I have

worked for so long, and in attempting to create a permanent

Archives for the future, I have realized, with some dismay,

that history is not a subject of any significance within the

precincts of a research institute. But, in many ways, there is

much to be learnt from the events of the early years of IISc.

To what sources must we turn in order to recapture the

key events in the genesis of what is, arguably, India’s most

important scientific research institution? There are two biographies

of Jamsetji Tata: the first by Frank Harris which appeared

half a century ago (Jamsetj Nusserwanji Tata: A

Chronicle of His Life, Blackie, 1958) and the second, a

smaller and more recent account, by R. M. Lala (For the

Love of India: The Life and Times of Jamsetji Tata, Penguin/

Viking, 2004), whose publication coincided with the

Tata Centenaries. There is one account of the birth and development

of the IISc, authored by B. V. Subbarayappa that

appeared in 1992 (In Pursuit of Excellence, Tata McGraw

Hill). All three sources detail the events that followed J. N.

Tata’s initial proposal to pledge a substantial part of his

wealth towards creating a research institute or university.

The Tata scheme was the product of a penetrating vision that

could see very far into the future. The idea of a postgraduate

research institution must have seemed far fetched in the

1890s, at a time when university education had an extremely

limited reach. J. N. Tata backed his vision with an unprecedented

act of philanthropy and most remarkably did not

want his name to be associated with the new institution,

thereby paving the way for support from all quarters. For the

scheme to materialize two conditions had to be met. First,

assured annual support from the government of India, whose

powers were vested in the British Viceroy in Delhi, was essential.

Second, identification of a location and a land grant

was crucial to the implementation of the scheme. The British

government’s objections were overcome by 1905 and the

grant of land from the Maharaja of Mysore was realized in

1907, culminating in the issual of a formal vesting order in

May 1909. J. N. Tata died in 1904, unaware that his idea

would indeed bear fruit. The tradition of philanthropy was

firmly established in the House of Tatas when his sons,

Dorab and Ratan, committed themselves to the vision of establishing

a research institute. The story of the long struggle

to ensure that the IISc did indeed come into existence and its

difficult years after birth are not well known.

There are many elements in the saga of the Institute’s

birth. J. N. Tata’s letter to Swami Vivekananda is now a part

of the Institute’s folklore: ‘…It seems to me that no better

use can be made of the ascetic spirit than the establishment

of monasteries or residential halls for men dominated by this

spirit, where they should live with ordinary decency and devote

their lives to the cultivation of sciences – natural and

humanistic. I am of the opinion that if such a crusade in favour

of an asceticism of this kind were undertaken by a competent

leader, it would greatly help asceticism, science and the

good name of our common country; and I know not who

would make a more fitting general of such a campaign than

Vivekananda…’. The discussions on the import of J. N.

Tata’s letter have been elaborate (Basu, S. P., Prabuddha

Bharata, 1978, pp. 413–420; 448–458), although Harris’

original biography confines this episode to a footnote. Both

men, undoubtedly, saw with remarkable clarity the need for

India to build its own centres for research and technological

advancement. Sadly, both died several years before the founding

of the Institute, Tata in 1904 and Vivekananda in 1902.

Today India is in the throes of a new round of institution

building. It is clear that many schemes can be conceived in

committee rooms; the real challenge lies in defining and realizing

a vision. Can anything be learnt from the past? How

was the plan for creating IISc drawn up and how successfully

was it implemented in the early years? How did the bureaucracy

of British India respond to an initiative that had

no precedent? The answers to these questions are necessarily

long and buried in hundreds (indeed thousands) of pages of

documents (some disintegrating) lying in the National Archives

in Delhi. A few are to be found in the more recently

created Tata Archives in Pune and, of course, in the libraries

in London, which maintain much of the written record of

nearly two centuries of British presence in India. As the institutional

archives begins the slow process of collecting and

cataloguing records that are more than a century old, I have

realized that the story of the early history of IISc really centres

around one man, Burjorji Padshah (1864–1941), and his

complex and, at times, difficult relationships with two Englishmen,

George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925), the Viceroy

of India and Morris Travers (1872–1961), who was the

first Director of the Institute.

By all accounts, Padshah was a remarkable man. Intensely

loyal to the vision of J. N. Tata, he worked unceasingly to

bring the projects of the steel plant, hydroelectric company,

and the research institute to fruition. Padshah, a ward of

J. N. Tata, came under the spell of Gopal Krishna Gokhale,

but moved on to work for the establishment of the Institute.

He toured the world between 1896 and 1898 to learn from

Western experience. He drafted the early documents of

which the report entitled ‘Institute of Scientific Research for

India’ (1898) must really mark the starting point for the long

and protracted negotiations with the British government. The

idea of using an American Institution like Johns Hopkins as a

model, rather than British or European universities, was due

to Padshah. Even a cursory glance at available archival material

between 1898 and 1910, establishes Padshah as a central

figure in realizing Tata’s vision. Padshah’s skills at negotiations,

his prodigious intellectual abilities and his complete

detachment from material pleasures seem to have been key

elements in his successful pursuit of the goals set by J. N.

Tata. His personal idiosyncracies were such that Mahatma

Gandhi (with whom he later corresponded) had this to say:

‘…I had never met him (Padshah), but friends said that he

was eccentric. Out of pity for horses he would ride in tramcars,

he refused to take degrees in spite of a prodigious memory,

he had an independent spirit, and he was a vegetarian, though a

Parsi’ (Sands of Time (Tata Archives), April 2005, p. 4).

I am no historian, but was fascinated by an essay authored

by Kim Sebaly in History of Education (1985, 14, 117–136)

entitled ‘The Tatas and University Reform in India, 1898–

1914’, which a young and alert colleague stumbled upon,

while surfing the Internet. Sebaly details the persistent efforts

of Padshah to promote the Tata scheme in the face of

Government reservations. The low point in the struggle was

reached when Padshah publicly proclaimed that the new

Viceroy (Curzon) was ‘in sympathy’ with the scheme. This

drew a blunt response from the Home Secretary: ‘…desist

from quoting Lord Curzon’s name or views’.

Almost the very first issue that Curzon faced when he

landed in Bombay as the new Viceroy in December 1898

was the proposal to set up the Institute. Indeed, a deputation

including J. N. Tata and Padshah met him on 31 December

1898. Curzon was a brilliant and complex man. The veteran

journalist Durga Das provides an assessment, a generous

one: ‘In a real sense, nevertheless, Curzon was the midwife

of India’s emergence on the world scene… What Curzon set

in motion was decades later to find consummation at the

hands of Jawaharlal Nehru’ (India: From Curzon to Nehru,

Rupa & Co, 1981). A quotation from Curzon, used by Durga

Das, highlights an imperial ambition: ‘India is the pivot of

Empire, by which I mean that outside the British Isles we

could, I believe, lose any portion of the Dominions of the

Queen and yet survive as an Empire; while if we lost India, I

maintain that our sun would sink to its setting’. Durga Das

has a tempered view of Curzon’s efforts in university education:

‘The measures Curzon introduced to reform university

education and promote technical training bear the stamp of a

courageous vision, although they confirmed his anti-Indian

bias by excluding Indian intellectuals from membership of

the commissions on university education.’

In piecing together a documentary record of an institution’s

early days I have had tantalizing glimpses of individuals

and events. From the Tata Archives there are letters,

hard to decipher at times, from Padshah to Gokhale. From

the archives at the University of Strathclyde comes a letter

from Sister Nivedita to the Scottish ‘thinker and planner’

Patrick Geddes (28 January 1903) which says: ‘…The last

time I saw Tata’s Secretary he was quarrelling with (William)

Ramsay in order to have yourself named as the Principal

of the Institute. Personally, I think nothing will come of

this scheme’. At the University College in London there is still

a treasure to be seen, an unpublished manuscript of Morris

Travers’ autobiography. Why study the history of IISc? Kim

Sebaly notes that his first visit to India in 1965–66 was to do

‘research on the establishment of the IITs’. He notes that he

then discovered what he regards ‘as the source of the social

and intellectual capital that led to their establishment after

Independence: the IISc, Bangalore’. He adds: ‘However important

foreign technical assistance was to the establishment

of the IITs, I thought (and still think) the story could be

more accurately told through a better understanding of the

struggle to establish the Institute’. The full story of the IISc

and the men who built it is yet to be written. If the right

scribe is found, it should be a tale worth reading.

P. Balaram

The following article appeared in outlook dated 13th October 2008.

CENTENARY
'The Best Place To Work'
The IISc director on the 100 years gone by and the 100 years ahead


Sugata Srinivasaraju interviews Prof P. Balaram


SS: How does it feel at 100? What thoughts pass your mind?

I think a hundred is a very special milestone for an Indian institution, because 100 years encompass the most important period of modern Indian history. It encompasses several decades before and after Independence. Therefore a century of the Institute is in many ways a century of science and technology development in India.

SS: What are those factors in these 100 years that has made IISc a premier institution of science?

The most interesting thing about IISc is its history. Its origins are set at a time when there was no scientific research of note in India. "The absence of a nobel winner isn't worrying. One would like to raise the whole level of performance." This was the very first decade of the 20th century. The institute evolved very slowly. In a sense, if one uses a biological analogy, it has been shaped by environmental pressures. IISc has responded to the changing environment in a gradual manner. It has been invested with a degree of stability and solidity which may not be always available to institutions that have grown rapidly over a short period of time.

SS: Can you elaborate on these 'environmental' pressures?

For example every dept of the institute in the early days was set up as a response to some need of the surroundings. The institute itself began with one department of chemistry and one department of electrical technology. So, it had one science and one engineering department. This was to serve the needs of the growing chemical industry at that time and also the increasing need for power. This was a 100 years ago. The bio-chemistry department was set up later, when it became apparent that research in nutrition and on food was critical. The physics department came to being when C V Raman became the first Indian director and he brought in this component of basic research.

SS: Before Raman was it a technology-oriented place?

It was not technology-oriented, but it was an institute that was oriented towards research, which had applications in the immediate surroundings. The early bio-chemistry work that was done for example was done on sandalwood, which is of great importance in Karnataka. But during the Second World War, when it became apparent that there was a great need for industrial growth in India, as well as the recognition that Independence was not far away, the board of scientific and industrial research was set up in India. The institute actually grew in a dramatic manner with many engineering departments being established at that time. So, if you look at most engineering departments here they were set up in the 40s and some in the early 50s.

SS: So, a new nation was creating new pressures?

Yes. Significantly, this was long before the IITs were conceived. If you look at the history of development of engineering education you will find, the true source of the intellectual capital for setting up the IITs came from the institute. Although they were set up with foreign aid, the people who went to man them were from here. Prof. J.C. Ghosh, the first director of IIT Kharagpur, the first IIT to be set up, went from here. He was the director here. He was the one who set up many of the engineering departments here. The first director of IIT Kanpur, P K Kelkar, was an alumnus of the institute. All the national laboratories that came up -- the CFTRI, the Dept of Atomic Energy and ISRO among many others -- have either been conceived, or in their genesis been helped, or during their gestation period maintained from the institute.

SS: In the 100 years of its life is there something that the IISc should have done, but didn't do?

When you look back at a lifetime for individuals, you can have a regret. You might have done this or you might have done that. But I don't think that institutions look back the same way. Institutions shape differently, they evolve differently. Institutions do not make conscious decisions. The decision or directions are many times made by external factors. So I don't think
institutions can look back on their history with any regret and say this should have been done and that should have been done. In fact, what institutions should do is look ahead and ask what should be done. We are using the centenary year in many ways not only to reflect on the past but also to think a little bit about the future.

SS: The environment in Bangalore in recent years is filled with technology, do you see pure science surviving?

I take somewhat a more detached view with respect to this apparent loss of interest in pure science. This is largely because in urban centres people sense opportunities in others directions. The flame of pure science must be kept burning only by a relatively small group of people. The phenomenon you are seeing is really an urban phenomenon. It is not the phenomenon of small towns. Certainly not a rural phenomenon where there is no exposure to either science or technology. I think we have a very large resource in our population. It is a matter of how innovatively we tap this human resource.

SS: A student today, given a choice between an IIT and the IISc, would want to join an IIT, although they know getting into the IISc is very big. How do you look at this?

IITs and the IISc are not competing institutions. They are in many ways complementary institutions. IISc is unique in the sense it is primarily a postgraduate institution. We don't really offer undergraduate degrees here as yet. While the IITs are predominantly undergraduate institutions, although they do have a significant postgraduate presence in some departments. We are in some ways a more research-oriented institution. We look at other institutions as a source for our students. We would like to attract students who have graduated from colleges, universities and also IITs.

SS: Is there a crisis of finding good students?

I don't really know if there is a crisis of good students or if there is a crisis of appropriately trained students. Human beings, if looked at as raw material, don't vary enormously. They are reasonably good people. They must be trained properly. The real problem is that training in schools and colleges has deteriorated, essentially because the teaching profession has not been well regarded or rewarded, both in terms of respect and remuneration.

SS: Is this because of some lopsided development of some technology industries that has taken away all the talent?

I may be in the minority on this, but I wouldn't call it lopsided development. When an industry explodes, as the IT industry has exploded, it obviously means that they are on to a good thing. It provides enormous sources of employment and improvement in economic conditions for large sections of populations. Therefore I will not grudge the explosion of any sector of industry at all. I would say more power to them. But I would think that the education sector must look at itself with a significant degree of introspection. They should ask the question if they have been attractive enough. Do they make things exciting enough for students?

SS: Does the IISc have any plan in place to attract good teachers and students?

We are thinking of some initiatives. We would like to get college and university teachers to come
here and spend time and become familiar with the research activity that takes place here. This will enable the researchers and teachers to have some connection with one another. This is very important. In the old days the UGC would run a lot of summer schools. We ourselves used to run a lot of them here. Over the years many of these have fallen into disuse. There are many attempts to revive them with fresh inputs and by giving fresh names.

SS: There is a very humanising aura about the IISc, how has it come about?

I spent all my adult life in IISc. You can't find a better place to work. It has a wonderful
ambience. People are free to do what they want. By and large the discourse here is gentle. Many many people in IISc are involved in their work. They like what they are doing. They are completely involved in it. They are happiest when they are pursuing their research. If more number of people are happy, their happiness contributes to the ambience of the place. An academic research institution is a wonderful place. However lowdown in the academic hierarchy, there is nobody telling you what to do. You are really in many ways marching to your own tune.

SS: Did the involvement of people like J N Tata, Vivekananda or the very benevolent Mysore Maharaja at the inception of the institute alter its course? Did it make a difference to the way the institute shaped? Did these great men set the tone?

I don't think individuals matter. In fact, if you look carefully at the archival material, you will realise that the institute has gone through a very turbulent phase. It is just that that turbulence has vanished into history. People don't know about it. Newspapers and magazines remember turbulence that are current. The mandate of the institute is to provide an environment in which people do their research and work in areas of interest to them. This gives them a freedom that is unparalleled. I don't grudge anybody's high salary, because for all you know he may be doing something he does not like. He may be really earning his salary. Here you are paid to do what you like to do. That is not very common.

SS: Without the intellectual capital of IISc do you think Bangalore would have become a IT hub or would so many public sector industries flourished here?

The institute has contributed to the growth of Bangalore in a very imperceptible way over a long
period of time. Let me give you an example. We had the country's first aerospace department. Now, HAL grew from people who went from here. NAL came later and lot of people there, past and present, were alumini of this place. If you take the space department, Prof. Dhawan made ISRO what it is today, because Vikram Sarabhai died prematurely. But Sarabhai himself was associated with the institute. The same is true for electronics industry and many aspects of IT industry.

SS: Does it hurt you that Bangalore's reputation as a science city has been submerged by the tag IT city? People in the scientific community get rankled about this?

No, I don't get rankled. If tomorrow Bangalore acquired the tag of film city or something else, why should I worry? A city must have growth in all directions. The institute is quite secure that way. The institute is part of the old tradition of the city and I think the old tradition of the city would survive.

SS: The Nobel Prize is not a criterion to judge an institution, but still, it is pointed out that the IISc has not produced a Nobel-laureate.

I can only tell you my personal views. I wouldn't worry about it at all. Although the Nobel prize is
the best known among scientific recognitions, it is given to very few people. There are a lot of people in the US who should have got the Nobel but have not. There are some people in India who should have got a Nobel prize but did not get it at a time they should have got it. The question is, suppose they had got a Nobel prize, would India have been tremendously different today? May be not. It may have provided us with an immediate burst of energy and enthusiasm. I still hope it will happen someday. Someone in India will get the Nobel prize. It would be a little like Abinav Bindra getting a gold medal at the Olympics. You can ask, now in general will it lead to Indians doing well in sports? Will it lead to getting 50 gold medals in 20 years time? I would say I don't know. I wouldn't worry about the Nobel prize. When you are talking about the Nobel prize you are talking about peaks.. You can have peaks over pretty barren landscape too. On the other hand, what one would want to do is to raise the level of this landscape itself.

SS: Where does the institute go from here? Also, you are presiding over a historical moment.

I am conscious of one thing. These sorts of anniversaries put a great deal of pressure on individuals and sometimes I think you happen to be present at an anniversary by accident. As far as the institute is concerned, we would now like the institute to modernise in a major way. We have begun the process of modernising our laboratories. We want the next generation of researchers to be doing research in laboratory surroundings that are distinctly more competitive from what we have had till now. We are also investing in new areas. We are making investments in areas of nano electronics, nano science, and areas of biology. We are constructing new buildings for the aersopace and physics departments. We are also putting into motion programmes that will bring many more international scientists to come and work here for reasonable periods. We want to increase international presence here and make it more heterogeneous. And we would like to expand in some other areas too. We are looking at the possibility of creating an inter-disciplinary research centre where we hope biologists, physicists, computer scientists, electronics and electrical engineers and people from other fields would all work together on some important problem of great practical use. One area that has been identified is energy and materials. Also synthetic biology. Last year, we created a centre for earth sciences and are in the process of creating a centre for neuroscience. My personal hope is that we should be able to expand the component of bio-medical research. Another programme that is still being talked about is if we should actually create an undergraduate programme as a bridge between science and engineering and try to create a unique programme that is not available elsewhere.

SS: Is there some scope for humanities and social sciences in the institute's plans for the future?

This is again my personal view. Every place which is devoted predominantly to science and technology would vastly benefit by having a small section that dealt with humanities and social sciences. In fact, the setting up of the archives at the institute is itself an attempt to hope some historians of science would come and spend time here. We started a centre for contemporary studies sometime ago to bridge this gap, but these are still small efforts. I hope we will be able to do more.