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
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