The chronicle of modern science in India is astonishing. It has been a collective effort of an ensemble of institution builders, scientists, academicians, diplomats, philosophers, seers, and strategists. This polymath ensemble ran a marathon for over two hundred years with a singular goal of unleashing India’s true scientific potential shrouded by colonial subversion. This marathon needs deep contemplation to support India’s present-day science diplomacy as it matures.
India of the 1700s, as per the renowned economist Angus Maddison’s historical macro-economic trends, had the second-highest contributions to the global gross domestic product (GDP) at nearly 23%, behind China and a rank higher than Europe. However, as Europe steadily built a global colonial network, it acquired an upper hand over India and China that had lost their naval power. Europe, China, and India were all proto-industrialised at par until the 18th century. However, Europe’s colonial ambitions and naval expansion became a significant driver of the First Industrial Revolution, its ensuing scientific progress, and economics revolving around it.
The British, piggybacking on its lead in the First Industrial Revolution and their control over Bengal after the decisive battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764), got the bandwidth to raise scientific infrastructure to pursue their geopolitical interests in India. This was the same period when the British East India Company (BEIC) established the first modern state-run scientific institution, the Survey of India, in 1767. The second half of the 18th century saw the BEIC fighting the Carnatic wars (1746-1763), the Anglo-Mysore wars (1767-1799) and the Anglo-Maratha wars (1775-1819) and extending political hold over large swathes of India’s territories.
As the BEIC annexed territories, it simultaneously began undertaking revenue, marine, meteorological, agricultural, topographical, and trigonometric surveys. The Trigonometric Survey of India megaproject had BEIC’s military imprints on it. The BEIC also set up observatories in the port-cities of Calcutta (1786), Madras (1796), and Bombay (1826) to help their maritime and hinterland trade. The BEIC’s establishment of state-owned rail, radio, telegraph, public works, irrigation, and mining departments mainly after the 1850s owed to these surveys.
The Indian intellectuals of those times quickly understood that scientific advancement was the tool catapulting Britain to the high position of the global power pedestal. To absorb the British scientific advancement and bring it home, some of them offered monetary grants to the corpus that bore the Research Fellowship initiated during the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. The contributions were for financing Indian researchers visiting Britain for training in natural sciences. However, London was able to see through the strategy behind these donations. The First War of Independence of 1857 ensured that the thousands of pounds from India for this corpus remained unused until the 1940s.
The British Empire’s India Office, which came about after 1857, oversaw the establishment of universities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras (1857), followed by those in Lahore (1882) and Allahabad (1887). However, unlike European universities, which were becoming prominent nuclei of advanced scientific research, Indian universities provided trained human resources that would administer India for the British Empire.
The newly-established colleges and universities began graduating professionally successful, affluent, yet conscientious bankers, lawyers, and medical doctors who were adept with the European worldview. This community, although informal, became India’s first scientific think tank. They quickly realised that the British had no intention of allowing Indians to carry out cutting-edge research in exact sciences. The reluctance was because allowing them to innovate would be detrimental to the empire’s stranglehold over India. Therefore, the India Office never made any attempts to raise research institutions nor fund scientific research. This obstructive prejudice was reason enough to stir the first Satyagraha in India, for science, five decades before the Salt Satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi.
By the late 1800s, many astute intellectuals from numerous walks of life like Taraknath Palit, Mahendra Lal Sarkar, Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar, Maharaj Prabhu Narayan Singh, Anand Mohan Bose, Dayal Singh Majithia, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar, Ashutosh Mukherjee, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, Mahamana Madan Mohan Malviya, Annie Besant, Swami Vivekananda, and Jamshedji Tata became India’s pioneering natural science research institution builders. They took upon themselves the responsibility of financing young Indian scholars to undertake scientific research in India and overseas, offering them faculty positions in their institutions, all in the absence of any support from the British Empire for India.
By the turn of the 20th century, their efforts bore fruits as some of them began establishing modern India’s first independent scientific research institutions. The Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences (IACS), founded by Mahendra Lal Sarkar in 1876, became the first genuinely Indian modern research institution that served India’s purpose. The founding Indian scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, and CV Raman were associated with IACS. By the 1910s, India’s modern science diplomacy began for good. These three scientists and their students started frequently attending scientific conferences and taking up doctoral and postdoctoral research appointments overseas.
The intellectuals, now accompanied by the pioneering career scientists, were quick to identify the geopolitical fault lines in Europe. They realised that continental Europe and the United States could provide them the necessary peer recognition and scientific collaborations that the India Office would not facilitate. To this end, they began track-2, people-to-people diplomacy with non-Commonwealth nationals, especially those from the French Third Republic, German Republic, and the United States. The diplomatic networking saw great success during the Roaring Twenties, a period of relative peace until the Great Depression of 1929 set in.
It was during the Roaring Twenties that CV Raman and Arthur Compton met in Toronto in 1924. Their meeting was the earliest rendezvous between an Indian scientist and an American counterpart who would later work on the Manhattan Project. Debendra Mohan Bose, JC Bose’s student, took up postdoctoral research with experimental physicist Erich Regener in Berlin. Shankar Agharkar took up doctoral research in Berlin at the behest of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee under the tutelage of the famed botanist Adolf Engler. SN Bose, JC Bose’s other student, chose to go to Paris for his postdoctoral research with quantum physicist Louis de Broglie and Nobel-laureate Marie Curie. CV Raman’s student, Sisir Kumar Mitra, attained his doctorate from Paris under the guidance of the famed spectroscopist Charles Fabry. For his postdoctoral studies, he collaborated with Marie Curie and radar-physicist Camille Button.
CV Raman’s Nobel Prize opened doors for India in numerous scientific circles around the world. Training under the tutelage of some of the world’s best scientists also helped India’s science diplomacy in many ways. SK Mitra’s long stint in France allowed him to become the first and perhaps only Indian scientist to attend the International Polar Year conference of 1932-33. His solitary inroads would later help India send a big scientific delegation, in its first post-independent scientific mega-undertaking, to the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. Our scientists, including those who researched in Britain, cultivated friendly relations with scholars from all over the world, thereby laying the plinth of science diplomacy post-independence.
These achievements had a multiplier effect in erasing the colonial subversion that Indians cannot excel in exact sciences. These successes gave the intellectuals the confidence to take the next major step of diplomatic protocol — formally inviting global-renowned scientists to the institutions they had built. The most significant example was Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya’s invitation to Albert Einstein.
Einstein was in flux after he departed from Germany due to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies; he had not yet fixed his subsequent affiliation. He was a visiting scientist to numerous institutions in Britain and the United States. During 1935-36, Mahamana invited Einstein to take academic residence at the Benares Hindu University. Einstein responded favorably to the invitation, but history had something else in store. It is not hard to imagine the course of events had Einstein accepted the offer. Had Einstein accepted the offer, he would not have written the letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt calling for the Manhattan Project. Had the Manhattan Project not proceeded, the atomic bombs would not be dropped. Had he come to India, one of the champions of the formation of the Israeli nation would have been linked intimately with India. And much like the German Jews who migrated to the United States and helped its subsequent scientific progress, would have come to India. All this is undoubtedly conjectural. The causes Einstein believed in fitted well with the Allied Powers. But Mahamana’s decision to invite Einstein will always be one of the marvelous diplomatic overtures in modern India’s history.
Einstein was in flux after he departed from Germany due to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies; he had not yet fixed his subsequent affiliation. He was a visiting scientist to numerous institutions in Britain and the United States. During 1935-36, Mahamana invited Einstein to take academic residence at the Benares Hindu University. Einstein responded favorably to the invitation, but history had something else in store. It is not hard to imagine the course of events had Einstein accepted the offer. Had Einstein accepted the offer, he would not have written the letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt calling for the Manhattan Project. Had the Manhattan Project not proceeded, the atomic bombs would not be dropped. Had he come to India, one of the champions of the formation of the Israeli nation would have been linked intimately with India. And much like the German Jews who migrated to the United States and helped its subsequent scientific progress, would have come to India. All this is undoubtedly conjectural. The causes Einstein believed in fitted well with the Allied Powers. But Mahamana’s decision to invite Einstein will always be one of the marvelous diplomatic overtures in modern India’s history.
Einstein was in flux after he departed from Germany due to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies; he had not yet fixed his subsequent affiliation. He was a visiting scientist to numerous institutions in Britain and the United States. During 1935-36, Mahamana invited Einstein to take academic residence at the Benares Hindu University. Einstein responded favorably to the invitation, but history had something else in store. It is not hard to imagine the course of events had Einstein accepted the offer. Had Einstein accepted the offer, he would not have written the letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt calling for the Manhattan Project. Had the Manhattan Project not proceeded, the atomic bombs would not be dropped. Had he come to India, one of the champions of the formation of the Israeli nation would have been linked intimately with India. And much like the German Jews who migrated to the United States and helped its subsequent scientific progress, would have come to India. All this is undoubtedly conjectural. The causes Einstein believed in fitted well with the Allied Powers. But Mahamana’s decision to invite Einstein will always be one of the marvelous diplomatic overtures in modern India’s history.
Einstein was in flux after he departed from Germany due to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies; he had not yet fixed his subsequent affiliation. He was a visiting scientist to numerous institutions in Britain and the United States. During 1935-36, Mahamana invited Einstein to take academic residence at the Benares Hindu University. Einstein responded favorably to the invitation, but history had something else in store. It is not hard to imagine the course of events had Einstein accepted the offer. Had Einstein accepted the offer, he would not have written the letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt calling for the Manhattan Project. Had the Manhattan Project not proceeded, the atomic bombs would not be dropped. Had he come to India, one of the champions of the formation of the Israeli nation would have been linked intimately with India. And much like the German Jews who migrated to the United States and helped its subsequent scientific progress, would have come to India. All this is undoubtedly conjectural. The causes Einstein believed in fitted well with the Allied Powers. But Mahamana’s decision to invite Einstein will always be one of the marvelous diplomatic overtures in modern India’s history.
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