by Gurbir Singh
Philanthropy under the Tata name has been reappraised by some in recent times.[154] There were not only alleged high-handed modern business tactics but also shady deals between the Tata family and British businessmen during the opium wars of the mid-1880s from which J.N. Tata would have benefited directly. However, the unquestionable success of IISc is, at least in part, a testament to the vision, determination and tenacity of the Tata family.
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Founded by Homi Bhabha and initially set up in Bangalore in 1945, TIFR was the first modern institute in India dedicated to pure scientific research. Set against the institutions in existence in India at the time, TIFR was unique, if somewhat incongruous. It was not obvious in 1945 how the large amounts of money spent on pure research would help a nation in its transition to independence after 200 years of colonisation.
In August 1945, the spectacular demonstration of nuclear power as a weapon of mass destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to World War II in the Pacific. The potential to use the same nuclear technology for civilian nuclear power was well understood by the late 1930s, in particular by those who had closely worked in the field during the golden age for nuclear physics. The Cavendish and Clarendon Laboratories had pioneered nuclear research in the UK during the 1930s, and Homi Bhabha was at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge during this time.
Figure 3‑5 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai. Credit Author
Bhabha’s vision for nuclear energy was not limited to the industrialisation of developing nations; he saw a deeper imperative, the preservation of human civilisation itself. At the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy held in August 1955 in Geneva, Bhabha said “For the full industrialisation of underdeveloped countries, for the continuation of our civilisation and its further development, atomic energy is not merely an aid, it is an absolute necessity.”[155]
Bhabha was a gifted intellectual and scientist of international reputation. His family connections with the high society in India, as well as with India’s political leadership, brought him into contact with influential players in industry, business, commerce and politics since his childhood. In 1939 Bhabha was on a visit to India from Cambridge. When World War II broke out, he was stranded in India and could not return as planned to Manchester to work with Patrick Blackett. C.V. Raman recognised Bhabha’s potential and hastily created the position of Reader of Theoretical Physics at the IISc, which Bhabha accepted. In 1941, at the annual meeting of the Indian Academy, Raman introduced Bhabha as “the modern Leonardo da Vinci”. In the same year, Bhabha was elected as a member of the Royal Society, and 1942, he won the prestigious Adams Prize for his PhD thesis.[156] Bhabha possessed an international reputation unique among Indian scientists and could easily have acquired a prominent position in a Western university. Instead, he chose to stay in India.
Figure 3‑6 Max Born (front row fourth from the right) and Homi Bhabha (left-hand side fourth row) at an Informal Meeting on Nuclear Physics. Institute for Theoretical Physics Copenhagen 1936. Credit IISc Archives
Convinced of the need for a “vigorous school of research in nuclear physics”[157] located in India, Homi Bhabha wrote to the Tata Trust on 12 March 1944 seeking sponsorship for what later became the TIFR.[158] This became the cradle for the Indian civil nuclear energy and space programmes. In his letter, Bhabha confided that he had already declined an offer of the Physics Chair at the University of Allahabad and professorship at the IACS. Perhaps, he was swept up by the national fervour of the impending independence, as in the same letter to the Tata Trust, he wrote “it is one’s duty to stay in one’s own country and build up schools comparable to that other countries are fortunate in possessing”.
Bhabha also saw the potential for a civil nuclear energy programme in advance of the first use of atomic energy as a weapon. The prospect of nuclear energy ahead of nuclear weapons is one that the British government pursued. Bhabha may have been directly influenced by it. In his 12 March 1944 letter to the Tata Trust, prior to the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he outlines his vision for a nuclear-powered India saying, “when nuclear energy has been successfully applied for power production, say a couple of decades from now, India will not have to look abroad for its experts”.
Although the TIFR was conceived and initiated in Bangalore, Bhabha wanted it to be based in Bombay (now Mumbai). The six months in 1935 that Max Born spent at IISc triggered a sequence of events that determined the design and architecture of some of the buildings at IISc and helped shape the initial design for TIFR, too. While at the IISc, Born was asked to recommend a ‘non-English’ European architect who could help with Mysore’s expanding building programme. He suggested his nephew Otto Köenigsberger, who arrived in Bangalore three years later. Born had met Homi Bhabha in Cambridge, where he was teaching after Nazism had forced him to abandon his professorship at Göttingen. Köenigsberger had already visited Mysore in 1933, also fleeing Hitler’s Germany.
Bhabha was impressed with Köenigsberger’s work at IISc and wanted him to design TIFR in Bombay. In the summer of 1947, Bhabha invited him to Bombay to start the detailed design as the chief architect. Köenigsberger started the work, but fresh legal delays with the TIFR site permissions forced him away, and Bhabha engaged Helmuth Bartsch of Holabird and Root from Chicago instead. TIFR formally came into existence on 1 June 1945. It operated until December of that year from IISc in Bangalore and then moved to Bombay. The custom-built premises it occupies today was formally opened by Prime Minister Nehru on 15 January 1962.
As a nuclear physicist, Bhabha was one of a “handful of scientists in India who understood the fission process and grasped its implications.”[159] During his time travelling in Europe and the US, he had also seen first-hand the dependence of developed nations on the availability of reliable electrical power to operate their national infrastructures.[160] For realising his vision of an industrialised self-reliant India, nationwide availability of low cost, dependable electrical power was a pre-requisite. He did not envisage retracing the developmental steps of the West by first building a series of coal-fired power stations but wanted to leapfrog into a future where a large-scale network of nuclear plants would eventually provide all the country’s power supply.[161]
In 1960, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator (TIFRAC), India’s first computer, was built at TIFR. The computer division of TIFR was co-located within the electronics and instrumentation group in 1955. The division consisted of a handful of physics or electronics graduates, some with master’s degrees, supported by students with diplomas in radio engineering. The project to build TIFRAC was headed by Dr R. Narasimhan (1926–2007), a mathematician who had been working in the US. He was probably the only member of the project team who had “seen a computer, let alone use one.”[162] Just as engineers working on India’s nuclear reactors had seen and India’s space engineers would discover in 1963, the computer engineers had to learn on the job with very limited facilities.
Figure 3‑7 India's First Digital Computer TIFRAC. 15 January 1962. Credit TIFR
Physically, TIFRAC was about 10 m in length, typical of the size of computers in the 1960s. One of its key innovations was the use of a visual display unit as the output device rather than the traditional teleprinter. TIFRAC used a word length of 40 bits and a memory capacity of 1024 words using the then state-of-the-art, three-dimensional magnetic core memory. Ready built memory was not available, so B.B. Kalia and his team were assigned the task to manually construct the memory matrix consisting of 12,000 magnetic cores by hand.[163] TIFRAC was completed and commissioned on 22 February 1960.[164]
TIFR was organisationally located in the DAE. The DAE was also the home of the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962, which later became ISRO in 1969. The connections between the TIFR and ISRO continue to the present. Many of the instruments and devices used on-board India's communication, scienc
e and remote sensing satellites were originally designed and built at TIFR. Five instruments aboard ISRO's first space telescope Astrosat were built by scientists in TIFR.
Before rockets, scientists used high-altitude balloons to collect data on cosmic rays. Bhabha had engaged Osmania University in Hyderabad to launch high-altitude balloons during his time at the IISc. The Balloon Facility, Hyderabad, is now a TIFR entity with an international reputation for building and conducting high-quality research using high-altitude balloons. It was responsible for making the balloon used on 24 October 2014 to set the world record for a human parachute jump from over 42 km (26.10 miles) altitude.[165]
Fundamental research in nuclear physics has been at the heart of TIFR from the outset, but now, the work includes other subjects, such as radio astronomy, molecular biology, semiconductor research and applied mathematics. Its size and organisational structure have also broadened. TIFR has expanded beyond its first purpose-built site at Colaba on the Bombay waterfront to multiple national centres across India, organised under three schools, mathematics, natural sciences and technology and computer science. It has developed a strong tradition of academic research and offers PhD and Master of Science courses, as well as hosts visiting international scholars and researchers. TIFR was formally established through a tripartite agreement between the Government of India, Government of Bombay and the Tata Trust in 1955. Today, it is almost entirely supported financially by the Government of India.
Scientific Temper
Unlike Gandhi, Nehru regarded ancient culture and traditions as a burden that “must be let go”.[166] He was convinced that the “methods and approach of science have revolutionised human life more than anything else in the long course of history.”[167] In Article 51A of the Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950, Nehru codified the central role of science in India’s future by requiring that every citizen of India shall “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”[168] A year after independence, Gandhi was assassinated. With his views unchallenged, Nehru kept science at the forefront. In addition to his role as prime minister, Nehru kept the key ministries of foreign affairs, atomic energy, natural resources and scientific research with himself. As prime minister, he set about embedding science into his political objectives wherever he could. He established personal contact with the many leading figures in the field of science, Indian and otherwise. Nehru sought as his scientific advisor, someone with high scientific credentials, international connections, experience in advising government at the highest levels and who shared his socialist political ideology. He found Patrick Blackett with extensive experience working for the British Ministry of Defence, as well as the Military Application of Uranium Detonation (MAUD) committee. For Nehru, Blackett's expertise and connections with political leaders in the West were of particular value following India’s independence. For Blackett, this would have seemed an opportunity to put into practice his personal left-of-centre principles to shape the world's largest democracy and help it carve out a new independent destiny.
Following the formal declaration of independence in August 1947, Nehru kick-started his plan to modernise India through science. In his haste to drive development through government institutions, such as CSIR, he drew competent personnel away from universities at a critical time. He may have got the running start he wanted but at the expense of an efficient higher education sector. The infrastructure to drive the relationship between a nation’s economy, higher education and industry needs to be cultivated over time. It cannot arise spontaneously. As one historian characterised it “government science in general is more government than science.”[169]
Today, India enjoys international recognition for its success with information technology and more recently with frugal innovations in its space programme. Although the proportion of India's population in these sectors is tiny, it would appear that Indians do not lack the capability to establish, build and lead large-scale technology programmes. Many household names in the field of technology, including Dell, Google, Microsoft and Adobe, are currently headed by individuals of Indian origin.[170] The image of India and Indians has transformed over the last couple of decades. “The old stereotype of Indians was that of snake charmers and fakirs lying on beds of nails; now it is that every Indian must be a software guru or a computer geek.”[171] Nehru would be disappointed by the slow rate of India's progress since independence, but he would be content with its continued commitment to science and technology as a guiding principle in national development.
Chapter Four
Science and the Raj
I ndian scientists conducting scientific research in colonial India had to overcome unique challenges defined by the prevailing political and social structures of colonialism. India had its share of talented individuals who laid the groundwork for an environment where Indian scientists could develop science for the benefit of India. However, their names or their achievements are not much known outside India. This is partly a consequence of the suppression and discrimination that accompanied colonialism.[172] While many of the English language accounts of the 20th-century scientists include names, such as Enrico Fermi (1904–1951), Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) and Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), the names of Indian scientists are not well known. During the 20th century, gifted Indians contributed to science, mathematics, biology, physics and literature. Bhabha Scattering, the Saha Equation, the Boson, Raman Effect, Bhatnagar-Mathur Magnetic Interference Balance and the Chandrasekhar Limit are terms found in modern textbooks although readers are not always aware of their Indian origins. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) won the Nobel Prize for Literature and C.V. Raman (Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, 1888–1970) for Physics in 1930.
The Industrial Revolution and the booming economy in the UK had endowed gifted British individuals with substantial wealth to undertake scientific and astronomical research on a scale that, today, could only be contemplated by a university or a research institute.[173] Individuals, such as James Watt (1736–1819), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), Geoffrey de Havilland (1882–1965), Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823) and George Stephenson (1781–1848), had a deep sense of curiosity, technical aptitude and immense personal drive. It is the legacy of their scientific and technological innovation that drives the UK and the Western nations even today.
India produced many men of scientific vision, drive and talent, Raja RamMohan Roy (1772–1833), Syed Ahmad Khan, Mahendralal Sircar and Asutosh Mookerjee, and many used their personal wealth to promote research and science, for example, Maharaja Takhtasingji of Bhavnagar, Jamsetji Tata and Maharaja Krishnachandra Roy (1710–1783) of Krishnanagar. However, in the absence of the opportunities facilitated, in part by the Industrial Revolution, India did not produce individuals with a combination of wealth, vision and talent for science. Indian scientists conducting research in colonial India faced with challenges of colonialism. A couple of such challenges were the low esteem of a subordinate people and the colonisers’ discriminatory views prevalent at the time. In the 20th century, the US was astonished when the USSR, a “backward nation of potato farmers”,[174] launched Gagarin into space.
For much of the 19th century, formal scientific research was conducted only by the Government of India through organisations, such as the Trigonometric Survey of India (founded in 1818), Geological Survey of India (founded in 1851) and the Meteorological Office (founded in 1864). Despite its name, the Government of India was not working for the interest of the people of India. Neither the British East India Company nor the British government after 1858 initially supported the idea of providing Indians with a higher education in English to the scholarly standards that prevailed in, for example, Oxford and Cambridge. Many British personnel in positions of authority believed that Indians were not intellectually capable of benefiting from advanced education. Others feared that Indians with higher education qualifications would be
a potential threat to their position.
It was through the collective effort of many talented individuals over an extended period of time that the groundwork was laid for an environment where Indian scientists could work for the benefit of India. One of the first such individuals responsible for navigating India towards a future shaped by science was Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833).[175] In Roy's time, science was transforming societies. The European Age of Enlightenment founded on rational thought was shaping the world around him. The Industrial Revolution was transforming small agricultural communities into manufacturing economies with global reach. Inventions, such as the typewriter, electricity, photography, Morse code, railways, large ocean-going ships, canals linking distant cities and electric telegraph providing instant communication across oceans, dramatically changed the way people lived.
Roy recognised the urgent need for India to reform from within to be part of this new future. He spoke up against the caste system and ingrained traditions based on superstition and rituals inherited from scriptures. He is credited with social reforms, such as ending the Indian traditions of Sati, child marriage and polygamy, and promoting education for women and remarriage for widows.
Roy was probably the first Indian intellectual to meet with and directly influence the powerful elites of Europe. He left India on the steamer Albion in November 1830 arriving in Liverpool four months later. He was mobbed by workers at public meetings in the great northern industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester.[176] He met the British King in 1831 and the King of France in October 1832. His visit to Britain coincided with the Reform Bill, popularly known as the Great Reform Act. He was present in London when the bill was eventually passed by the British Parliament in 1832. It was called the Great Reform Act because the reforms it introduced were great. The bill made bribery and corruption very difficult and allowed more of the population to participate in the democratic process leading to a fairer society.[177] He experienced first-hand the social and economic benefits that nations accrued from cultivating science and technology.