The Technological Indian by Ross Bassett (review)

Ross Bassett’s The Technological Indian is a fascinating history of a group of engineers in colonial and postcolonial India. Bassett, through a careful excavation of the biographies of Indian engineers who had received their degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sheds light not only on the role of these engineers. He uses the biographies of these engineers to present the complex and shifting entanglements of engineers/engineering with the socio-political imaginary of India. In a significant way, The Technological Indian is a counter history to the Orientalist construction of Hindus and India as “not a mechanical race.” The book starts with an 1884 speech by M. M. Kunte, the headmaster of the Poona High School, in which Kunte exhorts a group of middle-class Hindus that “there is no option but to follow and spread widely the art of mechanization” (p. 1). Kunte’s proclamation, as Bassett shows, cannot be seen in isolation. It, for example, coincided with Mahratta, a Poona-based English language newspaper that was started by the Indian nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, publishing a “three-part series under the title ‘Model Institute of Technology’” (p. 13). Mahratta called industrialization “India’s greatest need” (p. 15) and compared the British and American systems of technical education. It also celebrated “the masterly regulations of the great Massachusetts of Technology” (p. 13). Two years before Mahratta’s celebration of the MIT, the first Indian attended “MIT in 1882” (p. 4).

These historical events, Bassett argues, reflected a broader shift in the Indian social imaginary. Mahratta and the Marathi-language Kesari (another newspaper run by Tilak), for example, commonly “framed news in global rather than a colony-metropole perspective” (p. 15). Indeed, as Bassett shows in chapter 1, “the Indian discovery of America” was, at one level, rooted in the frustration of educated Indians towards British colonial government’s endorsement of the status quo with regard to technical/engineering education in India. The United States was not the dominant global power at that time and MIT was still in its infancy. Indians seeking and obtaining degrees at MIT thus reflected an international view that was not dependent upon colonial-metropole perspective. As such, Bassett’s focus on Indian engineers trained at the MIT represents a historiographic move that takes us beyond center-periphery models of history. The first Indian to attend MIT, Keshav Bhat, according to Bassett, was more interested in learning “a specific skill, rather than master a discipline,” and this may have been prompted by the fact that MIT at that time did not have a “formal program in textiles or textiles chemistry” (p. 39). Studying at MIT, however, was not straightforward. Along with issues of funding for the education, Indians had to contend with the socio-political situation in India as well as the United States. In the United States, the restrictions on Asians that started with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and encompassed all Asians beginning in 1917 must have had a profound effect on Indians (we do not get a very good picture of the impact of shifting U.S. racial politics on Indians in the book, except for some snippets). In the context of India, Bassett deftly presents the tensions of the Indians seeking degrees at the MIT. These tensions were most starkly visible among Gandhians such as T. M. Shah, who, as Bassett points out, “had perfect Gandhian credentials” (p. 108), and Bal Kelkar, who, as Gandhi wrote, “was brought up under my hands” (p. 134, see chapter 4 for details).

Although “its exact meaning was different in MIT and the Satyagraha Ashram [of Gandhi],” Bassett writes that the term “self-reliance” “had similar resonances” in both places (p. 118). However, straddling the different social worlds of the United States and India, MIT-trained Gandhian engineers expressed self-reliance in vastly different ways. For T. M. Shah an important early concern, which was expressed in relation to his family, was that self-reliance should be limited to...