Scientists who Turned Diplomats to fight British Colonialism
Undeterred by colonial subversion, India’s intellectuals and scientists took a diplomatic detour to push indigenous efforts to study, propagate and utilise modern science for country’s benefit.
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, which had been shrouded by colonial subversion. This marathon needs deep contemplation to support India’s present-day science diplomacy as it matures.
India of the 1700s, according to the renowned economist Angus Maddison’s historical macroeconomic trends, contributed the second-highest share to the global gross domestic product (GDP), at nearly 23%, ranking higher than Europe. However, as Europe steadily built a global colonial network, it gained an upper hand over India and China, which 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 the economic developments that accompanied it.
The British, building on their lead in the First Industrial Revolution and their control over Bengal following the decisive battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764), gained the capacity to develop scientific infrastructure in pursuit of 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 its political hold over large swathes of India’s territories.
As the BEIC annexed territories, it simultaneously began undertaking surveys in revenue, marine, meteorological, agricultural, topographical, and trigonometric areas. The Trigonometric Survey of India megaproject had the military imprints of BEIC on it. The BEIC also established observatories in the port cities of Calcutta (1786), Madras (1796), and Bombay (1826) to support 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, was largely due to these surveys.
The Indian intellectuals of those times quickly understood that scientific advancement was the tool that catapulted Britain to a high position on the global power pedestal. To absorb British scientific advancements and bring them home, some of them offered monetary grants to the corpus that funded 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, established after the 1857 uprising, oversaw the founding of universities in 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 conduct cutting-edge research in the exact sciences. The reluctance stemmed from the fact that allowing innovation would be detrimental to the empire’s stranglehold over India. Therefore, the India Office never made any attempts to raise research institutions or 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 fruit 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 had begun in earnest. These three scientists and their students began attending scientific conferences more frequently and pursuing 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 with the necessary peer recognition and scientific collaborations that the India Office would not facilitate. To this end, they initiated track-two, people-to-people diplomacy with non-Commonwealth nationals, especially those from the French Third Republic, the German Republic, and the United States. Diplomatic networking experienced great success during the Roaring Twenties, a period of relative peace that was interrupted by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
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, a student of JC Bose, undertook postdoctoral research with experimental physicist Erich Regener in Berlin. Shankar Agharkar undertook doctoral research in Berlin at the behest of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, under the tutelage of the renowned 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 the radar physicist Camille Button.
CV Raman’s Nobel Prize opened doors for India in numerous scientific circles worldwide. 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 led Indians to believe they could not excel in the exact sciences. These successes gave intellectuals the confidence to take the next major step in diplomatic protocol — formally inviting global-renowned scientists to the institutions they had built. A notable 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 at numerous institutions in the United Kingdom 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 would have been different 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 have been 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 contributed to its subsequent scientific progress, they would have come to India. All this is undoubtedly conjectural. The causes Einstein believed in fitted well with the Allied Powers. However, Mahamana’s decision to invite Einstein will always be one of the most remarkable diplomatic overtures in modern India’s history.
By the mid-1930s, even Britain could no longer resist the surge of scholarship emanating from India. During this period, Shankar Agharkar, the founder of the Maharashtra Association for the Cultivation of Sciences, unblocked Indian donations to the 1851 Research Fellowship, making Homi Jehangir Bhabha its first recipient. Not many realise that it was a botanist who aided India’s atomic programme in its infancy.
As it exists today, India’s science stands on the shoulders of hundreds of intellectuals who toiled over two and a half centuries, battling colonial subversion. The bicentennial history of this ideological and nonviolent battle, along with the stories of these unsung freedom fighters, needs to be told repeatedly. Particularly now, when India, along with the rest of the world, is on the edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The original article was published in the August 2021 edition of Science India magazine.
