IISc gave Bengaluru the ‘science hub’ tag. The story of its birth is yet to be written.
At first, Bengaluru was deemed ‘unsuitable’ for establishing what would become the Indian Institute of Science. Then-Viceroy of British India George Curzon was keen on Roorkee, Uttarakhand. With this declaration, former IISc director P Balaram grabbed the attention of the audience while delivering a lecture on the 115-year history of India’s top science and research institute.
For two hours, he reconstructed the story of IISc’s birth — a germ of an idea by Jamsetji Tata to its final birth in 1909. Today, 115 years later, the presence of IISc has transformed Bengaluru into a hub of science and technology.
“The history of IISc is intimately linked with the pattern of the evolution of higher education, research, and science and technology in India, over the course of the turbulent years of the 20th century,” said Prof Balaram at the Bangalore Room, an exhibition and performance space in Indiranagar, on 9 November.
Within the large campus of IISc is a statue of the late Jamsetji Tata, unveiled in 1922.
“No other statue of any other contributor or dignitary has been created in the institute,” said Prof Balaram. The campus’ housekeeping staff even place flowers on the statue every morning, as if Tata was “their god”. But the industrialist and philanthropist died before the institute could take shape.
“The story of 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,” he said.
In the early days after the establishment of the institute, people who lived around the campus didn’t know it was called IISc. They would instead call it the Tata Institute. If someone from outside the city wanted directions to IISc, local residents would ask if they were looking for the ‘Tata statue’.
“There can be no greater tribute than this to the memory of a man who did not wish his name to be formally associated with the institution that he conceived and founded,” Prof Balaram said.
Tata and IISc
The year was 1898. There were no science institutes in India other than the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Kolkata. Tata wanted to change that. He decided to set aside 14 of his buildings and four properties in Bombay for an endowment to establish a university of science. He also donated Rs 30 lakh at that time, which would be equal to over Rs 10 crore of today, the professor explained.
But first, Jamsetji Tata had to convince the British.
“He also had to face the frostiness of Lord Curzon who was a trenchant critic of the Tata scheme for a research institute,” Prof Balaram said. However, Tata remained steadfast in his goal as well as an assured annual support from the Government of India. The other crucial component for setting up the institute was land.
The professor recalled how Tata spent several years lobbying for it. He toured South India to find a suitable location for the institute and sponsored trips of well-known Europeans to Bengaluru to help plan and assess the feasibility of establishing the IISc.
Curzon and other government officials were keen that the institute be set up in Roorkee. But the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, came forward in 1907 with a generous offer of 371 acres of land for the institute in Bengaluru, Rs 5 lakh for the construction, and a recurring grant of Rs 50,000 a year.
“It was almost a 13-year-long struggle that hasn’t been documented enough. Neither was Tata alive to see the institute in its final form,” Prof Balaram said.
‘Nothing like it’
Prof Balaram made multiple visits over the years to the National Archives of India in Delhi, conducting scholarly analysis of historical records and scouring through archival pictures and letters. Through these sources, he reconstructed the story of the institute’s birth.
Photos of these letters and missives were part of Prof Balaram’s presentation.
One such letter exchange was between Morris Travers, the first director of IISc, and Lord Willingdon, then-Governor of Bombay and later Viceroy of India, in 1914.
“I had no idea that there was anything like this in India,” Willingdon said after going around the institute for the first time. Travers responded saying, “There is nothing like it in India; and nothing better in Great Britain.”
The contents of this letter evoked laughter from the audience.
More than eight decades later, American researchers like Kim Sebaly continued to be in awe of the institute’s growth. In an email dated 12 December 2007, Sebaly credited IISc for India’s scientific growth.
“… the source of the social and intellectual capital that led to the establishment of several Indian Institutes of Technology after Independence is IISc, Bangalore,” he said in the email to Prof Balaram.
How IISc changed over the years
One of the photos Prof Balaram had sourced was a black-and-white picture from 1911 of the first batch at IISc. There were no female students.
There are no records specifically identifying the first woman to ever have enrolled at IISc. But Prof Balaram found photographs of six women standing in white saris outside the institute’s first women’s hostel in 1945.
“One of them, Rajeswari Chatterjee, eventually became the first woman engineer to be appointed on the faculty of IISc in 1953,” he said.
When it was first established, IISc had only two departments – General and Applied Chemistry, and Electrical Technology.
“These were the subjects that the IISc council thought were important for students to learn when our country was going through the industrialisation phase,” Prof Balaram said.
Today, the institute has over 40 departments spread across six divisions: Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Electrical Sciences, Interdisciplinary Research, Mechanical Sciences, and Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
A member from the audience, who was also a former student of IISc, asked whether the institute’s directors ever thought of building statues of dignitaries like the Mysore Maharaja whose contribution can’t be forgotten.
“We did not want to get into the habit of erecting statues of everyone. Without Tata, none of this would have been possible,” said Prof Balaram.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
source/content: theprint.in (headline edited)