...The most dramatic technological imperative – the nuclear – presented itself to Indian state-makers with the end of WWII [World War II]. The nature of Japan’s defeat was spectacular beyond all imagining. The end of WWII also coincided with accelerated plans for the transfer of power to India.
Neither the exact form of the new state nor nationalism’s place therein nor the shape of post-war nuclear research were self-evident. In the period between 1945 and 1948, the Constituent Assembly debated the future of nuclear weapons in free India. The requirements of secrecy surrounding nuclear research, and regulations for the mining and trade of fissile materials found in India, were discussed in conjunction with debates on making a correct nation-state framework for the baffling entity called India that was coming into being.
Before WWII nuclear research was not a matter for state legislation anywhere in the world; it became one after the end of the war. Following the use of atomic weapons, atomic and nuclear research became inextricably linked with warfare and so became part of the business of state.
An Indian state was in the making. Nehru and the nationalist elite also realized the importance of nuclear pursuits as a potential energy source, a dual imperative equally obvious to the physics community. Both held stakes in the shape of things to come, and it was because their interests converged – in contest with alternative futures for the country – that the nuclear history of India took the shape it did.
The discovery of nuclear fission in the year WWII broke out confirmed the potential of nuclear energy for the scientific community. How this could be utilized for war purposes became clear only with the end of the war. The use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, including the production of energy, remained far from clear and largely utopian even towards the end of the 1940s.
Because nuclear research was radically transformed as a field by the wartime scientific effort, the priority given to understand this transformation has framed the history of nuclear physics even for the inter-war period. The historiography of nuclear physics has been so plagued by teleological reconstruction that Jeff Hughes correctly contends:
“The nuclear age is only now coming to be understood as a contingent accomplishment rather than an inevitable outcome of scientific activity.” In the process, canonical nuclear history, particularly for the period prior to WWII, is guilty of “its implicit naturalistic justification of the creation of nuclear weapons.”
The importance of countering retrospective constructions entails seeing nuclear physics as an emerging field in the 1930s, when the physicists in question themselves justified their research interest as simply the need “to participate in the most ‘modern’ branch of the subject.” They were driven by the modernist imperative of nuclear physics.
Of the correctness of this in relation to the Indian physics community there is no doubt. The modernist imperative in the late 1930s meant, first and foremost, establishing the capabilities for pursuing nuclear physics. Within this, one option was the development of an infrastructure for participating in nuclear physics research as an international activity.
Another was participating in study and research at the leading laboratories in Western Europe and North America. The Cavendish Laboratory was the leading place for experimental nuclear physics until the mid-1930s; it was moreover a laboratory for the empire with an established tradition of training Indian students.
The Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, had joined the fray with its successful implementation of the cyclotron principle in 1933 and increasingly took the lead through building larger accelerators with higher energies. In 1938 Raman and Saha sent a student each, Rappal Sangameswara Krishnan to the Cavendish and Basanti Dulal Nagchoudhuri to the Radiation Laboratory, with the explicit purpose of training them followed by their return to help establish nuclear physics in India. The physicist Walther Bothe in Germany was working towards acquiring a cyclotron around the same time. In December 1938 he tabulated the distribution of cyclotrons in the world with his own order of preference.
Decisive action towards entering the field of experimental nuclear physics research by Raman in Bangalore and Saha in Calcutta was contemporaneous with many others, as Bothe’s survey shows. In 1936 Saha was impressed by the atom-smasher (cyclotron) at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley and convinced of its dual importance for medical treatment and nuclear physics research.
He wanted to build one in India because it would elevate the status of his laboratory to possess the most recent equipment for cutting-edge scientific research. He also perceived his efforts at building infrastructure for science as inseparable from his efforts at nation-building.
His arguments must have convinced Nehru, who not only supported Saha’s quest for funds from industry-led philanthropic foundations but also followed the developments on this first Indian cyclotron while in prison. Raman, who wanted to establish nuclear physics at the IISc., Bangalore, similarly argued that nuclear physics was “the [research] problem of the time.” He saw the necessity for its establishment to retain the prestige of the Bangalore institute as India’s foremost scientific research centre. A cyclotron should be built, he said, no less because “almost every civilized country, barring India, had one.”
Bhabha, the youngest of the three and the only one to have trained abroad, saw advantages in the pursuit of nuclear physics to further his research interests in cosmic ray physics. While resident in India during the war he became aware of the strength of his industrial and scientific network, which he mobilized towards the establishment of an institution dedicated to fundamental research in the physical sciences. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was established by June 1945, though particle accelerator-building activity began only around 1951–2. Bhabha argued for the establishment of an “outstanding school of physics” (not for the introduction of a new field within an existing institution) to train young scientists who could become experts on nuclear energy matters. This was not only one’s duty to one’s country, Bhabha argued, but also necessary towards advising on industrial development.
Raman at the Department of Physics, IISc., Bangalore, Saha at the Department of Physics, USC, Calcutta, and Bhabha at the TIFR, Bombay, all argued for the establishment of nuclear physics before August 1945, on different scales and with varying ambitions. In modernizing their discipline they also found connections with the broader agreement on science-based industrialization. Nuclear physics was necessary for building a nation, as a sign of civilization, and for advising on India’s industrial production.
Before August 1945 the nationalist elite accepted the logic of nation-building, civilization, and training for expertise – but as a part of the larger commitment to promoting the scientific education and research necessary for developing India. There was no reason to prioritize nuclear physics, no case to be made for nuclear exceptionalism.
This view changed with the use of atomic weapons at the end of WWII: nuclear physics now became uniquely important to nation-building. It was no longer possible to think about nuclear research on the same lines as building dams or planning heavy industrial development. As a future source of energy, it provided the new basis for hope of accelerated industrial development and became imaginable as essential to industrial development.
This being also the period of India’s decolonization, it seemed no less plausible to argue that to not possess nuclear knowledge would enfeeble India in international politics. Might the inability to master nuclear science and technology mean the loss of sovereignty yet again?
It can hardly be challenged that, in the context of the modern world, no country can be politically and economically independent, even within the framework of international interdependence, unless it is highly industrialized and has developed its powers to the utmost.
Nor can it achieve or maintain high standards of living and liquidate poverty without the aid of modern technology in almost every sphere of life. An industrially backward country will continually upset the world’s equilibrium and encourage the aggressive tendencies of more developed countries.
The scale of funding and the complexity of nuclear research were now much larger, rendering the university laboratory infrastructurally inadequate. Even if this change had begun before the war, its significance now was important enough for new ways to be found by politicians and physicists.
This put Raman, Saha, and Bhabha in the spotlight. Nuclear research was on the state agenda and feasible perhaps only with state funding; laboratories would have to be readjusted to these new parameters and re-equipped; newer networks and alliances would have to be built to ensure the survival of the nuclear physics laboratory in universities and research institutions.
The three laboratories were now in competition for state resources and, increasingly, priority. Given scarce resources, they could either compete or specialize and collaborate. Both Bhabha and Saha came to see centralization and the comprehensive provision of research equipment within a single facility as the requisite condition for progress.
Limited resources also meant there was little sense in separating fundamental research in nuclear physics from nuclear energy research. With the exception of the United States, those in the field, including Britain, confronted a similar problem. Between 1945 and 1948 the convergence of interests and anxieties among the political leadership and nuclear researchers decisively recast the nuclear field in free India. Ideas of state-building shaped the thinking of physicists as they sought to create a feasible research agenda.
In the emerging rhetoric of what the new state would look like lay the constraints on legitimately possible research pursuits. If Nehru and the political leadership had found in this community the expertise to work the technological challenge presented by the nuclear, Raman, Saha, Bhabha and their colleagues and students knew better than ever the support that their proposals could potentially enjoy with the new government. The state and nuclear physics research in independent India, it could be said, were being co-produced.
If the state was to be the agent for reorganizing science, it would have to invest and put in place the requisite infrastructure and mechanisms. This process had already begun with the co-ordination of the scientific war effort by the late imperial state. The CSIR, with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar at the helm from 1940, was one manifestation of this. Having co-ordinated industrial and fundamental research for war purposes, the organization and its director were retained by Nehru’s government as the co-ordinating state department in the building of national laboratories.
In 1946 the Atomic Energy Research Board of India led by Bhabha was established under the CSIR. Between 1946 and 1948 Bhatnagar played an important role in ensuring that a single laboratory emerged as the central laboratory of nuclear research within the reigning CSIR logic of developing one good laboratory dedicated to a singular purpose. This had come to be internationally recognized as the best way forward for organizing nuclear research technology. Spearheaded by Bhatnagar, the work of the future involved the establishment of laboratories for India within the framework of an emerging nation-state.
The nature of Bhatnagar’s effort was, all the same, somewhat distinct from that of Saha and Bhabha, and for that matter Raman, all of whom also wanted to establish nuclear physics laboratories but argued for them as a part of nation-building efforts. Saha tended to link these with development and education, Bhabha with national identity and industrial advice, and Raman with universal modernity and civilization.
Continuing his pre-Independence work, Bhatnagar was the co-ordinating scholar-bureaucrat for scientific research on behalf of the state, the goals of autonomy and self-sufficiency being central in his horizons.
By contrast with the rich body of scholarship on science in imperial India, there is relatively little work on the history of scientific practice in independent India. The scholarship on imperial science provides a rich context leading into the “idea of modern India” at the threshold of Independence. But that is the point at which much of the literature concludes.
Though histories of the nuclear energy and weapons programme comment especially on the TIFR for the period after 1945, there is effectively no study of the establishment of nuclear physics research and education in the country as a whole.
In order to fill this gap I steer clear of 1974 as well as the nuclear power plants and research reactors built during this period, concentrating instead on the establishment of advanced teaching and research in nuclear physics (1938–45).
I follow this with an argument on its reconstruction, beginning August 1945, towards an autonomous nuclear field (1945–8), and the consequent impact on the laboratory practice of nuclear physics (1948–59). The questions I raise are, first: What was the promise of nuclear physics educators and laboratory leaders to the national state project?
How did they imagine their projects within the larger consensus on science-based industrialization between 1938 and 1945? Second, how did their contribution relate to the new-found nuclear research imperative of the newly founded national state (1945–8)? And finally, how did certain research laboratories perceive the disjunction between science and technology?
Excerpted with permission from Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth-Century India by Jahnavi Phalkey, published by Permanent Black.
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Neither the exact form of the new state nor nationalism’s place therein nor the shape of post-war nuclear research were self-evident. In the period between 1945 and 1948, the Constituent Assembly debated the future of nuclear weapons in free India. The requirements of secrecy surrounding nuclear research, and regulations for the mining and trade of fissile materials found in India, were discussed in conjunction with debates on making a correct nation-state framework for the baffling entity called India that was coming into being.
Before WWII nuclear research was not a matter for state legislation anywhere in the world; it became one after the end of the war. Following the use of atomic weapons, atomic and nuclear research became inextricably linked with warfare and so became part of the business of state.
An Indian state was in the making. Nehru and the nationalist elite also realized the importance of nuclear pursuits as a potential energy source, a dual imperative equally obvious to the physics community. Both held stakes in the shape of things to come, and it was because their interests converged – in contest with alternative futures for the country – that the nuclear history of India took the shape it did.
The discovery of nuclear fission in the year WWII broke out confirmed the potential of nuclear energy for the scientific community. How this could be utilized for war purposes became clear only with the end of the war. The use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, including the production of energy, remained far from clear and largely utopian even towards the end of the 1940s.
Because nuclear research was radically transformed as a field by the wartime scientific effort, the priority given to understand this transformation has framed the history of nuclear physics even for the inter-war period. The historiography of nuclear physics has been so plagued by teleological reconstruction that Jeff Hughes correctly contends:
“The nuclear age is only now coming to be understood as a contingent accomplishment rather than an inevitable outcome of scientific activity.” In the process, canonical nuclear history, particularly for the period prior to WWII, is guilty of “its implicit naturalistic justification of the creation of nuclear weapons.”
The importance of countering retrospective constructions entails seeing nuclear physics as an emerging field in the 1930s, when the physicists in question themselves justified their research interest as simply the need “to participate in the most ‘modern’ branch of the subject.” They were driven by the modernist imperative of nuclear physics.
Of the correctness of this in relation to the Indian physics community there is no doubt. The modernist imperative in the late 1930s meant, first and foremost, establishing the capabilities for pursuing nuclear physics. Within this, one option was the development of an infrastructure for participating in nuclear physics research as an international activity.
Another was participating in study and research at the leading laboratories in Western Europe and North America. The Cavendish Laboratory was the leading place for experimental nuclear physics until the mid-1930s; it was moreover a laboratory for the empire with an established tradition of training Indian students.
The Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, had joined the fray with its successful implementation of the cyclotron principle in 1933 and increasingly took the lead through building larger accelerators with higher energies. In 1938 Raman and Saha sent a student each, Rappal Sangameswara Krishnan to the Cavendish and Basanti Dulal Nagchoudhuri to the Radiation Laboratory, with the explicit purpose of training them followed by their return to help establish nuclear physics in India. The physicist Walther Bothe in Germany was working towards acquiring a cyclotron around the same time. In December 1938 he tabulated the distribution of cyclotrons in the world with his own order of preference.
Decisive action towards entering the field of experimental nuclear physics research by Raman in Bangalore and Saha in Calcutta was contemporaneous with many others, as Bothe’s survey shows. In 1936 Saha was impressed by the atom-smasher (cyclotron) at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley and convinced of its dual importance for medical treatment and nuclear physics research.
He wanted to build one in India because it would elevate the status of his laboratory to possess the most recent equipment for cutting-edge scientific research. He also perceived his efforts at building infrastructure for science as inseparable from his efforts at nation-building.
His arguments must have convinced Nehru, who not only supported Saha’s quest for funds from industry-led philanthropic foundations but also followed the developments on this first Indian cyclotron while in prison. Raman, who wanted to establish nuclear physics at the IISc., Bangalore, similarly argued that nuclear physics was “the [research] problem of the time.” He saw the necessity for its establishment to retain the prestige of the Bangalore institute as India’s foremost scientific research centre. A cyclotron should be built, he said, no less because “almost every civilized country, barring India, had one.”
Bhabha, the youngest of the three and the only one to have trained abroad, saw advantages in the pursuit of nuclear physics to further his research interests in cosmic ray physics. While resident in India during the war he became aware of the strength of his industrial and scientific network, which he mobilized towards the establishment of an institution dedicated to fundamental research in the physical sciences. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was established by June 1945, though particle accelerator-building activity began only around 1951–2. Bhabha argued for the establishment of an “outstanding school of physics” (not for the introduction of a new field within an existing institution) to train young scientists who could become experts on nuclear energy matters. This was not only one’s duty to one’s country, Bhabha argued, but also necessary towards advising on industrial development.
Raman at the Department of Physics, IISc., Bangalore, Saha at the Department of Physics, USC, Calcutta, and Bhabha at the TIFR, Bombay, all argued for the establishment of nuclear physics before August 1945, on different scales and with varying ambitions. In modernizing their discipline they also found connections with the broader agreement on science-based industrialization. Nuclear physics was necessary for building a nation, as a sign of civilization, and for advising on India’s industrial production.
Before August 1945 the nationalist elite accepted the logic of nation-building, civilization, and training for expertise – but as a part of the larger commitment to promoting the scientific education and research necessary for developing India. There was no reason to prioritize nuclear physics, no case to be made for nuclear exceptionalism.
This view changed with the use of atomic weapons at the end of WWII: nuclear physics now became uniquely important to nation-building. It was no longer possible to think about nuclear research on the same lines as building dams or planning heavy industrial development. As a future source of energy, it provided the new basis for hope of accelerated industrial development and became imaginable as essential to industrial development.
This being also the period of India’s decolonization, it seemed no less plausible to argue that to not possess nuclear knowledge would enfeeble India in international politics. Might the inability to master nuclear science and technology mean the loss of sovereignty yet again?
It can hardly be challenged that, in the context of the modern world, no country can be politically and economically independent, even within the framework of international interdependence, unless it is highly industrialized and has developed its powers to the utmost.
Nor can it achieve or maintain high standards of living and liquidate poverty without the aid of modern technology in almost every sphere of life. An industrially backward country will continually upset the world’s equilibrium and encourage the aggressive tendencies of more developed countries.
The scale of funding and the complexity of nuclear research were now much larger, rendering the university laboratory infrastructurally inadequate. Even if this change had begun before the war, its significance now was important enough for new ways to be found by politicians and physicists.
This put Raman, Saha, and Bhabha in the spotlight. Nuclear research was on the state agenda and feasible perhaps only with state funding; laboratories would have to be readjusted to these new parameters and re-equipped; newer networks and alliances would have to be built to ensure the survival of the nuclear physics laboratory in universities and research institutions.
The three laboratories were now in competition for state resources and, increasingly, priority. Given scarce resources, they could either compete or specialize and collaborate. Both Bhabha and Saha came to see centralization and the comprehensive provision of research equipment within a single facility as the requisite condition for progress.
Limited resources also meant there was little sense in separating fundamental research in nuclear physics from nuclear energy research. With the exception of the United States, those in the field, including Britain, confronted a similar problem. Between 1945 and 1948 the convergence of interests and anxieties among the political leadership and nuclear researchers decisively recast the nuclear field in free India. Ideas of state-building shaped the thinking of physicists as they sought to create a feasible research agenda.
In the emerging rhetoric of what the new state would look like lay the constraints on legitimately possible research pursuits. If Nehru and the political leadership had found in this community the expertise to work the technological challenge presented by the nuclear, Raman, Saha, Bhabha and their colleagues and students knew better than ever the support that their proposals could potentially enjoy with the new government. The state and nuclear physics research in independent India, it could be said, were being co-produced.
If the state was to be the agent for reorganizing science, it would have to invest and put in place the requisite infrastructure and mechanisms. This process had already begun with the co-ordination of the scientific war effort by the late imperial state. The CSIR, with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar at the helm from 1940, was one manifestation of this. Having co-ordinated industrial and fundamental research for war purposes, the organization and its director were retained by Nehru’s government as the co-ordinating state department in the building of national laboratories.
In 1946 the Atomic Energy Research Board of India led by Bhabha was established under the CSIR. Between 1946 and 1948 Bhatnagar played an important role in ensuring that a single laboratory emerged as the central laboratory of nuclear research within the reigning CSIR logic of developing one good laboratory dedicated to a singular purpose. This had come to be internationally recognized as the best way forward for organizing nuclear research technology. Spearheaded by Bhatnagar, the work of the future involved the establishment of laboratories for India within the framework of an emerging nation-state.
The nature of Bhatnagar’s effort was, all the same, somewhat distinct from that of Saha and Bhabha, and for that matter Raman, all of whom also wanted to establish nuclear physics laboratories but argued for them as a part of nation-building efforts. Saha tended to link these with development and education, Bhabha with national identity and industrial advice, and Raman with universal modernity and civilization.
Continuing his pre-Independence work, Bhatnagar was the co-ordinating scholar-bureaucrat for scientific research on behalf of the state, the goals of autonomy and self-sufficiency being central in his horizons.
By contrast with the rich body of scholarship on science in imperial India, there is relatively little work on the history of scientific practice in independent India. The scholarship on imperial science provides a rich context leading into the “idea of modern India” at the threshold of Independence. But that is the point at which much of the literature concludes.
Though histories of the nuclear energy and weapons programme comment especially on the TIFR for the period after 1945, there is effectively no study of the establishment of nuclear physics research and education in the country as a whole.
In order to fill this gap I steer clear of 1974 as well as the nuclear power plants and research reactors built during this period, concentrating instead on the establishment of advanced teaching and research in nuclear physics (1938–45).
I follow this with an argument on its reconstruction, beginning August 1945, towards an autonomous nuclear field (1945–8), and the consequent impact on the laboratory practice of nuclear physics (1948–59). The questions I raise are, first: What was the promise of nuclear physics educators and laboratory leaders to the national state project?
How did they imagine their projects within the larger consensus on science-based industrialization between 1938 and 1945? Second, how did their contribution relate to the new-found nuclear research imperative of the newly founded national state (1945–8)? And finally, how did certain research laboratories perceive the disjunction between science and technology?
Excerpted with permission from Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth-Century India by Jahnavi Phalkey, published by Permanent Black.
