Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian Institutes of Technology

Abstract

Post-independence Indian science as a medium of national development offers an opportunity to engage with the West beyond the straightjacket of domination and subordination. This ambivalence is reflected in the conception and materialisation of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), established under the guidance of Western powers to strengthen India’s technological progress. Being delivered from the West, IITs created conditions of sameness and difference, leading to a situation where the West and India transformed each other, with major implications for ideas of development and nationhood. This article focuses on IITs, particularly IIT Kanpur, as a site of collaboration and contestation, where engineering and politics often crossed, negotiated and resisted each other. This also led to situations where science’s materialisation through machines, such as computers, blurred the experiential difference between the West and India. Such boundary crossings created new scientific subjectivities that traversed beyond the nation and de-territorialised the practice of science.