Cover of Ajantha Subramanian's book 'The Caste Of Merit'
The first IIT at Kharagpur stands on the site of the former British prison of Hijli. In the institute's first convocation address, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the location's symbolic value. "Here in the place of that Hijli detention camp stands this fine monument of India," he pointed out. "This picture seems to me symbolic of changes that are coming to India." Nehru went on to laud the engineer as the world's new nation-builder. "Now you are Engineers," he proclaimed, "and this world today...takes shape more and more under the hands of Engineers." For Nehru, it was appropriate that the engineer had superseded the administrator as the primary agent of governance and development. Administrators had always played an important role, he admitted. However, "the time has now come when the Engineer plays an infinitely greater role than anybody else." In fact, he predicted, the division between administrator and engineer would gradually fade away "because the major work of the country today deals with...engineering schemes of various types. We are building up a new India and the administrator who is completely ignorant of engineering does not help much in administering." This was already true of more technologically developed countries, where "engineers and scientists play a far more important role even outside their sphere of engineering and science." Given the precedent they had set, Nehru concluded, "that is bound to happen in India."
Nehru's pronouncement of engineering as the new technology of nation-building heralded its importance in the project of post independence developmentalism. The engineer was to be the linchpin of the developmental state, with his technical feats putting the prowess of the state on display. But Nehru did not bestow the same level of recognition and responsibility on all of independent India's engineering colleges. His convocation address at the first IIT indicated the exceptional status of the IIT system. As beneficiaries of bilateral relations with the world's industrial powers, the IITs were elevated as institutions that would best realize the promise of technological development.
Institutional stratification was not limited to the field of technical education. In science too, a similar process had produced the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) as the most esteemed of scientific institutions. Both the IITs and the IIS were founded to distinguish effort from expertise. Indeed, this was quite explicitly stated in the government's review committee report on scientific institutions, which defined scientific expertise as the work of a "few men of high calibre" and emphasized the constitutive link between excellence and selectivity. The report tied the success of the IIS directly to uneven investment. The IIS's excellence "required the judicious investment of resources in 'the development of fewer establishments for advanced training and research,' since a more expansive approach would mean that 'the general level of technical education and research would be lowered.'" In other words, democratizing access to training would be antithetical to excellence. Nehru concurred. "I am all for democracy," he opined, "but democracy normally means mediocrity too. It is a well-known thing, you put up with it in a democracy because, well, it is better to have democracy than having something worse. But the fact is that numbers lead to mediocrity.
Scientific and technological expertise was thus set apart from "the manpower mandate" through the development of a parallel institutional structure of higher education in techno-scientific fields with separate budgetary allocations, entrance examinations, fee structures, and curricular frameworks. The exclusivity of institutions such as the IITs and the IIS was ensured despite the dissenting opinions of a few scientists, such as Nazir Ahmed and Meghnad Saha, "who argued for a closer alignment between scientific and technological research and education and the existing network of national universities." Saha, the son of a lower-caste shop keeper from East Bengal, was also an outlier when it came to the upper-caste social backgrounds of most prominent scientists and technologists.
Exclusivity and excellence were to be maintained by insulating such institutions from politics, commerce, and bureaucracy. Scientific and technological policy was formulated by Nehru's handpicked group of scientific advisers without much parliamentary debate. This did not mean that scientists and technologists were removed from the work of government; indeed, they were intimately tied to it. As political scientist Srirupa Roy puts it, "The inauguration of each laboratory was the site as well as the means for the material representation of the science-state-nation triad that structured social relations in Nehruvian India. The joint presence of state officials and scientists at these events attested to the partnership between science and the state." At the same time, the repeated contrast between the creative labors of experts and the unimaginative labors of bureaucrats sustained the idea of an autonomous, insulated intellectual universe.
Significantly, caste serviced these distinctions both as social reality and as metaphor. Although the Nehruvian government was officially committed to democratization and against the use of caste in education policy, insulating these institutions from the ferment of democratic politics ensured their role in the social reproduction of caste. Furthermore, caste operated as a metaphor for merit. Nehru, for instance, characterized nationally oriented science and technology as infused with "the Brahminic spirit of service." This idea of the elite scientist-technologist as Brahmin "conveyed both the ability of an elite caste to disengage from the quotidian and material concerns that preoccupied those less privileged, and the unique qualities of creative thought that emanated from the 'head' of the social body."
The Indian state underwrote the exceptionalism of the IITs in many ways. First, it did so through their founding as institutions distinct from the existing educational ecosystem. Second, the patronage of foreign partners set them apart as "world- class" institutions that would act as forerunners in developing India. The state indexed its intimate association with this class of institutions through routine rituals of recognition. The presence of prime ministers, presidents, ministers, and foreign diplomats at IIT convocation ceremonies was commonplace, putting on visual display the institutes' standing at the highest echelon of Indian education. This did not go unnoticed by the institutions' students. As one 1963 alumnus of IIT Madras put it, "Within a couple of days of our joining, IITM held its first convocation with President S. Radhakrishnan as the chief guest. For many of us, I think that grand ceremony was a momentous introduction to the status of our new home for the next five years.
Excerpted with permission of Harvard University Press from 'The Caste Of Merit' by Ajantha Subramanian. Order your copy here.
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