IIT Madras (IITM) Zanzibar, which was inaugurated last year, became part of household conversation after Amitabh Bachchan asked a participant in the game show Kaun Banega Crorepati where the first overseas campus of an IIT was located. What does it mean to be an IIT outside India?
History and context
The IITs were conceived and established as contributors to the human resource development of the nation. This is iterated in the “Indian” foundation of their name, the Indian institutes of Technology, and a sign in the main building of IIT Kharagpur that reads “Dedicated to the Service of the Nation” underscores this national imperative.
Four IITs in four parts of the country, envisaged in the Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee’s Report in the 1940s, imagined a new technological geography, and the idea of an India united by technology. Unlike the older technological institutions in Madras, Roorkee, and Shibpur (Howrah), the IITs were intended as Indian institutions of axiomatic Indianness.
The IITs at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, and later, Delhi, were built with Western assistance and tutelage. While being national and aspirational, they were notionally universal, and saw technology as acultural. Unveiling the stone tablet in IIT Madras, then President of West Germany Heinrich Lübke said: “Knowledge will be the common property of the people.” And in his first convocation address at IIT Madras in 1964, President S Radhakrishnan said Indians must pursue knowledge, which has been the hallmark of its civilisation, in collaboration with other countries — articulating a collaborative and cross-national idea of technology.
Today, as IITs are admitting foreign students and foreign universities are setting up campuses in India, the Dr K Radhakrishnan Committee has recommended the setting up of IIT campuses overseas. So, if IITs are territorial national expressions of postcolonial science, how do we reconcile the reality of the first offshore campus in Zanzibar?
Western and Indian
Initial Western guidance was necessary for the establishment of IITs, but their Indian character was never in doubt. By contrast, the Zanzibar campus of IIT Madras continues to be Indian, not African or Tanzanian. (Zanzibar is a Tanzanian archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the East African mainland.)
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When IIT Kanpur was modelled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there was a debate on whether the new institute would be an “MIT in India” or “an Indian MIT”. Needless to say, the latter prevailed as Indians Indianised technology. An “MIT Kanpur” or “Technische Hochschulen Madras” or a “German IIT” (as German professors called IIT Madras), would have been a transplant lacking in Indian character.
Prof Gordon Brown, Head of Electrical Engineering at MIT, expressed reservations about using the MIT name indiscriminately; for him and his colleagues, engineering was always global and linear, and developing countries had to learn from the developed world. On the other hand, Prof Norman Dahl of the Kanpur Indo-American Program declared that IIT Kanpur was not an imitation, but an Indian institute addressing Indian problems.
Seventy years after the IIT project started delivering, IITs are making an audacious effort not just to mentor (as the Western powers did), but are ready to create a double in Zanzibar and in other cities outside India.
Indian, Zanzibari, both?
The IIT Madras campus in Zanzibar is not a Zanzibar Institute of Technology mentored by IIT Madras. It is a deterritorialised copy while still being an Indian institute. There can be a debate on which word to emphasise — Indian, or Madras, or Zanzibar. But it must be agreed that IIT Madras Zanzibar represents the journey of a postcolonial state to become a technological powerhouse.
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The first overseas campus is a declaration of aspiration by both IIT Madras and India as a nation to shoulder responsibility and share its success story. Prof Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dean of Global Engagement at IIT Madras and one of the brains behind the campus, sees Zanzibar as the gateway to the greater African region, iterating the sincerity of India’s friendship with the continent.
On the day of the inauguration, November 6, 2023, Zanzibar’s President Hussein Mwinyi described the campus as the high point of his term in office, and hoped that IITM Zanzibar would be a driver of economic change that would help the island achieve sustainable development goals. He also said he expected the IITM campus to complement the nation’s vision 2050 that requires skilled labour to transform the economy, and invited students from the entire region to utilise the opportunity presented by IITM.
While the IITM campus feeds the aspirations of Zanzibar in the pursuit of technology, it also offers Indians a legitimate reason to look at themselves and their achievements with confidence. The opening of IITM Zanzibar also demonstrates that India does not believe in separating the producers and consumers of knowledge, nor does it reduce African students into mere beneficiaries — rather, it is brotherhood and sisterhood in action.
Some have questioned the infrastructural inadequacies of the new campus, and doubted the wisdom of IITs travelling beyond the nation’s borders. Such views must be taken as a challenge of sorts. India and Zanzibar cannot fail each other.
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(Dr Jyotirmaya Tripathy is Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Madras.)
