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Article ID: CBB000953936

Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States (2009)

Bassett, Ross K. (Author)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 50
Pages: 783--810

Publication Date: 2009
Edition Details: Part of a special issue.
Language: English

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Technology Cold War Education, engineering Cross-national interaction Computers and computing International relations 20th century, late United States India

In July 1963, a chartered DC-7 landed at a military airbase in Kanpur, India, a large but unremarkable city on the Ganges River, in a region often considered backward by Indians. The plane held an International Business Machines (IBM) 1620 computer, commonly used in American universities, which was destined for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur, an institution supported by a nine-university American consortium. At the institute, a group of young Indian men muscled the machine into place (fig. 1). There to greet the computer was Harry Huskey, one of the foremost figures in U.S. computing. Huskey, who had consulted on the pioneer computer ENIAC, worked with Alan Turing in England, and served as president of the American computing professional society, was a professor of electrical engineering and head of the computer center at the University of California, Berkeley. Shortly after he and two computer experts from Princeton University had the computer up and running, they began an informal course for twenty-five specially selected IIT Kanpur first-year students, who, after completing their normal class work, would stay long into the night programming the computer (fig. 2). 1 The historiography of Indo-American relations during the cold war has been focused on a pair of bipoles: the United States--Soviet Union, and Pakistan--India. Jawaharlal Nehru famously declared India nonaligned, which for the United States meant refusing to take its side in the cold war, and India's independent foreign policy was a continual irritant to the United States. America's close relations with, and arms sales to, Pakistan, which was willing to align itself with U.S. interests, was a provocation to India, driving it closer to the Soviet Union. The United States and India became estranged democracies that maintained a cold peace. 2

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Article Brown, John K.; Downey, Gary Lee; Diogo, Maria Paula (2009) The Normativities of Engineers: Engineering Education and History of Technology. Technology and Culture (p. 737). unapi

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