‘He embodied promises and limitations of technocracy’: Aparajith Ramnath on M Visvesvaraya’s legacy

Historian Aparajith Ramnath is the newest winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. He has been awarded the Prize for Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M Visvesvaraya, a biography of M Visvesvaraya (1861–1962), former Diwan of Mysore and India’s most recognisable civil engineer. The jury praised the book for its “deeply researched account of Visvesvaraya’s life and career” and commended how Ramnath’s biography “chronicles the life of a remarkable individual and technocrat, as well as the times and country that shaped [M Visvesvaraya].”

Ramnath is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. His interests lie in the history of science and technology, the history of engineers, business history, and South Asian history. In a conversation with Scroll, the author-historian spoke about how he found his calling in the history of science and technology, the quest to understand the person behind the persona of M Visvesvaraya, the impact of his work on our contemporary lives, and more.

Many congratulations on winning this year’s Kamaladevi Chattoapdhyay Prize. How long has the book been in the making?
Thank you! The book was commissioned in 2017 and published in 2024, so seven years all told. Of course, that includes several fallow periods!

Tell us about your journey from studying engineering to becoming a historian and working at the intersection of both. It is not a common career route.
I drifted into engineering like many people of my generation. But I’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve always been fascinated by the past. After graduation, I worked briefly in a computer networks company in Bangalore, trying desperately to figure out a way to reconcile my interests with my training. That’s when I learnt about the field called the history of science and technology. I went to graduate school to train in it. And that’s how it all started.

Can you pinpoint any particular incident / person / insitution that inspired your research for the Visvesvaraya biography? He’s arguably the best-known engineer of modern India – but why do you find him so fascinating?
I was aware of Visvesvaraya since my school days. After I finished college, I lived in Bangalore, where his legacy is hard to miss. But it was while working on my doctoral project (which grew into my first book, on the history of engineers in late-colonial India) that I became intrigued by him as a potential subject for research. At a time when very few Indian engineers gained prominence in the colonial system, he seemed to be a larger-than-life figure. In many important ways, he was an outlier to the larger historical trends surrounding the profession’s development in his time. He built a reputation in fields far beyond the one he was professionally trained in, becoming a political administrator, an industrial manager, a constitutional analyst, and a thinker on economic development. How did that happen? In popular accounts, he came across as an otherworldly genius. I wanted to understand the person behind the persona, and the historical environment behind the person.

Where did you primarily look for research materials? Did you discover anything about Visvesvaraya that you weren’t quite expecting?
The state archives of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Telangana; the archives of the erstwhile Nehru Memorial Library (now PMML); the British Library in London; archives and collections of professional engineering institutions in India and the UK. I also combed through digitised databases of old newspapers, magazines, and other contemporary sources. I visited places that were key to Visvesvaraya’s life to get a sense of the atmosphere. I spoke to his family, who were very helpful. I looked at sources on other historical figures with whom Visvesvaraya worked.

There were many flashes of insight that emerged from the sources. His wry sense of humour, his sensitivity to criticism, his generally progressive outlook on social issues, his love of dogs. I also found that he was much more actively involved in crucial political discussions than one would have expected. He worked closely with political leaders in the 1920s as they pressed the colonial government for talks. He was actively concerned with issues of constitutional reform and the political status of residents of the princely states.

And what are the roadblocks that you encountered? What is the state of Visvesvaraya’s archives – are they readily accessible?
Well, for a very long time, I thought I wouldn’t find enough material to write a biography. Visvesvaraya was a very reserved person, so he didn’t bare his soul in letters to friends. In fact he hardly had any friends who were not also associates. He was single for most of his life. So his private papers are almost entirely related to his official life: newspaper cuttings, official reports and letters, and the like. They are not complete in any sense; there are gaps. But they are quite voluminous, and immersing myself in them proved illuminating. They are available on microfilm at the PMML, but there are photocopies, running to several volumes, in other institutions. I referred to them mostly at the Institution of Engineers (India) branch in Mysuru. State archives are a little more complicated to navigate, since obviously their records related to Visvesvaraya are not all in one place. Besides these, as I mentioned before, I had to look at various other types of sources and triangulate between them.

For someone like me who has very little knowledge of urban planning and engineering, what are some of Visvesvaraya’s most identifiable achievements? I’m saying, what are some urban features that are a part of my everyday life because Visvesvaraya envisioned and implemented them?
Piped water supply projects in various cities; multipurpose dams (most famously the KRS near Mysuru); the emergence of a sugar belt in Maharashtra; riverfront beautification projects across the country; Bengaluru’s ring roads; the Indian Institute of Science and other engineering/technological institutions; the Mysore Sandal Soap factories and dozens of other industrial ventures: all these were either envisioned or (directly or indirectly) shaped by his work.

Why is Visvesvaraya’s story still relevant today? And what do you think are some urgent lessons from his visions of institution-building?
I think we can learn a lot from Visvesvaraya’s resolutely secular outlook; his brand of patriotism, which had no room for cultural chauvinism; his emphasis on social reform; his championing of primary education; and his insistence on good public amenities. His career also embodies the promises and the limitations of technocratic thinking – something that we see playing out in the present. He was motivated by a desire to raise the material prosperity of his compatriots, and his achievements in this direction were enormous. But he had his blind spots too: on the environment, on people’s needs beyond the material, and on the role imperialism had played in the industrial development of the nations he looked up to. Today, again, we see the tremendous role science and tech can play, but we must be aware that it is not a magic solution or an alternative to political debate.

Your earlier book, The Birth of an Indian Profession Engineers: Industry, and the State, 1900-47, is also interested in the profession of engineering as it is today. Very briefly, what would you say are some historical reasons why engineering is still so coveted as an area of study?
Well, based on my first book, I can say that at least part of the appeal of engineering as a career stems from the associations it bore during the colonial era. Engineers then were members of an exclusive profession; they were fairly powerful representatives of the state; they lived in style; they saw themselves as civilising and modernising agents. Some of those associations live on. In later periods, engineering was connected with nation-building and imbued with an aura of rigour and rationality. In today’s India, I think the idea of the engineer has blended with the idea of the technocrat, i.e. somebody who starts with a technical background but addresses governance-related problems. And we can credit Visvesvaraya’s career for some of that.

While India churns out an incredible number of young engineers every year, it is also a severely unequal job market and a lot of our infrastructure leaves much to be desired. What do you think the reasons for this paradox could be?
We produce a large quantity of engineers, but the quality of their training is not uniformly good. Besides, good public infrastructure is not merely a technical problem. It also requires political will, regulatory mechanisms, and civic engagement.

Who are some of the most notable engineers working today? Do you think the future of engineering in India is still humanitarian and central to nation-building or have we lost some of it to purely corporate endeavours?
As I understand it, there are many outstanding engineers, but only a few become public figures. In recent times, G Madhavi Latha has won accolades for her work on the technically challenging Chenab Bridge (while laudably drawing attention to the fact that large engineering projects are collective achievements). E Sreedharan and the late AzPJ Abdul Kalam are, of course, household names. Others, such as Sam Pitroda and Nandan Nilekani, have had a huge impact as technocrats.

I don’t think corporate projects and nation-building are necessarily mutually exclusive. But to the extent that many engineers become cogs in large organisations, it does become more difficult for them to have the kind of impact that someone like Visvesvaraya had. Still, there are important engineering collectives that are conscious of the need to work on sustainable and context-specific solutions. Ensuring that engineering students are also exposed to humanistic branches of learning will be key in the future.