MIT South Asian Alumni Association: Technological Desi - Long History of South Asian Students at MIT

hi i'm whitney espic the ceo of the mit alumni association and i hope you enjoy this digital production created for alumni and friends like you good morning everyone welcome i'm ranu bopana class of 1987 president of the mit south asian alumni association welcome to the mit south asian alumni association conversation on the technological desi the long history of south asian students at mit let's just give people a couple of minutes to join and we'll get started shortly while we're waiting let me just mention that mitza aims to connect south asian alumni with mit and each other and to offer an outlet for shared development and conversation we are an opt-in community so if you know an alum who is not on our mailing list or would like to be please encourage them to add us to their communities in the infinite connection to get our emails and also please look for us on social media on facebook instagram linkedin to connect all right well let's get started no one could be more excited than i am that the mit south asian alumni association and misty mit india are undertaking an archival and oral history project on mit in south asia ever since i read ross bissett's book and learned that the first student from south asia attended mit way back in 1882 almost after i meet mit's founding i have felt that this story needs to be more widely told and we are so honored to have ross bessette here with us today ross is a historian who spent 15 years researching how a people left behind by the industrial revolution came to be among the world's leaders in engineering and technology and what a central role mit played in that history ross is a professor at the university of north carolina state university and he's also the director of the benjamin franklin scholars program a dual degree program in engineering in the humanities he is himself a engineer a graduate from upenn who worked at ibm before going on to get a phd in history from princeton later we're also going to hear from elmenti associate professor of history sona iyer who researches modern south asia and south asian diasporas and is the author of indians in kenya the politics of diaspora she is currently leading the project that you'll be hearing about today and supervising 10 student interns some of which you'll also get to meet today our project tells the remarkable story of south asia at mit and mit and south asia to honor the determination and grit of multiple generations of south asians at mit so without further ado let me introduce ross ross bissett the floor is yours thanks uh very much ranu and thanks for your own grit in sort of seeing this to its realization it must be very exciting again for you to see this finally coming to fruition and thank you sana and the students for their work on this so this is a picture of nehru prime minister nehru visiting mit in october of 1949 and a group of students uh with him so this giving this talk right now makes me a bit nostalgic again as ronnie mentioned i worked researching this project for many years and it a couple of things that makes me nostalgic for in march of 2016 i gave some talks in mumbai and um on on this book and so here are uh addie goldridge and nadir godridge um they sponsored one of my talks in mumbai and then also here is fc coley who's usually considered the father of the indian i.t industry an mit graduate who gave me the honor of coming to my talk and so one of the things again i think of now while we're basically confined to our houses uh in researching this project i was able to travel the length and breadth of india from um from ahmedabad and bhavnagar to uh calcutta and jump shedport from chennai to uh to delhi and to palani and one of the things i want to do sometimes people when i told them about this project told me you know you're working on a project of mit students who from india and they would tell me that they sometimes people would say it was fairly narrow and i want to um give you a little tour of mumbai from an mit perspective so i've been to mumbai many times in the course of my my research and maybe my view of mumbai is a little different than most but let me give you a an mit focused uh tour of mumbai so the first place i want to talk about and i don't think it has that same um location anymore but there were in during world war ii a lot of american soldiers were stationed in in bomb bombay and the united states opened a library in bombay and one of the things that many mit graduates told me was that one of the first times they found out about mit was when they went to this library and saw mit catalog so at a time when you could say the bandwidth information bandwidth was fairly limited this was one way that people found out about about mit so um another uh thing i think of is that during uh shortly after independence india bombay had a large project to increase the water supply and so this involved building an aqueduct and the leader of this project one of the leaders of this project was ananta punja who was the first uh doctorate from indian to receive a doctorate from mit and he was a civil engineer and played a very important role in a number of engineering projects in the early years of indian independence so let's go a little bit north to po-i to see iit bombay we know of course that the indian iits were in some ways modeled after uh mit but even more um it's kind of interesting that iit bombay has something that they call the infinite corridor and so it's just interesting to see how that connection sort of lives on besides many iit bomb based students who went to mit after that so again if we move over to vicroli we'll see the godrej facilities and addie and nutter goderich um sort of the late leaders of the goldridge family business uh went to mit and we see that many a number of business families sent their children to mit to prepare for uh entering the family business so we'll go over to villa villaparlay and we'll see uh ramesh chauhan and his uh company parlay and thumbs up ramesh chowan sort of took on coca-cola started this thumbs-up cola and was very successful again another mi mit graduate heading a business family so if we go over to early we'll see the headquarters of the aditya birla group um aditya berla the grandson of judy berla well gd burlesque seems to have really passionately believed that his grandson needed to go to mit to prepare him to run the business and he did and was a very successful business leader in india of course so i want to also mention uh lalit canodio one of the founders of tcs and datamatics uh his datamatics is up uh near the airport so if we go south a little bit to the air india building again we will be reminded of fc coley and tcs and fc coley's work in really making tcs a pioneer in the it business connecting india and the united states and europe in ways that just would have been unthinkable before so i also think of charles korea the architect and uh navi bombay and his work in sort of conceiving this idea of of a new bombay in a way that bombay could could spread out um also then as we go to um the kaligota area we see durga bhaj pai's work the john gear art gallery uh another mit graduate in architect in architecture and then finally near the churchgate area i'm reminded of sham chayani who passed away about 10 years ago or and was a leading bombay environmentalist and so again it's quite striking to me i don't the role that mit graduates have played in bombay is is quite striking to me i'm quite sure that there's no other american or probably foreign university where one could sort of say or say the same thing and so um i say that by way of introducing this talk but let me just give you a little bit of sort of um the background of this project you could say um this project started in hayden library that i started out i was interested in the history of iit kanpur and mit was one of the anchor universities supporting iit kanpur and as such it had a lot of materials on the history of iit kanpur and so i i live in raleigh north carolina and there was a flight um in the early 2000s that left raleigh about six o'clock in the morning got to boston about 7 30 in the morning got me into cambridge about 8 30 and the mit archives were which had this material on kanpur only opened to 10. and so i spent time hanging out in the hayden library and one of the things i found was that mit had this collection of commencement programs and these commencement programs listed every graduate and their hometown and so this really intrigued me what i saw was it would be possible to make a database of every person from india who graduated from from mit and so that was what i did and so just here's an example with a noted uh mit graduate suha sukhothmi who became the director of iit bombay who did a phd in mechanical engineering from mit mit but so it became possible to first of all list all the graduates of mit but then also to try to find out their stories how did they end up at mit and what did they do afterwards and so that was my quest for the last uh as uh as ronnie mentioned for about 14 or 15 years or so so i want to just um and so one of the attractions of this was it was a definite population of people that i could study and i thought of this as sort of a historical experiment you know what can we learn about indian history by looking at these people what what what does that tell us and so that's what i set out to do and so a couple of things that i think it told me is that first of all it shows connections between a number of indian nationalist leaders and business leaders between mit which we weren't necessarily aware of before baal tilik mahatma gandhi gd burla and also shows how indians really looked to mit for 130 years to find resources to transform the country to transform their businesses uh to transform themselves and again one of my claims is that the modern high-tech indian was to a significant extent created by indians who who looked to mit i want to describe in particular two moments of of my research that kind of highlights some of these claims so one of the things that i found was that the first indian to attend mit was keshav bought in 1882 he attended mit only for one year and no other indian attended mit for 20 years so one of my questions was is this signal or is this noise is just just is this just some random event that happened that really doesn't have any larger meaning uh noise or does it really tell us something does it tell us something about india and so i guess one of the things notable about pune at this time was that this was really a center of the burgeoning the indian nationalist movement uh and we have nationalist leaders like baal tilik there and so one aspect of this is baal tilik was a journalist he published two newspapers the maratha in english and the caseri and marathi and so i got the maratha in english and spent months and months pouring through microfilm versions of the murata seeing you know what could i find was there any information that would sort of connect keshav bot and uh and mit and so what i did find was actually that there was a lot in the marathon related to mit this article model institute of technology is really all about mit so what i found as i read the maratha was that i saw that tilik was very interested in technological development and was thinking looking to uh the west looking to the united states to see how he could lead a movement to develop india technologically that one of the problems you could say that he saw with india was india's technologically lagging position so um just and one of the most intriguing things i found was in the case series so i don't read in marathi the quesary is uh it was in marathi i and the copies of these copies of these are very hard to find i ended up going to cambridge in the united kingdom and spent a week with uh uh a uh uh woman from maharashtra reading through um case series on the microfilm reader there but so one of the again intriguing things again in 1844 the case re said um we would like to introduce our readers to the renowned industrial school in massachusetts which is famous worldwide and it's been successfully running for more than two decades and so the caseri and the maratha baltillox movement were really arguing that to develop india they needed something like mit one of the kind of amusing things about this is that um through them in the maratha and the caseri um baltillic and his editors were able to access a lot of material and they saw what was happening in the world one of the things they saw was that england was kind of seen as falling behind in the race for industrialization falling behind germany and falling behind um the united states and so there one of the intriguing and amusing things i found was that there was an article in the maratha describing a um a a report on british technical education and some suggestions for british technical education and so um bob tillich abstracted that in his newspaper and he said these this report i gave some recommendations which are in the whole highly useful at the present stage of technical education in england but then he went on to say though we believe they cannot fairly compare with the masterly regulations of the great massachusetts institute of technology u.s america of which we have already given a full description in these columns so that the information that baltilic had gave him some way to critique england and to say to his readers you know england isn't really all that that they are not actually the leaders and there's ways that we can develop technologically so um what i'd like to do now is just hand it over to one of the the students who's working on this cat to just say a little bit about about her work on keshav bot hi yes thank you so much russ um so my name is katso and i'm a current junior at mit and i first just wanted to say that i am so grateful for having the chance to work on this incredible project um so catherine another student on the project who couldn't be here this morning and i were using ross's reference database to put together a short summary of keshav bot's life which i will now share um so keshav bot was born in 1855 and schooled in pune as ross said where he then traveled to go to england in his 20s after being refused work in england he left for america and arrived in boston in july 1882 where he registered as a student at mit studying electricity he eventually began working at john cochran's turkey red dye works in malden he was later best known in india for his knowledge of the dying process rather than for his status as the first indian mit student overall it's a little bit unclear how much an mit education benefited bob's career though he was a pioneer in overseas study in the americas most of his study most of his success sorry came from his experience at the cochrane dyeworks which were not part of his courses of study at mit nevertheless he spoke highly of his time in boston indicating in in a 1899 letter included in the first volume of mit's technological review that he had made lasting friendships at mit and i'll now pass it back to ross thank you thank you cat so one of the other intriguing things that i found was links between mit students and and gujarat and specifically links between mit and mahatma gandhi so in the 1920s and 1930s more indians who came who went to mit came from gujarat than from anywhere else in india and again quite surprisingly there were a number of connections between mahatma gandhi and mit so i just want to um this is part of my database and so the on the second to left column are the names um so on the left column are the years of graduation and then the um the column the third column from the left is the location and you can see these uh bob nugger bob nugger all these people who came from from this area and it's quite was quite surprising to me i didn't expect it at all so here's a heat map showing again the sort of presence of where indian mit graduates came from in the 1930s and again you can see uh that the highest level of heat is in gujarat uh in and in that area so that was a surprise to me uh one of the things that really turned my project around was a meeting i had with um manubai perek uh on malabar malabar hill in mumbai in 2008 so uh uh anand pandya um told me that i should go see who was a mit graduate told me that i should see menu by perek and so so i did so again he got his uh phd from mit in in 1940 and so he really again transformed this study for me and it was quite a remarkable thing so i asked him why did you go to mit and one of the things that he told me was because his father said that he should and so this sort of sent me back to his his father dave chan parekh one of the remarkable things is that dave chan perek was a lifelong associate of mahatma gandhi and they sort of had some similarities they were both uh grew up in families or ministers um to some of the princely states they both went to the united kingdom for for further education but dave chon perek sort of went in a different direction than mahatma gandhi that he went um he went to cambridge in the united kingdom and he um had interaction with the economist alfred marshall and manubai perek told me that the economist alfred marshall said to him he said why are you indians coming to to england to be lawyers what you should really be doing is going to the to mit and becoming engineers and so i found um and so amanda by prec told me that his father went to mit i found documentary evidence that he went to the the united states um uh here is a report of one of those one of those visits uh and again uh jave chan perek was very uh close to uh mahatma gandhi uh dave chon prak here is the figure on the far left of the second row and this was a meeting to welcome mahatma gandhi after his return from south africa mahatma gandhi is the third uh the third person in the sec third person from the left on on the second row sitting and his his wife tasturbai is is next to him um and one of the intriguing things is that there were a number of people from bhavnagar in uh gujarat who went to mit this is a meeting in the 1930s the d1 of bob nugger uh prabhashankar putney sitting down here in the turbine uh funded a number of uh students from bhavnagar to attend mit and this is a a meeting of them at mit that one of the things that was said was that prabhashankar putney treated them all to a dinner at the ritz carlton which must have been a great treat at the time um one of the most intriguing people that i found in my research was a man by the name of trichomol shah he was the son-in-law of dave chan parekh and mahatma gandhi was actually present at his wedding uh trikhem law shah was a fairly i think you can say a fairly uh committed uh gandhian but he went uh at the encouragement of dave chon perek to mit he studied got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and received a master's degree in electrical engineering and when he returned to india one of the intriguing things is he had a letter of recommendation from uh veneever bush and so trikhim lal shah was someone who had connections to mahatma gandhi and veneever bush and so uh veneever bush really is one of the most important figures in technology in the 20th century that he was one of the leaders in the development of computing he had a vision for what later became the internet was a leader in development of uh military technology during world war ii and so in some sense i think trick and lal shah is probably one of the only people in the world who had these connections to both uh mahatma gandhi and veneever bush in the course of my research i got access to a number of letters that um that trikhim lal shah had written to his father-in-law uh dave chan perek and dave chan parekh was always worried about his weight that he had a belief at this time that it was very risky health-wise for indians to come to the united states um because of the weather because there was not adequate food for for vegetarians and so he was always asking about his weight and so he would um want every week a monthly report and so um this is a picture of trichomol shaw and then um i found a letter which sort of provides some context for this picture that he's afraid that dave john perek will see how skinny he looks and will think that he's not healthy but that wasn't really the case at all um just as again uh one of the letters that i was able to get from um from the family of trick and law shaw again that made it really possible to tell the story in a in a a rich way the other person i want to mention is uh baal khalker and he was the son of kaka kolker who was one of gandhi's close associates as well and baal khalkar was raised in such a satyagraha ashram in ahmedabad he marched with gandhi in the salt march and in 1940 he went to mit uh to study mechanical engineering again quite a remarkable thing here's a picture of uh of of gandhi and baal klelker is um behind gandhi and on his left right on his left there but so again quite a remarkable thing to see this move from going to being a key figure in the satyagraha ashram to being a mechanical engineering student at mit one of the things i was able to get in touch with the birla family basan kumar birla and they gave me access to some materials they had and this is a letter that baal kelker wrote to gd burla asking for financial aid you could say to attend to mit and what's kind of striking and what's special about this letter you might say is the editing was done by mahatma gandhi so mahatma gandhi of course edited a newspaper himself and was known to be sort of have very strong opinions maybe to be even some somewhat of a control freak and so he uh edited uh baal klulker's letter asking for help from uh from gd burla support for from gd burla to attend mit and it seems and uh mahatma gandhi actually gave gd burla himself this letter uh from baal kulker asking for support and i i believe that he did get that support here's just a picture i got this is from i got this from a grandson of uh balco just showing a group of indian mi mit students in around 1940 enjoying the snow at mit um just let me just see how we're doing for tom um again one other person i just want to mention and i had the privilege of speaking to a number of times was fc coley who had a master's degree from from mit was an executive at tata electric and really after tcs thought of consultancy services was started and got off the ground he was brought in to really domesticate it and he really had connections with the united states that enabled tcs to become sort of the global player in it that it that it is today so in concluding again i was just able to sort of touch on a few moments of my own research but this you could say is uh an incomplete story that i had a great deal of enjoyment working on this and talking to people i started working on this in 2003 and published my book in 2016 but it was a story that i couldn't really tell completely the materials were highly distributed the people are highly distributed throughout india and the united states and it's a story that you could say can only be fully told by collecting memories materials from a wide range of people and i guess i would say just in concluding that it's a story that we really need your help to fully tell to make people uh aware of and so that's i guess one of the purposes of our of our talk today is just to try to enlist your help uh in this effort to really tell the fully the story of uh in indians at mit um and one uh final thing i i just sort of say that i have been in touch with the um the son of trichomol shaw and when my book came out he uh gave a copy to his to his son and he had his his son his granddaughter his son's daughter read it and he sent me this note saying um he had a daughter this daughter was in seventh grade and she read the chapters and now she wants to know more about my father and gandhi and in the independence movement and the purpose of the book was to rile's curiosity and um this book has done that for for this young girl and so he was very happy and that was one of the highest recommendations that i could have for for what i've done so again i want to thank you and um turn it over um should i turn it back to you ranu or sana [Music] thank you so much ross um let's turn it over now to professor iyer senna the floor is yours thank you so much ross um and hi everyone uh thanks for joining us uh today to hear a little bit more about where so the future in some ways of uh ross's book um and the future really was uh you know sort of started out with ranu reaching out to me a couple of years ago to say that uh you know sangam's 60th um anniversary uh you know the setting asanga map is sort of coming up and there's this incredible book by ross on the technological indian and we have to recover these stories put them into the public realm collect more um and i was intrigued and before i knew it ranu who if all of you for those of you who know her is very persuasive and before you even know it you're saying yes and nodding your head you know plunging head first into it so the idea had been that we wanted to sort of find a way of telling you know tracing and telling the personal professional and intellectual journeys of a whole range of affiliates uh of south asians who had been affiliated with uh mit in a variety of capacities um and to try and bring together the sort of intimate stories of life on campus social lives uh with the more public stories of um you know careers of professions um and things like that and so there are two sort of guiding principles that i had in my mind as we began to get into this project uh one was to think of this as a way of recovering and telling the story of south asia at mid and this was sort of primarily done in very much the vein that you know ross's book has laid it out in sort of tracing the students right um bringing in the faculty the staff the academics of how south asia has established a presence at mit at the institute and the other side of it which again sort of uh you know was invoked in ross's book was you know mit in south asia um you know as sort of ross laid out really nicely in his presentation at the beginning this idea of what technical knowledge and education could do for south asia goes back to the late 19th century and sort of continues well into the 21st century so we want to sort of capture that um and we're sort of thinking about ways in which we can do that um looking at the institutional links again the iit you know ross pension is one but we very quickly discovered that you know the iits are just one of very many kinds of institutional links that mit has with south asia um you know misty india mit india has sent close to a thousand students on internships to india to a whole host of organizations um and and sort of firms um and they are also sort of alumni who have individual trajectories that might not get captured in sort of the institutional story so we wanted to make sure that we trace all of these stories bring them in and really sort of think about mit at south uh sort of south asia at mit but also mit in south asia um there are three main things that are sort of that i'm really keen that our project showcases one is to uh make sure that we do cover south asia as a region um and don't uh only look at india um so of course you know the indian sort of alumni is a very large part of this story but we are also sort of trying to pull in stories of uh you know people who came from present-day pakistan bangladesh sri lanka to name a few but also the first and second generation south asians are you know students and faculty and staff of south asian descent um you know would call themselves american or canadian or came from kenya tanzania or mauritius so we're really sort of broadening out this idea of who constitutes south asia and where south asia is constituted um we are hugely indebted to ross's book um you know which is uh you know been the starting point for all of us um but we also want to move uh you know along with the story of the technological uh they see in the indian but also to look at the other schools uh you know such as the schools of science architecture and planning economics sort of the poverty lab political science the center of international studies linguistics history uh the sds program the gender and women's studies program and the business school that have all sort of been hubs of uh the production of knowledge on south asia and have also sort of included a lot of students um and faculty who work on uh from south asia in fact you know one of the reasons why many of our incoming undergraduates today choose mit over some other schools that focus on stem is that mit does provide a very holistic undergraduate experience and curriculum to them so we wanted to make sure we have that in and then finally i was schemed that we also think about how south asia has shaped mit as an institute so that you know this is sort of two-way story um you know mit is an uh internationally renowned institution of learning and teaching that where cutting-edge research takes place um you know my own school shaz is motto is great ideas change the world um so you know to what extent has um has this south asian connection contributed to the institute itself in position being able to position itself at the forefront of research um and learning and how it was you know and how integral this south asian connection is to the future at the institute is also something i wanted to do um so it's a big project as you can imagine um and at the moment we have sort of two goals uh two sort of end points the first is to build an online archive that will allow us to tell this story and put you know ross's you know the great work that ross has done in his insights and also the work the students are doing into the public realm um so we have a student who's building a website um and the second is uh you know the plan is to showcase uh you know this project in an exhibition uh hopefully in person but also a website online in 2022 uh to really showcase the highlights of our findings and the projects um it's a big undertaking um and you know when ranu reached out to me to talk about this um you know to ask me to get involved i thought well you know i can do a little bit but what better way to get uh you know students involved at mit than to actually get them to sort of be part of this right from the beginning because after all our current students will be tracing their genealogies right whether they are personal or professional or intellectual to this history of south asia and mit um so with uh you know the help of funding from misty india and the south asian association alumni association we've been able to get uh recruit 10 student interns uh who have been working since since december um you'll be hearing about them in just a second uh but i just wanted to say that the work that they've been doing you know this is such a huge project that there were ways in which we had to really manage and slice off little bits it's an ongoing project um and for now we are focusing on the early years from about 1882 till the 1940s um and perhaps sort of a little bit into the 1950s um but i wanted to now call the students in to just very briefly share with you their findings so far they've been working uh with us for about an hour for about a month now you already heard from cat but i was going to ask neisha um to join us next to introduce herself and tell us a little bit about what she's been working on hi everyone so my name is niosha narayanan i'm a junior in course three at mit um i have been working along with rujul um who if you want to turn your camera on as well um we have been working on um looking through the archives of the tech mit's newspaper and technique um the magazine to try to find instances of mentions of india and the first mit students so the way we did this is all of these archives are available publicly online and we we search through these using uh various keywords and we searched through every year since um 1880 up till 1960. so the first section that we have um is okay here we go the first section that we had was um initial south asian students at mit um and so the first student as uh professor bassett and as kat mentioned was keshav pot and this was the first instance we could find in the tech um about mr bhatt and it was an instance of when he read out loud an interesting paper on college life in india next slide please another instance that we found was this unfortunate incident of mother of kirloskar who was the cousin of shantanu keraloshko who passed away from tuberculosis unfortunately in 1925. next slide please another thing i found interesting um was this little tidbit from 1925 which shows all the numbers of international students at mit in 1925. um as you can see there are

seven international students from india and i thought it was cool that there were also many students from from europe and south america next slide please and i'll pass it on to ritual here so we also looked at some of associations students formed and cultural events that were happening on or near campus a couple from 1945 um we found an article about the hindustan association celebrating india day with a couple of talks and another one of in the same year of indian students arranging an exhibit in lobby 10 about various things related to india we also found some cultural events like a concert in kresge in 1957 and um a dance which there's a nice picture of in 1960 organized by the indian student greater boston we also found similar to what professor bassett said some connections between the independence movement and politics and mit in the tech so in 1932 i found this article about tm shah and nm shah being imprisoned for um anti-british activities and it was quite a large article on that and um similarly in 1942 we have an indian student writing about the indian position on independence later post-independence we have a visit uh jawaharlal nehru's visit to india a visit to mit um we have the akatori khan's visit to mit and many such interesting things in the tech so that's what neoshe and i are doing that's all from us i'll hand it back to professor ayer thank you rugelinisha luisa hello everyone my name is luisa i'm a senior studying mechanical engineering and theater i am actually peruvian and the the reason why i got interested in this project and helping out all of the team um was that india has always been india and south asia have always been really fascinating to me in a cultural perspective so i'm really also grateful to be a part of this project with the team it's been a really great experience so far um my job in the team is to um research theses at mit that have to do with south asia um one of the uh key stories that i found so far um using like keywords like niosha um and rujol said um one of the first thesis with the word india in it was actually in the 1920s um and was written by leonard best i can share my screen really quickly actually um was written by leonard best undergraduate in chemical engineering this uh student was supervised by warren k lewis who was actually one of the modern fathers of chemical engineering so i thought that was that was really striking i'm going through the different decades and trying to understand as well through this keyword method of what are some other thesis that have been written about south asia in the 1940s the first thesis in the architecture department specifically addressing an issue in india was written by habapur rahman so i know at the end of this project the goal is to integrate all of these across of our own different sections and i'm really excited to do that i'm also researching departments and faculty at mit so i'm doing some research with misty india about the india technology education program itep it was founded in the late 90s in the music department george ruckert was a key professor in establishing the mit heritage of the arts of south asia which up to this day has performances in kresge and like uh nyosha and rajul said this has been something that has been happening for a long time and i'm currently looking into further exploring into the literature department theater and other humanities departments as well as the center for international studies um yeah this is this is very exciting and um it's really interesting to understand the cultural pathway like across the decades um in in this way so thank you thanks so much luisa and alas student speaker naksha hi everyone thank you so much for joining my name is naksha and i'm a junior at mit majoring in chemical engineering and a minor in business management um so the reason i got interested in this project is because i was part of the south asian association of students and just have always been curious to learn about the history of south asia at mit and south asian students as well so with luisa i'm working on the departments and organizations part of this project so we've been looking at various departments that um and and uh or um departments at mit that i think professor iyer had mentioned so um center for international studies and also academic departments um such as political science women gender studies music theater and etc so we're just trying to basically find the origin stories of these department who was involved especially any key south asian figures or individuals and also gathering data on how many people have been involved and how many years they have uh it has been since they have been established and then we're also looking at some organizations and these are mainly like student organizations at mit so um some of these organizations are south asian students at mit sas sangam which is the graduate students association um pax mit which is the pakistani uh students associations the nepali student association and many more um so we'll be basically contacting them gathering information on their histories and also talking to the students of these organizations to just understand how they were established and the type of work that they are doing right now and finally another thing that i've been working on with ranu and i'll actually share my screen really quickly to show everyone is a survey for alumni so this is a survey that we created um to get more information from from the alumni because um the website and exhibit exhibition that we're talking about will only be richer with your participation and we want to know what your lives at mit were like so this starts out with some basic information about when you graduated or what your affiliation at mit is and then we ask more questions on arrivals and departure your social lives at mit so any groups or organizations that you were part of or any dorm room or housing that you stayed in celebrations and holidays at mit um south asia at mit um so if anything um that had a south asian theme uh occurred on campus during your time here um or even instances of mit and south asia so a lot of you may be familiar with the misti or mit india program and finally your career path and mentors so what did you pursue after mit and how did mit shape your life after graduation and for all these questions you have the opportunity to share any images or materials to um that that may um tell us more about about your time here um so yeah um and i believe so um professor iyer will definitely talk a little bit more about the survey um but yeah thank you so much thanks so much naksha um so you know i hope you've all got a little bit of a feeler and a taster for the really wonderful work that these students have been doing over their break and through iap we have a new cohort joining we have some other students who are working um you know on the tech side building up the website um it's it's been a really exciting project um naksha mentioned the survey that she and ranu have been working on which i think is going to be circulated um this week um you know quite soon to the alumni and i really encourage you to fill up um all of it a little bit of it some of it um because it's your stories that will make this pro which i think are worth archiving uh for posterity for future generations of your family your grandchildren um and kids but also i think for the public it's it's really you know having a website that um can be as sort of can reflect the diversity of south asia at mit uh will only be possible with your uh in so it's an opt-in survey um that i'd suggest now the other uh you know the big sort of task that the students have um that they haven't mentioned because i you know i thought that i would close with this was that we you know as much as the archival work and archival research is one part of this project another one is to actually have the students go out and conduct oral histories uh amongst the alumni and again you know ross has been sort of our starting point our guru in all of this um his wonderful um database of all the alumni was one that he provided us with and so i asked the students to go ahead and select up to six alumni that they wanted to interview um which they have and it really you know i was just astounded by the diversity of the candidates uh you know of the alumni that they've sort of chosen uh we have at the moment sort of 40 uh you know alumni who are going to be interviewed you know in the next couple of weeks uh with more in the future um and you know again as i said i was really keen this is really the story that these students are going to end up being in it's their genealogy so i was schemed that they conduct the interviews themselves identify the alumni to interview reach out to them and then actually conduct the interviews um so we're really excited about that and again the interviews will be hosted on this online archive that we are creating and then some will be showcased um at the exhibition so first you know my ask to all of you attending is please do fill out the survey so we can you know pull some of that information for our website if you'd like to be interviewed um in some of these targeted student-led interviews please reach out to us um you know reach out to ranu and then let us know and we can sort of send students your way uh some of you might already be uh hearing from them in the next couple of weeks and then finally and this is really an idea that ranu had it would be sort of nice to also have some of you interview one another sort of uh reminisce um you know over zoom or other medium about your time uh at mit about how mit has shaped your lives and what you remember about mid um so you know iran who had asked me to give a few tips right at the end about how one could do that um and it's really quite easy uh you know my recommendation would be that you could do it one or one on one or in a group but you know perhaps not more than three or four people um there should be one person who identity you know who's a sort of main lead in terms of conducting the interview which is just really to sort of help shape the conversation um i would recommend that the conversation in the interview doesn't last more than about 30 to 40 minutes uh you know 30 minutes is a good amount of time and as i've been telling the students any interview has to have a balance of being allowing for spontaneous conversation but also something a little bit focused um you know uh to sort of have a hook to have a kind of focus to come back to so that when we are doing our archiving and curating uh you know our jobs are a little easier so think about you know is there an event that you want to you know conduct an interview around um is there a particular generation so is it a group of the batch of 1982 that's sort of good to come together is it a particular career trajectory that is similar um you know that is the hook or the sort of point is it the location right um you know as ross had mentioned it was pune and then gujarat which were the main two places from where these early students came um the story is a little bit different today i know sort of with silicon valley and bangalore and the iits so there are these sort of different ways in which you could conduct a short oral history yourselves amongst yourselves um but again i would recommend it being up to four people in any one group um centered around one particular idea or theme um and then finally in terms of how you would go about this uh you know zoom and everyone is now uh sort of zoom savvy thanks to this pandemic it's a great way to just set up a zoom meeting hit record it gets saved as an uh mp4 i think um and you can send that to us um we could also use email as a format of more formal questions and answers um or a kind of conversation and you could send us that transcript and you can always just choose to do a audio um interview uh you can you know turn your videos off on uh zoom to just have an audio interview um we would be really uh grateful uh if you could sort of get involved to whatever extent you can um this is a big project it's an ongoing one as i said we're sort of ending in terms of the archival work in the 1940s just to manage things but the idea is that we will if we get funding which i hope we do get more students involved different student cohorts you know starting in the spring and going right through the exhibition in 2022 to be able to continue this story and bring the story uh you know down to the present day um which is uh you know i think a really interesting trajectory to map thanks very much and i'm going to hand it over to ranu now for closing remarks thank you everyone as you can see this is quite a broad and interesting project some of you had a question about the survey naksha and i will be sending that out shortly it will go out to the email list that we currently have for the mit south asian alumni association so you know please if you have friends who would like to be part of this please ask them to join in our community by opting in um on the infinite connection to the south asian alumni association please share it with your friends please interview your friends um and we are you know really excited about crowd sourcing this and and documenting this incredible story so ross and um sanam we have some questions um you know we you are both historians but um from what you know could you say a little bit about the trajectory of the the mit south asian alumni um through the years on campus from from your research so far that's a really uh big and broad question i guess some so a few things i think of is um that um one crucial sort of dividing line of demarcation you might say is before 1965 there were their united states had very discriminatory immigration laws in place which made it very difficult for south asians to stay permanently in the united states so before so one key change in the trajectory was that before 1965 not a hundred percent for sure but to a very large degree most of the south asians who came to mit would return to to india or pakistan uh but then after 1965 when the this legislation was changed uh that um that changed and it became much more common for graduates of mit to stay in the united states and to find jobs i think um it's kind of intriguing that i mentioned at the beginning um suhas sukkot me who was the director of um of iit bombay but he his father was a famous uh statistician and he had two brothers who went to mit and so uh suha sukhothmi himself returned to indiana's two brothers stayed in the united states one is now the dean of emory medical school and one has been a prominent uh physicist and academic so maybe in their lives sort of shows some of that that transformation sana is there anything that you would like to add sure you know um my remarks are not so much based on my research but my experience of teaching at mit where i've been faculty in the history department since 2013 and i've been really struck by uh the numbers of students uh you know who you know as ross you were saying are sort of first and second generation south asians are here at um here at mit who come into my classes there are predominantly sort of classes taught on south asian history and uh you know for me it's been really interesting teaching this history to students who are in some ways once removed uh from south asia itself um and to bring in students from whose parents migrated in the 1960s and 70s from you know and it really reminds me of how old i am when i have students and i say so you know when were you born or if i mention a key event in south asia like 9 11 um they're like well we weren't even born but you know it's really they are these sort of generational shifts and each generation i think has its own idea of what it means to be south asian and i've become really cognizant of that um you know with with the students um what really struck me in reading your book ross and sort of doing some of this research is how although the sloan business school is quite recent in terms of you know the institute's sort of sort of long history um there has been this involvement of sort of south asian business right from the beginning um you know right from the early students so it's not just sort of technological know-how but really sort of also business and enterprise that has been very much part of that and you know in the current sort of moment i think there's a lot of work on south asia you know both in the economics department uh but also at the business school um so those were the two main sort of shifts that i think are really interesting um in terms of a trajectory to uh to sort of capture thank you both one of the other things you know you um ross have really documented in your book um you know the central role that technology played um in development and um you know and in advancement of you know south asia but one of the other things that struck me in reading your book is really how global mit has been from the beginning were you struck by that and did you feel like this was something that was perhaps quite different from other institutions yeah i really was and again it seems to me that again the vision of mit was remarkably global again like i think around 1900 or so there was a comment that uh that in the president's report that mit had the most global student population of any um university in the united states one of the things that i've sort of as i've thought about this one of the things that i think of is that you know mit grew up you know it in the up until the 19 teens it was in boston but he grew up right next to harvard and harvard was always trying to uh assimilate to take over mit and i think what i guess i would say in sort of an evolutionary fashion for mit to survive the administrators at mit had to have a very powerful vision of what mit was this wasn't just another school that they really believed it was something that had something special and that part of that something special was that they had something to teach the whole world and so they made connections you know with china with india way before other schools did i was kind of intrigued that so i got my phd from princeton and about 10 years ago there was a big thing that the president of princeton was making his first visit to uh india or something like that and you know mit had had connections you know deep deep connections you know for decades and decades before that thank you and i also just want to acknowledge that we have a number of of participants on the call today some of whom were interviewed by you some of whom are from families of alums who were interviewed by you there's a very rich history that you know is contained right here a lot of you have many questions about you know the trajectory of the south asian population and i'm not sure that that any any of you can answer that for us right now but it'll be really um you know i'll be really curious to see after we collect this information how much more we learn about that um so we are unfortunately at the end of our time today but thank you everyone for uh participating thank you very much to all of our speakers for this wonderful enlightening conversation and hello to sana's son in the background as well thank you and please keep posted for look out for the survey that is coming your way and help us by adding to this archive and adding to you know our database thank you everyone and have a great day thanks for joining us and for more information on how to connect with the mit alumni association please visit our website

2021-01-16 00:39

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