Event Description
Dr. Asif Siddiqi presents on Cold War Geographies: Thumba and the Making of the Indian Space Program.
This talk seeks to illuminate two processes of recent concern to historians of science and technology. The first is to contribute to and extend an ongoing conversation about the nature of “global” or “transnational” science during the Cold War. The talk focuses, in particular, on Thumba, a remote fishing village in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which became the nexus of a massive international program to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere in the 1960s and 1970s. The event that is conventionally thought of as the “birth” of the Indian space program was grounded at Thumba: from here, on November 21, 1963, Indian engineers launched an American sounding rocket with a French payload using Soviet ground equipment.This striking convergence of the scientific imperatives of four different nations at the high point of the Cold War, hardly reported at the time, serves as an entry point to my second goal: to articulate what it meant for India—newly independent, non-aligned, and self-avowedly “postcolonial”—to produce science in a context where science itself was laden with intractable ideological weight. Through an exploration of the formation of the Thumba Project, I hope to explore some of these salient points about the relationship between science, development, and modernization in both the postcolonial and Cold War settings. |
