In 1881 Sir Richard Temple, the former governor of Bombay, declared, “the Hindus are not a mechanical race” (p. 2). Unwilling to admit this as fated, the headmaster of Poona High School, M. M. Kunte, exhorted his audience three years later to learn the “art of mechanization” if they wished to see their country prosper (p. 1). At the time, the technological ability of Indians was suspect. Today—with India a global hub for information technology and producing thousands of engineers annually—these concerns are a faded memory. “How did ‘Indian’ and ‘technological’ go from being mutually exclusive to being practically synonymous for the Indian middle class?” (p. 3). This is the question that animates Bassett's volume.

Tracking the “technological imaginations” of middle-class Indians over more than a century, the author argues that from the latter decades of the 1800s, Indians of means and education envisioned a technologically advanced India—oriented toward an ascendant United States of America and inspired in particular by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (p. 4). MIT was not simply the premier destination for technical education abroad; more significantly, it shaped the very technological conceptions of this influential class.

Between its founding in 1861 and 2000, MIT granted degrees to approximately 1,300 Indians. Keshav Bhat from the Poona was the first, in 1882. His name acquired currency in Bombay Presidency, which is similar to a state within the United States—British India was divided into different presidencies—because he represented what the western Indian nationalist newspapers Mahratta and Kesari had advocated: technical education for Indians, preferably in America, and ideally at MIT. This was, according to Bassett, the beginning of an “Indian Discovery of America”—a decidedly male, middle-class discovery (p. 13). In the early twentieth century, as swadeshi (self-sufficiency) became the anticolonial clarion call in India and as America asserted its global technological primacy, Indians increasingly looked to the United States for industrial education. They included J. N. Tata (of the eponymous industrial house) and the editors of Calcutta-based English-language journal Modern Review. MIT returnees such as Ishwar Das Varshnei helped lead nationalist industrial efforts such as Paisa Fund Glass Works, one of India's first modern glassworks, financed through what would today be called crowdfunding. Bassett illustrates how, over the following decades, the careers of young men who had made their way to MIT intersected with the high politics of India in surprising ways. For example, Mohandas Gandhi—his aversion to technological modernity notwithstanding—was associated with and knew a few of them. Being a Gandhian and training at MIT were not wholly incompatible.

During World War II, the pathways leading students from India to America changed from being sporadic and informally facilitated to being steady and institutionally enabled. The colonial government, belatedly encouraging advanced training for local engineers, even instituted a program to fund the technical education of hundreds on foreign shores. While most Indians looking for an overseas education had until now traveled to England, from 1948 America became the top draw. Among those applying to pursue scientific training in America, Bassett asserts, no institution matched the pull of MIT. In the years following decolonization in 1947, several MIT graduates would return to occupy positions in the vaunted scientific enterprises of independent India. But in equal measure, the careers of those frustrated by these Nehruvian adventures signal the failures of that statist vision. During these early decades of independent India, MIT became attractive to a new class: the scions of business elites, comprising individuals such as Aditya Birla who would inherit their family businesses and expand them despite the stifling business environment of Indira Gandhi's “license-permit raj.” With the establishment of Tata Consultancy Services in 1968, three MIT graduates had also sparked the creation of an information technology industry in India.

There were even repeated calls to form an “Indian MIT”—by Kesari in the late nineteenth century, by the prominent Indian engineer M. Visvesvaraya in the early twentieth, by the colonial government in 1945 (leading eventually to the first Indian Institute of Technology, at Kharagpur), and by a leading industrialist in independent India, G. D. Birla (whose Birla Institute of Technology and Science at Pilani took inspiration from MIT). The Indian government in the early 1960s was also keen that the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur be designed by MIT, eventually settling for it to be managed by a consortium of American universities.

This engaging book links the biographies of Indians at MIT with the social contexts that produced them and the national politics they interacted with. It employs both a novel archive (that of Indians at MIT) and a fresh lens (the pull of American technological advance on Indians from the late nineteenth century). Nonetheless, some scholars might wonder whether the role accorded to this Cambridge institution is overblown. The author's thesis, which appears quite credible with regard to American science at large, can seem strained by the need to prove it through MIT alone.