The Technological Indian takes its starting point in addressing a historical puzzle. How is it possible that in the late nineteenth century, in the context of British colonialism, Indians were considered “not a mechanical race” (p. 2, based on a quote by a former governor of Bombay), when today it has become so common, almost stereotypical, for young middle-class Indians to seek engineering careers? “How did ‘Indian’ and ‘technological’ go from being mutually exclusive to being practically synonymous for the Indian middle-class?” (3). Author Ross Bassett is uniquely qualified to explore this question. He received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering before becoming a historian (MA from Cornell, PhD from Princeton). He is now a professor at the History Department at North Carolina State University, where he also serves as director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program, which encourages engineering students to simultaneously pursue a degree in humanities or social sciences.

Bassett’s monograph is based on a database of approximately 850 Indian engineering graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the 1880s to the 2000s, a database he built from MIT commencement programs. Using a wide variety of additional sources, such as government archives, business and personal records, and oral histories, Bassett traces these graduates’ lives and careers across more than 120 years. Indeed, it is a great strength of the book that the author so expertly contextualizes the individual biographies in the wider social and political history of both India and the United States, giving a panoramic view of their lives and experiences.

This prosopographic research design allows Bassett to make a series of significant contributions to the literature. First, focusing on Indians coming to the United States elevates his study to a transnational level, and readers learn a lot about U.S.-Indian relations during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of this group of expats. Second, Bassett contributes to a line of research into understanding the global connections of the Indian nationalist movement, similar to the monographs by Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism and Age of Entanglement.^{Footnote 1} Bassett highlights that Indian Independence activists were open to international networks of support and actively encouraged engineering education outside India as a stepping-stone to India’s industrial development. Even several of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest associates went to MIT, despite the fact that Gandhi is often portrayed as categorically opposing modern technology—a premise that, based on Bassett’s research, may require further scrutiny.

Third, most research on Indian technological history foregrounds the impact of the state. Bassett’s work extends this framework by highlighting a series of relevant non-state actors as well as emphasizing explicitly the role of the formally independent Indian princely states, in particular the small state of Bhavnagar. Indeed, the dynamic tensions between the state’s agenda for technological development and activities outside the state are one of the recurrent themes of the book. Fourth, the book is one of the few scholarly contributions analyzing pre- and post-Independence India together and showing continuities across the major political turning points of the twentieth century up to the most contemporary period.

Interestingly, Bassett explains the attraction of MIT through the lens of India’s awakening and strengthening nationalist agenda. He argues that going to MIT was “a rebellion against the British system” (11), and much of the pre-Independence story focuses on the theme of anticolonial nationalism. This argument does pose the question of how unique MIT was and what role the United States, in comparison to other countries such as Germany or Japan, played for nationalistic Indians. Within the United States, the question of whether the experience of MIT students was different from that of Indian students at other educational institutions remains open. Finally, it is worth noting that the book is aptly titled The Technological Indian and indeed focuses strongly on this group of Indians at MIT and after graduating, while questions of higher education in the United States are only of secondary interest. Bassett hints at the isomorphic tendencies in the educational system when stressing that MIT served as a model for the first Indian Institute of Technology but does not engage in educational research in greater detail.

This is a future research agenda rather than a critique of the choices the author made. The book is an innovative, insightful, and well-written scholarly contribution. Business historians will be particularly interested in the frequent references to companies founded by the MIT graduates and the links between MIT and large Indian business families, notably the Tata dynasty. Undoubtedly, the author has prepared the ground for a series of new research questions in technological and global history, while simultaneously making a timely contribution to current political debates about technology transfers between highly industrialized and less developed countries.