From the Los Angeles Review of Books, August 5:
Dwaipayan Banerjee’s new book investigates India’s role in the history of 20th-century tech development, and what caused it always to seem a step behind the West.
Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution by Dwaipayan Banerjee. Princeton University Press, 2026. 296 pages.
IN THE 1970S, my father was among thousands of science and engineering graduates who left India for the West. The United States and Britain had flung open their doors to Asian immigrants. Leaving India made sense for the superfluously educated, whom India was ambitious enough to train even while lacking the infrastructure to employ them. The West, however, wasn’t always what they had hoped for. Like my dad, many ended up running small businesses or finding quiet jobs in research or manufacturing, hitting glass ceilings if they tried to move any higher. But as their numbers grew and discrimination softened, Indian-born engineers would eventually take over the biggest technology firms in the world, from Google (Sundar Pichai) to Microsoft (Satya Nadella) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). In Fremont, the closest major East Bay city to California’s Silicon Valley, nearly a third of residents are Indian Americans.
Their success leaves us to ask why India never built a Silicon Valley of its own.
It is more of a puzzle than it seems. While it’s true that India is best known for backend IT services, it lags so far behind China and the United States in scientific research that it’s scarcely mentioned in the same breath anymore. For decades, however, the outcome of the global technological arms race was far from certain. For a while, India was a contender. After wresting independence from the British in 1947 (when my father was two years old), Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru bet big on science and technology, nurturing what he termed India’s “scientific temper,” a quality that in late antiquity had led its thinkers to discover “the zero,” a foundational concept in modern mathematics. India started its own space program as early as 1962. It launched its first satellite in 1975. It established the Indian Institutes of Technology to rival the technical colleges of the West.
“In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, policymakers across the Global South adopted these radical economic ideas,” writes MIT anthropologist Dwaipayan Banerjee in his new book Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution, which traces the nation’s early computing successes and failures. For some Asian nations, these bets paid off. South Korea and Taiwan bolstered their manufacturing bases and offered incentives to companies that carried out innovative research. Today, the two countries together are the world’s largest net exporters of computer chips. In India, the ingredients were present, but somehow the bread didn’t rise. India retreated into low-cost outsourcing and offshoring services, becoming more of a servant than a competitor to Silicon Valley. Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, India imports far more computer chips than it makes.
“This was not the future that Indian policymakers hoped for,” Banerjee observes. The postindependence dream had been to harness high technology to repair the damage of colonial underdevelopment, perhaps even to leapfrog the nations that had once ruled the country. As the historian S. Irfan Habib has noted, “for Nehru, the solution to India’s problems lay in a combination of socialism and science, of technology and heavy industrialisation.” Instead, notes Banerjee, “India provides the raw labor that drives Global North research and manufacturing.”
Indeed, he adds, American computing dominance is premised on underdevelopment elsewhere. If it had not depressed the technological ascent of countries like India and absorbed their engineering talent, the United States would never have become the computing power it is now.
This is more than a story of bad decisions and lost opportunities. For Banerjee, it’s a cautionary tale about the enduring effects of empire: the long psychological reach of providing cheap labor and raw materials for two centuries while the colonizers reaped the real profits. In the 18th century, India had been one of the world’s biggest exporters of fine cotton textiles. By the early 19th century, its own cotton was being processed at an industrial scale by English textile mills, making Britain unimaginably rich while India languished.
“Computing has become the new cotton,” he argues.
Banerjee’s case study comes by way of a single machine: the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Automatic Calculator. Developed in Bombay in the 1950s, it was India’s first homegrown digital computer. Having witnessed how foreign powers kept India industrially stagnant by rationing access to technology, scientists and engineers at TIFR resolved to build a device sans foreign parts or input. In this way, they hoped to show that they could be self-reliant, in true Gandhian style.
The internationally celebrated physicist Homi J. Bhabha, who was the founding director of TIFR and the driving force behind India’s nuclear program, recognized that Indian science would be lost in a backwater without fast computers. Paper and pencil were no longer enough to get Nobel Prize–winning research done. The future lay in processing power. The ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania (the first general-purpose electronic computer, announced in 1946), mathematician John von Neumann’s IAS machine at Princeton (operational by 1952), and the IBM 701 (the company’s first commercial digital electronic computer, introduced in 1952) were turning the United States into the center of the scientific world.
Bhabha became a power broker, furiously working to ensure that scientists at TIFR had the equipment they needed. Leveraging his personal contacts and considerable charisma, he earned both the government’s backing and the support of left-leaning Western researchers who felt that formerly colonized countries had been deliberately overshadowed by “a kind of apartheid in global scientific expertise,” Banerjee writes. Although India was officially nonaligned, the Cold War played out behind the scenes....
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