Engineer, Economist, Nationalist: The Many Lives Of Bharat Ratna M. Visvesvaraya

Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962). Aparajith Ramnath. Penguin Random House India. Pages: 708. Price: Rs 1299.

India’s story, from ancient to modern times, is filled with personalities whose ideas, methods, and works contributed to the country’s intellectual, political, and social history and led them to occupy an enduring place in Indian public memory. But there are also icons whose life and career remain underexamined, less known, and much less celebrated.

This story is about the man who shaped India’s engineering imagination, both literally and figuratively, not only by building engineering marvels across undivided India but also by donning the hat of an economist, an educationist, and a constitutionalist to make significant contributions to India’s story of development and planning. This is the story of an archetypal engineer-statesman, Bharat Ratna Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, whose life and career needed a sustained inquiry in the form of a biography — and so we have Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) by Aparajith Ramnath.

Ramnath’s biography is a historical narration of the many lives that Visvesvaraya embodied. Divided into twenty-three chapters under three parts, the book is a deeply researched and detailed account of a life and career that transcended engineering and encompassed various professional and advisory roles underscoring his untiring efforts dedicated to nation-building.

The author carefully chronicles Visvesvaraya’s illustrious life in a lucid, expository, non-reverential, and critical manner. At the same time, he maintains a fine balance between narration and historical context while carrying out a detailed examination of Visvesvaraya’s entire life with a more critical assessment of his role in Indian history.

In the Introduction, Ramnath offers to present Visvesvaraya’s story as “also the story of irrigation in the subcontinent; of princely India in a time of great flux; of technology and industrialization in an incipient nation; of the conundrum of what it meant to be a scientific Indian”. (pp. xxv–xxvi)

Many Lives within One Life

M. Visvesvaraya did not have a normal childhood. He lost his father when he was in his mid-teens and his family suffered from subsequent poverty. His uncle lent his support and got him enrolled in the High School in Bangalore. But his life as a student was no bed of roses. Visvesvaraya, as the author writes,

From this humble beginning, he would go on to become a civil engineer in the colonial government and subsequently assume various other responsibilities. Visvesvaraya’s later insistence on discipline, order, and duty was shaped by his experiences in his formative years.

A career spanning more than seven decades is a feat only a few achieve, and Visvesvaraya is one of them. His career defied professional silos, blending technical expertise with administrative foresight and political imagination. He started as a civil engineer but did not limit himself to civil engineering; rather, he went on to assume various other roles in different parts of the country.

The author highlights the technocratic and institutional imagination of Visvesvaraya while remaining careful to point out lacunae identified by Visvesvaraya’s critics, without supplanting them with his own analyses.

Even as a young engineer, Visvesvaraya was deeply enthusiastic about discussions on industrialisation and technical education but was cautious that putting his views on such subjects would have been construed as publicly criticising the colonial government. The author attributes this cautiousness to Visvesvaraya’s “strong sense of bureaucratic loyalty”, which lasted only till his stint under the colonial government. (p. 59)

Despite such cautiousness and earning respect as an engineer of senior repute in the colonial set-up, he nonetheless had to face racial discrimination, which was not uncommon during British rule.

In 1906, during his career stint in the Bombay Presidency, he was chosen to be awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind (Emperor of India) medal, an honour instituted in 1900 by order of Queen Victoria and conferred on “any person without distinction of race, occupation, position, or sex,…who shall have distinguished himself (or herself) by important and useful service in the advancement of the public interest in India”.

Visvesvaraya, however, was more disappointed than elated because he was being awarded a Second-Class award that came with a silver medal. Sensitive to ideas of discrimination or distinctions, he himself wrote: “My own view is that it would be most satisfactory if, without causing displeasure, the medal would be cancelled.” (pp. 117–118)

Visvesvaraya’s visits to different countries led him to draw comparative observations which shaped his understanding of education, industry, planning, and development. During the 1890s, he spent some time in Japan, a nation that became a hallmark of modernity blended with civilisational continuity. Japan left a lasting impression on him, which the author terms Visvesvaraya’s “lifelong love affair with Japan.”

At the heart of this love affair was the idea of the education system and its connection with industries. “He was impressed by their Code of Education, which aimed for near universal instruction at the lower levels, focused on economically useful learning, and endeavoured to promote national pride,” observes Ramnath. (p. 61) Visvesvaraya, in his memoirs, noted that “children were kept most cheerful and instructed in loyalty, patriotism, behaviour, morals and human relations.”

He believed that India needed a multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral approach to national development and that education would serve as the first step. In his own work, Reconstructing India, he made a bold statement:

His innate openness to reforms gave him the opportunity to take decisive steps in all the positions he held. As the author writes in Chapter 11, “From Universal Education to University,” “his ideal was a single, common education system accessible to all students irrespective of their background.” He was the proponent of compulsory education, women’s education, technical and industrial education, and diversification of technical education in India.

During his dewanship, on 29 June 1916, a Bill for the creation of a university was tabled in the Mysore Legislative Council. Speaking in the assembly on the necessity of education and a university, he made a pertinent statement:

As the author points out in various parts of the book, Visvesvaraya was articulate on his views on economic development. Rapid industrialisation was, for him, a means to that end. He was of the view that Indian planning should avoid communist tendencies and its basic policy should be to encourage collective effort without interfering with individual initiatives.

He published a book titled Planning Economy for India in 1934, which was probably the “first attempt by an Indian to draw up a nationwide plan.” (p. 434) He suggested economic planning with institutional arrangements and a ten-year plan for the country as a whole. “The aim of Visvesvaraya’s prototype plan was to double the income of the country within ten years. Targets were set under various heads — industries, agriculture, public works and infrastructure, commerce, finance/banking, combating unemployment, and education/training,” writes the author. (p. 436)

Visvesvaraya, in his seventies, became a more direct critic of the colonial setup. He stressed that India must attain political autonomy, arguing that:

Visvesvaraya not only advocated for heavy industries but also for rural industries and the need for self-government in villages. It is on this point that he was at loggerheads with Mahatma Gandhi, and both exchanged views.

Visvesvaraya favoured both heavy industries and village industries, but Gandhi was willing to concede only a temporary role to large-scale industries since they had the potential to displace human labour. Visvesvaraya believed that “the development of heavy and cottage industries must go on pari passu if the country is to prosper economically and be self-sufficient. Advanced countries have established a close relationship between the two…” (p. 440) However, both agreed on the need for rural industrialisation; the fundamental difference was that Visvesvaraya saw rural industries not as an end in themselves but as a stepping stone to further mechanisation.

Visvesvaraya’s idea of planning and development for the overall objective of reconstructing India was gaining much traction but also invited criticisms. The author succinctly deals with various criticisms of Visvesvaraya’s conception of planning from the economist D.R. Gadgil and the Marxist critic G.D. Parikh.

Parikh described Visvesvaraya’s vision as “typically fascist,” mainly because Visvesvaraya stressed the need for a citizen army and argued: “Every man capable of wielding arms should be trained in the modern methods of warfare as is done in Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan.” Parikh’s criticisms come as no surprise since Visvesvaraya’s idea of a nation with national development principles and militarism stood in tension with the Marxist conception of a communist state.

Visvesvaraya believed that economic development and the nation’s ability to defend itself go hand in hand. This is why he wrote: “The safety of individual communities and groups, their culture and civilization are often jeopardized or even destroyed, if they are not trained for self-defence. No nation can regard itself as safe that is not prepared to defend itself.”

Visvesvaraya, a Nationalist

Visvesvaraya has not been justly admired for his role in the freedom movement. His name must be reinscribed alongside other nationalist leaders of the movement.

In 1920, in Reconstructing India, he was hopeful that India would achieve dominion status in the near future. A couple of years later, he was voted chairman of the Bombay conference, or the Malaviya conference, and chaired a meeting of the most influential political leaders of the time. A resolution was passed condemning the colonial government’s use of sedition laws to carry out wholesale arrests and imprisonments of nationalists.

It was also proposed to discuss the demand for Swaraj or full responsible government at a Round Table Conference between the Government and popular representatives, but only if the political detainees were released. A twenty-strong committee was set up to liaise and organise the round table conference, and Visvesvaraya was again made chairman of the committee with M.R. Jayakar and M.A. Jinnah as its secretaries. Although the desired result could not be achieved, Visvesvaraya continued to play an important role in India’s quest for Swaraj or dominion status.

He drafted a short document titled “Dominion Status for India,” wherein he wrote:

The draft scheme was divided into three sections: the first dealt with the institutional framework that needed to be created; the second emphasised the urgent need to implement dominion status; and the third stressed the need for “national organisation to develop a disciplined combination and effort among the people to prepare for self-government and nationhood.” (p. 341)

He did not mince his words when he boldly stated: “The main obstacle…to Indian freedom is British vested interests.” Perhaps his interaction with other prominent nationalist leaders prompted him to make such bold statements, which his contemporaries may not have anticipated a decade or two earlier.

For Visvesvaraya, who dedicated his life to nation-building, it was impossible to turn his eyes from the prevailing vexatious situation in India. After World War I, he explained why India was not in the same position as other countries and why it needed reconstruction:

For Visvesvaraya, reconstruction was not a one-time measure. India was in need of gradual and impact-driven national reconstruction, which seemed impossible without Swaraj or dominion status, as the British had vested interests in ruling India and draining resources out of it. The author succinctly describes Visvesvaraya’s idea of reconstruction:

Visvesvaraya, in all his roles, created his own benchmarks to be lived up to. In his attempt to take steps for nation-building, he addressed questions and challenges as organically as possible. Building on this thought and his concerns for a national life that should not be devoid of progress and development, he wrote in his memoir: “My one aim, therefore, was to plan, promote and encourage developments chiefly in education, industries, commerce, and public works to enable the people to work well, earn well, and live well.”

Final Take

The book reflects the author’s commitment to presenting the life of M. Visvesvaraya with a critical assessment. Ramnath offers a panoramic view of Visvesvaraya’s life without truncating the critics’ views of him. The book is a remarkable work of formidable research and analysis, presented with an engaging narrative style.

However, in the first part of the book, which primarily deals with his career as an engineer, some sections are heavily engulfed in scientific and physical details of the projects Visvesvaraya undertook. Although this gives historical context, readers without a background in science or engineering are more likely to skip those sections.

The book would also have benefited from a timeline of Visvesvaraya’s life, placed either at the very beginning or at the end of the epilogue. That said, it is a promising read for all those interested in a panoramic view of the national icon.