Founding Fathers, Never Founding Mothers: The Indian State, Science, and Politics of Recognition

EPOCH
5 hours ago
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Nilakshi Das │Institute of Historical Research

Founding Fathers

The historiography of Indian independence and nation-building enshrined a generation of male scientist-nationalists as the ‘founding fathers of science in modern India’. At its centre stood the technocrat and first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, for whom science was at the heart of economic self-reliance and political sovereignty. Supporting his political vision was a coterie of scientific allies who, like Nehru himself, were largely upper-caste and upper-class, raised in families of liberal thought, educated in the West, and who had returned to the motherland to lead the state’s institution-building project.

Three men in dark suits sit behind a long table at an international conference, microphones and name cards set in from of them, facing a large audience hall. — Closing session of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Geneva, 1955 featuring (left to right): Mr. Ilya S. Tchernychev, Dr Ralph J. Bunche, and Homi J. Bhabha. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Well-known names in this historiography include P.C. Ray, the father of Indian chemistry; Homi J. Bhabha, the founding father of India's nuclear programme; Vikram Sarabhai, the founding father of India's space programme; Jagadish Chandra Bose, celebrated as the father of plant sciences; and P.C. Mahalanobis, the father of Indian statistics, among others.

The very rhetoric of the 'father' mobilises a masculine semiotic, one in which the triad of state, science, and scientist emerged as a vocation at once patriotic and patriarchal. In this historiography these figures were simultaneously cast as saints, luminaries, teachers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs.

A notably distinct figure within this tradition was the physicist Meghnad Saha, who was born in rural Bengal and was educated primarily in India, in contrast to the Western-educated bhadralok (gentleman from upper-caste Hindu families) intelligentsia. Saha’s vision of Indian science was also distinct, rooted in industrialisation and planned economic development rather than the Gandhian philosophy of the village industry. He became an increasingly marginal figure within the post-independence scientific establishment, frequently disagreeing with Nehru, and at odds with Homi J. Bhabha and the chemist Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who was the founding director of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Nobel prize winner C.V. Raman who enjoyed the prime minister’s confidence.

Nonetheless, Saha's resistance to this establishment has itself been absorbed into a historiography that, however attentive to the dynamics of caste and class, remains centred on male protagonists. Largely absent from this historiography of science and nation-building in India are women, whose contributions have been marginalised, and the vast majority of whom were excluded from science and higher education altogether by their caste and class.

What about 'Founding Mothers'?

Against considerable resistance, in the later part of the nineteenth century, formal education became acceptable for a narrow stratum of women, when it was demonstrated that a woman could acquire the cultural refinements of modernity without jeopardising her place within the home. These women came from largely similar backgrounds of upper-class and caste, and from reformist households. For the majority of Indian women, education of any kind remained out of reach well into the mid-twentieth century. Education for women was typically meant to inculcate the bourgeois virtues of orderliness, and practical skills of literacy and accounting to run the household, within which science had little place.

The earliest examples of women who went to university include Chandramukhi Basu and Kadambini Ganguly, the first Indian women to receive Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Calcutta in 1883, with Kadambini Ganguly later undertaking medical training and becoming the first woman doctor to practice western medicine in India in 1886.

Genealogy, however, is only part of the answer. Several Indian women did overcome the gendered barriers in science. Recent historiography has started recovering their scientific contributions, and their experiences of marginalisation. These include stories of incredible persistence. The botanist Janaki Ammal earned a PhD from Michigan in 1931, the first Indian woman to hold a doctorate in science. Yet as a mixed-race, lower-caste woman moving between British and Indian scientific institutions, her career was fraught with challenges, struggles to belong, a lack of recognition, and omission from leadership positions.

The printed cover of a 1946 scientific monograph, Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, showing the title and the name of its two authors, C.D Darlington and E.K. Janaki Ammal. — Cover of *Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants* by C.D. Darlington and E.K. Janaki Ammal, 1946. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Kamala Sohonie became the first woman to be admitted to the Indian Institute of Science in 1933, but only after unrelenting protest after the institute’s director (C.V. Raman) initially refused her on the grounds that women were unfit for research. Sohonie later went on to earn a PhD from Cambridge in 1939. The chemist Asima Chatterjee, trained with P.C. Ray, the 'father of Indian chemistry', became the first woman to earn a Doctor of Science from an Indian university (the University of Calcutta) in 1944, in an academic culture largely indifferent to women. The meteorologist Anna Mani worked in Raman's own laboratory in the early 1940s and published several single-author papers, yet was never granted a doctorate. Likewise, the physicist Bibha Chowdhuri, who earned her PhD from Manchester in 1949, made significant contributions to cosmic-ray physics, only to go largely unrecognised. Although the scientific institutions they entered in Britain were more willing to admit them than their Indian equivalents, the gendered barriers in British institutions were no less entrenched, and consistently intersected with race.

This historiography proves that, though a minority, women were present at the forefront of scientific research. But to be a founding father was to build institutions, advise the state, and embody the nation's scientific ambitions in public, roles from which women were structurally excluded and marginalised. That the celebrated figures of Indian science were overwhelmingly male owes less to difference in merit and scientific industriousness than to a set of overlapping constraints, including the gendered division of labour, institutions that were slow to admit women, and an image of science as masculine, all rooted in how the nation imagined womanhood.

Nationalism and Womanhood

Feminist and postcolonial critique has reframed the question of women’s underrepresentation in science, moving from their exclusion from the obvious institutional sites of scientific practice to the wider cultural order of Indian society in which the field of science has been complicit in reproducing gender hierarchies. Anticolonial nationalism in India developed through diverse political imaginings and organised movements, from militant uprisings that followed the Revolt of 1857 to the Gandhian non-violent resistance and civil disobedience of the early twentieth century. Indian nationalism and nationhood have been analysed by historians and political theorists through many framings. A representative view, associated most closely with Partha Chatterjee, is that the hegemonic strand of nationalist thought emerged from the Western-educated bourgeoisie for whom education and science were central to the making of the modern nation. The nationalist elites simultaneously sought to revive Indian culture and spirituality, a responsibility which was primarily assigned to women.

This gendered division organised both the imagery of the nation and the practice of science. While the popular imaginaries of science, and the scientist, rested on a masculine semiotic, Indian nationalism was grounded in a feminine one, in which the nation itself came to be embodied as a woman, a mother, known as Bharat Mata (Mother India). Within this revivalist strand of nationalist ideology, women occupied an overdetermined role as a mother that was central to women’s identities, a position shaped by religion which was integral to the patriarchal structuring of society.

The ‘Mother India’ rhetoric became the emblem of the state’s political project, most powerfully in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, the hymn from his 1882 novel Anandamath that personified the nation as a mother goddess and became the anthem of the Swadeshi movement. Yet, this feminine icon remained tied to a patriarchal narrative framed by elite, upper-caste men that left women, lower-caste groups, and minorities behind.

Gandhi and Nehru employed essentialised notions of femininity. In Gandhian nationalism, women were considered morally superior to men, embodying compassion and non-violent resistance. However, despite writing in favour of legal and social equality between the sexes, Gandhi’s work did not change or challenge normative gender roles. It was at the Second Gujarat Educational Conference in October 1917 that Gandhi declared, ‘woman's right to rule the home' while ‘man is master outside it’. In Gandhi’s view, men and women might be equal in life, but their functions in society differed. Women thus remained subordinate, without agency, authority or autonomy.

A photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi seated together in a close conversation at a political meeting, with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister seated to the left of the frame. — Jawaharlal Nehru with Mahatma Gandhi at the All India Congress meeting, Mumbai, July 6, 1946. On the left is Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Nehru, regarded as the greatest champion of the ‘scientific temper’ (or the spirit of scientific inquiry), was more ambivalent when it came to women. In The Discovery of India (1946), Nehru wrote of the freedom struggle:

Our women came to the front and took charge of the struggle… there was an avalanche of them, which took not only the British Government but their own menfolk by surprise...It was not only that display of courage and daring, but what was even more surprising was the organizational power they showed.

He records a nationalist resolution paying homage to the women who ‘forsook the shelter of their homes’ to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder with their menfolk in the front line of Indian national army’. Women were manifestly capable of and present in mass public activism beside men. Their visibility in the nationalist movement, however, did not translate into visibility in science. These accounts show why, after decades of women’s participation in science in India, the popular imaginaries of science, and the scientist, remain deeply imbricated in masculinist ideologies.

A water-colour painting of a female figure in a saffron saree with four arms, standing barefoot on a pale green ground and a faint halo behind her head. On each arm she is holding a sheaf of rice, a white cloth, a book and a string of beads. — *Bharat Mata* (Mother India), a painting by Abanindranath Tagore, 1905. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Oral Hiistories and Women in Science

Briefly reflecting on the oral history interviews I conducted for my doctoral research with four women scientists who took STEM degrees in Britain between 1950 and 2000, I situate their gendered experiences within the longer nationalist history in which science was held to be largely incompatible with women’s normative roles in the family and society. Oral history, as both a methodological and analytical framework, allowed me to collect narratives of childhood, experiences of academic mobility, scientific training in the post-war British university, and considerations of return. These accounts revealed striking differences between men’s and women’s scientific trajectories.

Whereas several male interviewees returned to India and were recruited into the expanding institutions of postcolonial scientific institutions, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, and the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, the women in the study were rarely invited to take on similar roles immediately upon completing their degrees. Relatedly, gender did not feature in men’s narratives at all. It was not a category through which they understood their careers, because the postcolonial scientific infrastructure had positioned them as its natural inheritors. The one exception was Ibrahim, who spoke about misogyny in science and noted the case of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, whose discovery of the first radio pulsars in 1967 earned the 1974 Nobel prize in Physics, awarded to her supervisor and colleague, not to her.

Women’s accounts, in contrast, revealed how they navigated scientific aspirations that frequently intersected with the expectations of return imposed by the family, and how they negotiated institutional hierarchies structured by both race and gender in the post-war British university. All four women were the first in their families to break gendered norms and pursue academic mobility overseas, and all returned to build long careers teaching in Indian higher education. It is worth noting that most of the women I interviewed were primarily from upper-class and upper-caste backgrounds of bureaucrats and academics. The relative absence of caste as a category of self-identification emerged because, unlike gender, upper caste positionings conferred access to higher education overseas and was reproduced through assertions of merit and cultural capital.

Ajit completed a PhD in mathematics at Cambridge in 1969 and taught at Hindu College, Delhi; Gaiti earned a doctorate in molecular biology, also at Cambridge, in 1980 and joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai; Meenaxi and Geetha each read for a DPhil in mathematics at Oxford, finishing in 1992 and 1993, before returning to teach at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati and St Stephen’s College, Delhi respectively. This could be attributed to views of teaching as a feminised profession, culturally and socially permissible, and in alignment with Indian middle-class ideals of morality and virtue. However, even within educational institutions itself, their narratives point towards the structural asymmetries in women’s scientific careers.

Commenting on the composition of mathematics at Delhi University, Geetha observed that women formed more than half of all undergraduates studying the subject, 'but you look at departments, look at how many are professors. It starts trickling down’. She identified a self-reproducing condition in which the scarcity of senior women itself deterred those who might follow, since 'women students really need to see a lot of women doing maths and managing to have a life’.

Geetha’s narrative also showed how the normative gendered expectations of motherhood shaped the conditions of professional participation. When deciding whether to leave her daughter behind to attend a conference, she notes ‘I still remember a colleague of mine saying that you should never feel guilty as a woman. But you do feel guilty. I don't think my husband had any sense of that kind of guilt when he had to travel for work’. Gaiti also discussed experiences of marginalisation in the Indian scientific establishment. She shared: ‘as a woman, I mean, for sure, there is a tendency in the Indian system to just get ignored’. She found meaning in her students’ success: 'if your students do well, you have the satisfaction of all of that’. However, the labour she counted as meaningful, (i.e. mentorship and the making of the next generation) is the least visible in the currency of scientific prestige in comparison to accolades like grants, prizes, and citations, which fell disproportionately to men.

Despite their structural exclusion, these women forged meaningful participation in science, exercising agency through knowledge making, teaching, and expanding the possibilities of scientific careers for others. To recognise this is to reimagine the history of nationalist and postcolonial science in India beyond a male-centred historiography, one in which women did science even as they were denied the privileges of recognition, prestige, and power bestowed upon its founding fathers. Such recognition could materialise through statues, memorials, or collective biographies. Its function is both commemorative and material, securing women a place in the historical record while creating a more accessible industry for the next generation.