Asif Siddiqi, Fordham University
Drexel University, History and Politics Colloquium
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Location: Drexel University -- Disque Hall 109, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Thumba: a remote fishing village in the southern Indian state of Kerala which became the nexus of a massive international program to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere in the 1960s and 1970s. The “birth” of the Indian space program was grounded at Thumba: from here, on November 21, 1963, Indian engineers launched an American sounding rocket with a French payload using Soviet ground equipment. This striking convergence of the scientific imperatives of four different nations at the high point of the Cold War was hardly reported at the time, What did this mean for India—newly independent, non-aligned, and self-avowedly “postcolonial”—to produce science in a context where science itself was laden with intractable ideological weight? Through an exploration of the formation of the Thumba Project, we will explore some of these salient points about the relationship between science, development, and modernization in both the postcolonial and Cold War settings.