By Rose Sebastian.
The first state-run science museum to come up in independent India was the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum, Kolkata (1959). It was followed by the establishment of the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Bangalore (1962) and a flurry of other science museums in various cities.
All these institutions, which were initially under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), were later brought under the purview of the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM) in 1978 to standardize and coordinate their content and outreach programmes.
The unique exigencies of nation-building in postcolonial India shaped the form and function of these institutions, to achieve economic and social progress through techno-scientific modernity, and establish India as a significant presence in the postwar global politics. Yet another aim was to make science accessible and understandable to the common man, rather than confined to distant laboratories and high-end institutions.
This piece enquires into how national science policy from the Nehruvian era continues to inform the museum discourse on science in postindependence India through a case study of the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Bangalore.
Read the full article: Science as the raison d’etat: Nehruvian scientism and the Indian science museum.
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Rose Sebastian is the Bajaj Postdoctoral Fellow (2025) at Harvard’s Mittal Institute of South Asia Studies. Her longtime research interest in cultural studies, museum studies, and contemporary India has branched off to her current postdoctoral project on how the nation and its technoscientific modernity is imagined and narrativized in the science museums of post-independence India.