Vikram Sarabhai
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A brief biography
Amrita Shah, August 11, 2019: The Times of India
From: Amrita Shah, August 11, 2019: The Times of India
On August 12, 1919, a baby boy was born in the home of Ahmedabad’s leading textile mill-owner; his siblings looked at him and declared he had big ears, “just like Gandhiji,” which they wanted to fold like betel leaves. The baby was Vikram Sarabhai. Monday marks the birth centenary of this remarkable figure, even as Chandrayaan 2, steadily surging towards the moon shines a light on the Indian space programme which he founded.
Vikram’s was a charmed life. Born in the lap of luxury, he went to an esoteric experimental school set up by his parents equipped with a workshop to nurture his scientific inclinations. At 18, he went to Cambridge with a recommendation from family friend Rabindranath Tagore. When World War Two intervened, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru to continue his research under Nobel Laureate C V Raman. Here he was thrown into the company of a brilliant young scientist Homi Bhabha similarly stranded by the War and met classical dancer Mrinalini Swaminathan with whom he fell in love. “Science is so similar to art...both spiritually aware of the indivisible wholeness of the cosmos...Vikram as a scientist and I as a dancer shared a ‘togetherness’ that was hard to define,” Mrinalini would write.
When American physicist and Nobel Laureate Robert Millikan was in India to acquire data for his world survey of cosmic ray intensity, Vikram helped with his balloon experiments whetting his own interest in exploring cosmic rays and properties of the Upper Atmosphere. A decade and a half later, when scientists would see satellites as a viable tool to study space, Nehru and Bhabha would support the setting up of an Indian National Committee for Space Research with him as chairman.
This charmed life had its dark side. In his childhood, Vikram’s aunt Anasuya, who had formed a labour union, brought home stories of the daily struggles of textile mill-workers. The freedom movement came knocking, his mother and sister were jailed which made his younger sister Gita at least, “desperately miserable.” A few years later Vikram’s brother died from a sudden illness. It is likely that these experiences instilled in him a strong social conscience manifested in his determination to use sophisticated technology, particularly the space programme to improve the lives of India’s poor. Perhaps they also engendered in him an acute awareness of life’s transience which is one way to explain his prolific parallel career as a builder of institutions such as The Indian Institute of Management (IIM-A), the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts, and the National Institute of Design. He also ran successful businesses, was a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and piloted the Atomic Energy Commission at a crucial stage after Bhabha’s death.
But even while he engaged with multiple fields, Vikram remained at heart a scientist. Not just the practise of science or a particular area of research but the business of being a scientist and thinking like one shaped his approach. “A person who has imbibed the ways of science injects into a situation a new way of looking at it,” he said.
A ‘new way of looking’ and all that went with it — innovation, enterprise and improvisation — were hallmarks of Vikram’s modus operandi. The early days of the space programme, for instance, unfolded in the former fishing village of Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram, a stretch of wilderness with no infrastructure, cycles and rusty buses and an office in an old church building without even a roof to keep pigeons out. In these primitive conditions and with an absence of indigenous precedents, a team of young Indian scientists created bits of technology, propellants, nose cones and payloads from scratch.
Vikram’s methods were tough, he could create competition on the one hand (one team called its propellant ‘Mrinal’ after his wife to curry favour), and encourage staffers to push with the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ on the other. “We were in the air all the time, thinking big,” says Vasant Gowarikar, who was working on explosives. “The insistence on indigenization all the time was a great motivation.” In November 1963, the first blastoff took place and Vikram sent home a telegram: “Gee whiz wonderful rocket shot.”
Vikram died unexpectedly in his sleep on December 30, 1971 at the age of 52. By this time, the space programme had swelled to a staff of thousands and he had worked out a blueprint for its future course both technologically and with applications in agriculture, forestry, oceanography, geology and cartography. In a brief life span, Vikram had contributed enormously to the shaping of modern India and he had done it with verve. Hobnobbing with the world’s most distinguished one day, whistling and flip-flopping in his chappals up the steps of his laboratory the next and always carrying his own briefcase to avoid getting into ‘feudal habits’.
He was also, to use a word rarely applied to Indian achievers, a ‘dreamer’. His daughter Mallika recalls how he was often lost in a reverie chin on his hand, like “Rodin’s Thinker” ruminating, one presumes, on ideas like using a borrowed American satellite to transmit educational content to 2,400 villages in India’s backward regions or a spectacular scheme of building agricultural complexes serviced by atomic power and desalinated sea water. Fifty years after his death those dreams are taking us to the moon.
Shah is the author of Vikram Sarabhai—A Life (2007)
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Amrita Shah, August 27, 2023: The Times of India
Vikram Sarabhai, founder of the Indian space programme, was born in 1919 in a family of textile barons. Among the world’s wealthiest industrialists, the Sarabhais were unusually political: they were close to Gandhi and allied themselves firmly with the anti-colonial struggle. Surrounded by luxury, spoilt for choice and yet aware of his family legacy of political ac tivism, Vikram chose the path of science.
In an era marked by the excitement of new discoveries regarding the atom, Vikram became a physicist. Unlike others who studied cosmic rays for the atomic particles thrown up by them, he came to be interested in cosmic rays as a tool to study outer space. His interest tied in with an emerging trend. In 1961-62, against a background of a global push in space research by the International Council of Scientific Unions, the Department of Atomic Energy (supported by prime minister Nehru and DAE secretary Homi Bhabha) initiated space research in India and set up a sounding rocket programme under Vikram’s leadership.
The idea of a poor and newly independent country like India entering a field requiring technology and investment such as space research seemed unimaginably audacious. And the programme was equally so, with Vikram encouraging bright, young scientists and engineers such as Vasant Gowarikar and Abdul Kalam (among many) to join and setting them challenging tasks with threadbare resources on the beaches of Thumba, a fishing village in Kerala. Henri Cartier Bresson captured the slapdash energy of the enterprise in evocative black and white photographs, including an iconic one of two scientists casually transporting a nose cone on a bicycle.
The cheekiness was counterbalanced by a highly evolved vision. In 1963, when the Soviets had just about launched the world’s first synchronous satellite, Vikram was already thinking of using satellites for communications. He envisaged applications for space in agriculture, forestry, oceanography, mineral prospecting and cartography. And in a 1966 paper on ‘Space Activity for Developing Countries’, he hoped that space activity would stimulate growth in electronics and cybernetics and create a new culture of collaboration between countries and specialisations.
Vikram’s dream was to link technology with development, serving the needs of the masses while nurturing a highly sophisticated work culture and scientific abilities. One of his favourite phrases was ‘leapfrog ging’ which referred to his faith in the power of technology to enable developing countries to circumvent the long processes followed by the west. His ideas created a ‘big sensation internationally’, according to Japanese space scientist Hideo Itokawa, and birthed ambitious schemes such as the world’s first experiment in direct broadcasting by satellite using an American ATS-6 on loan to transmit locally produced content to 2,400 backward Indian villages.
Vikram Sarabhai died young, at the age of 52 in December 1971. He was succeeded by brilliant and capable leaders, but he also left behind a vision which continued to shape the programme long after his death.
Now that the talented and spirited people of the Indian Space Research Organisation have scaled a new horizon, made us proud and euphoric by taking us to the moon, it is tempting to speculate on how the visionary founder of the space programme might have viewed the potential impact of this achievement.
Let me borrow some of his own words as a guide. Here is what he had to say about the effects of science for example: “A person who has imbibed the ways of science injects into a situation a new way of looking at it, hopefully perhaps a degree of enlightenment.” So perhaps this is what he would hope to gain from the moon mission: a broadening of minds, a trigger to innovation, and greater wisdom. Shah is the author of ‘Vikram Sarabhai: A Life’
