His Science Had Soul

Amrita Shah has tried—often successfully—to bring the personality of this man to life, most of all in quoting his dancer wife Mrinalini’s words. "We had so many things in common, our love for beauty, for honesty, for tradition. Vikram as a scientist, I as a dancer, shared a togetherness that is hard to define." Sarabhai ran the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and ISRO together, but during his time, his greatest success was in preventing these establishments from becoming typical government scientific institutions, a fate that befell the AEC after his death. Fortunately, Satish Dhawan took up Sarabhai’s mantle at ISRO and gave it the structure for later greatness. The author has done commendable work in interviewing all those living who remember Sarabhai. India’s first rocket launch makes us feel that globalisation had already gone very far by 1963 with the French supplying a radar, the Russians a computer, and the Americans the training. All this changed and none contributed more to changing it than those who obsequiously succumbed to government pressure after Sarabhai’s death to explode a meaningless nuclear device that generated 30 years of dual-use sanctions against India.

It seems strange that an eminent, privately wealthy scientist would be chosen to head the country’s two premier scientific establishments, but clearly, political decision-making was more elegant and uncluttered in the ’50s than it is today.

There is much talk today of Newtonian research and Baconian research. The former denotes the management of pure research while the latter looks at the societal goals that science ought to address. Sarabhai in that sense was like Vannevar Bush, scientific advisor to President Harry Truman, who belonged to a category of scientists more concerned with society than science.

Was he the last of that generation? Perhaps, because the nation’s unease with the unsatisfactory performance of defence research surfaced recently in public debate. Even more unsettling were the antics of the scientists in the AEC who over 40 years have not written a comprehensive Atomic Energy Act to regulate their own function and define their responsibilities. Sarabhai’s untimely death, like Bhabha’s, raises many ‘what ifs’. As we approach the Indo-US nuclear agreement, this is a timely book.