Binging on Bhabha, Sarabhai and Bhai

The name Vikram aroused much curiosity among the younger generation of Indians during the launch of the lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, in September 2019. The module that was supposed to land on the lunar surface was named after the space agency’s founder, Vikram Sarabhai. Another reason for the instant recall of the surname ‘Sarabhai’ is a popular sitcom, Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, which, of course, has no connection with the space scientist. Now, for the first time, Indians can see some glimpses of the life of Vikram Sarabhai on the small screen.

The web series, Rocket Boys, is not a biopic but a peek into the turning points in the lives of Sarabhai and his mentor Homi Jehangir Bhabha. It is an attempt to bring out the curious inter-twining of India’s most successful scientific programmes — space and nuclear — and some behind-the-scene stories. However, since we live in the era of post-truth and twisted history, it is better to raise some red flags.

The stage for science-led industrialisation was set before the Independence in the work of the National Planning Committee chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated an alliance between science and politics. After Independence, this resulted in the development of government research laboratories and concentration of power in the hands of a few scientists who headed scientific departments while working closely with Nehru. Prominent in this group were Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Homi Bhabha, and later Vikram Sarabhai. Bhabha used to address the Prime Minister as Bhai — a sort of bromance, also seen in Rocket Boys.

There were other equally or more eminent scientists but they were not part of this club, like CV Raman, Meghnad Saha and Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. But no scientist by the name of Mehdi Raza existed — as depicted in Rocket Boys. This character seems to be inspired by that of Saha, who founded the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata. He joined politics post Independence and became a vocal critic of Nehru and Bhabha in the Lok Sabha. The Dorabji Tata Trust, which supported Saha’s research in its initial years, later funded Bhabha to establish the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai.

The similarity between Saha and the fictitious Mehdi Raza ends here and fiction takes over. Raza appears in the company of Nehru at the inauguration of the first nuclear reactor, Apsara. Bhabha and Raza then share a bottle of whiskey, sitting right in the swimming pool in which the reactor had gone critical a few hours ago. In reality, Apsara achieved criticality on August 4, 1956, while Saha had passed away in February that year. Such dramatised mix-up of timelines and personalities apart, the intense rivalry among different research groups for available resources has been captured to some extent.

The decade of the 1960s was a period of turmoil with two wars, famines, food shortages, changing geopolitical equations and leadership changes in India in quick succession. It was also the period when scientific activity reached its zenith — new nuclear reactors were built, a rocket-launching station became operational at Thumba, the Green Revolution unfolded and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur came up. All these projects were competing for limited resources and scientific leaders clashed to secure their own turfs and institutes.

Like Saha’s Nuclear Physics Institute in Kolkata, CV Raman too had developed his centre — the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore. The speed at which government resources flowed to the laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) due to Bhatnagar’s influence on Nehru made Raman caustically remark that it was a result of the ‘Nehru-Bhatnagar effect’ (a la Raman Effect). The Physical Research Laboratory that Sarabhai founded in Ahmedabad started as a private initiative but managed to get grants from the Department of Atomic Energy for the space programme.

In the initial years, resource crunch, particularly that of foreign exchange, forced scientists working in all these institutes to fabricate instruments on their own, sometimes from parts procured from war-surplus depots and scrap markets. Portraying such efforts as a sort of jugaad is a great disservice to their ingenuity and hard work.

The stories of competition and rivalry in building India’s nuclear and space programmes have been well documented using archival material and oral history by scholars like Robert S Anderson, Indira Chowdhury, MV Ramana and Jahnavi Phalkey as well as in recent books penned by former scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Rocket Boys scores over them when it comes to the human side of Bhabha and Sarabhai. Bhabha’s relationship with Phiroza ‘Pipsy’ Wadia, which was perhaps known only to a close circle of their contemporaries, comes alive in Rocket Boys, though details of it as shown remain suspect. The love triangle of Vikram, Mrinalini Sarabhai and Kamla Chowdhry has been portrayed somewhat sensitively and may have been done so with the inputs and approval of Sarabhai’s children Mallika and Kartikeya.

Stories of scientists and scientific development need to be told and retold as and when new material becomes available. Such retelling helps us examine historical characters in a new light.

A short biography of particle physicist Bibha Chowdhuri, penned by historian Rajinder Singh in 2018, revealed how her work was ignored though she had worked with both Bhabha and Sarabhai as well as in the laboratory of Nobel laureate PMS Blackett. After this book, TIFR made amends by recognising her work officially three decades after her death.

A newly discovered dwarf star was also named after her. Chinmay Tumbe’s essay on Kamla Chowdhry brought out her role as the real builder of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), shrugging off the stereotypical image of being ‘the other woman’ in Sarabhai’s life.

Some years back, Hidden Figures, a movie based on the life of the first African-American female engineer at NASA, Mary W Jackson, caught national attention in America and the space agency named its headquarter building after her in recognition of her contributions.

So, let the show go on.