Dwaipayan Banerjee’s Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution tells a compelling history of a newly independent India, struggling to define itself as a sovereign nation after casting off Britain’s colonial rule from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. At the heart of this narrative lies the nascent field of computing, undergoing a phase of expansion after World War II and exerting a transformative influence across multiple scientific disciplines. Banerjee traces the trajectory of a cohort of influential figures who were seeking to establish computing as a foundational element within the scientific and technological infrastructure of post-colonial India. Alongside India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they pursued an “autonomous technocratic governance with direct regulatory authority” (p. 159) to bring the country in line with its aspirations. Banerjee makes his argument clear from the start that this vision was unfulfilled. The book explores the questions of what might have happened differently and what mechanisms instead led to the computing industry that India has today.

The narrative draws on a case study of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), led by nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, and its years-long attempts to gather enough political influence, financial backing, and, crucially, equipment to create an industrial infrastructure for computing in Mumbai (Bombay), at which both theoretical and applied contributions could be made. Banerjee describes several ambitious attempts, variously interrupted by geopolitical conditions and interventions from both foreign and domestic entities. The expense of early computing hardware was extremely challenging to finance for post-colonial states, which created pressure to accept foreign investment. The influence and extraction of multinational corporations like IBM, looking for captive markets, made it nearly impossible to compete in early hardware development. More generally, the meddling of Western powers, particularly the United States, impacted India’s ability to gain access to scientific knowledge, equipment, and materials. Crucially, all of this was entangled in a Cold War dynamic in which India did not pursue alignment. There is an implied tension in the book between two related theories of political economy – modernisation and world systems – which provides a productive lens through which Banerjee’s analysis can be discussed.

Modernisation theories of socio-economists like Seymour Lipset, Walt Rostow, and, later, Francis Fukuyama that emerged after World War II proposed that industrialisation leads to stability, democratisation, and social progress. In the first part of the book, this theory may help to explain the early motivations of Nehru and Bhabha to pursue self-reliance through industrialisation as a pluralistic multi-party democracy. However, there were two dominant models at the time of how this might occur, one socialist and one capitalist, and India hoped to blend the two. Both Nehru and Bhabha were sympathetic to the state-led, socialist motivations of the Soviet Union at the time, but could not ignore the importance of research and technology from the United States, particularly around computing. However, unlike other countries and regions, which more clearly came down on one side or the other of the Cold War, Banerjee argues that India did not benefit from close assistance or knowledge exchange from either, a fact which deeply impacted its plans to industrialise with computing at the centre. Banerjee spends much of the first part of the book establishing how difficult it was for Bhabha to even obtain a single computer. So, while modernisation theories may have been part of the initial motivations of these early statesmen, they cannot fully or sincerely explain their challenges. Banerjee’s example of IBM is most instructive in examining these gaps.

India’s sympathies with the Soviet Union made the American government suspicious of sharing too much technical knowledge, which Banerjee illustrates as successive failed attempts to gain access to early computing infrastructure. However, India, as a market, was still a very attractive prospect, and American companies were eager to access it, as demonstrated by the multinationals bringing their products (and their own technical teams) to the country. Being unable to obtain a computer, Bhabha sought out the assistance of several engineers and research scientists to build one at TIFR. The indigenous “TIFRAC” computer was intended to be a game-changer, and it was truly a scientific feat. Unfortunately, by the time it was developed, under extremely challenging conditions, computing had already moved on. TIFRAC was obsolete within a few short years. The innovations of TIFRAC were much easier and cost-effective for IBM to scale, and IBM had the financial resources to control the global supply chain. As computers became smaller and easier to build, India could not compete with IBM’s approach to leasing out-dated, refurbished computers to India. By the early 70s, Banerjee writes, IBM was producing three-quarters of the computers in the country. India, in need of foreign currency, began to build a software industry and export talent, in an attempt to gain some kind of foothold in the global computing industry. Meanwhile, IBM exploited the captive market, avoided import regulations and weathered a currency crisis for decades, a strategy that Bhabha had warned successive governments would make it very difficult for India’s own computer manufacturing ambitions.

Bhabha did not completely eschew the notion of partnership, however, and Banerjee contrasts the IBM example with that of the potential partnership with another major U.S. American computing company, Control Data Corporation (CDC). Bhabha was already a well-connected individual with the ear of influential people and politicians, and eventually found himself on the National Defence Council at a time when 40% of the national budget was being spent on defence. Banerjee writes that Bhabha’s newfound political and financial backing may have changed his earlier preference for an entirely self-reliant computing industry. The CDC, unlike IBM, had invited Indian engineers to train using their best technology and even proposed to bring some manufacturing of memory to India, a long-standing hope of TIFR. CDC was “treating Indian researchers as peers who required -and deserved - the same technical capabilities as their international counterparts” (p. 153).

The partnership with CDC, however, required an upfront investment that India could not afford after the devaluation of the rupee. Eventually, geopolitical factors and the death of Homi Bhabha soured the deal. The reliance on Bhabha’s connections and influence, which had made some earlier achievements possible, turned out to be a vulnerability in the eyes of international partners. After both Bhabha and Nehru had died, political shifts within the country fraught the idea of a self-reliant computing industry.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government leaned toward aligning research and scientific innovation with the needs of the country, which decreased attention on Bhabha’s goal of having a strong theoretical research contribution to computing. The private sector was becoming restless with what they perceived as an overly cautious approach. Vikram Sarabhai, Bhabha’s protégé who took over leadership of TIFR, passed away suddenly just as the framework of self-reliance began to unravel. The private sector was enticed by burgeoning software development opportunities that emerged from IBM’s interests in the country, and they were successful at presenting Sarabhai’s successor M.G.K. Menon’s reticence as obstructive. Just what Bhabha and others had warned came to pass. IBM entered into multiple “asymmetrical partnerships” to mobilise India’s talent toward its own goals, with the United States being the primary beneficiary. Though IBM was eventually expelled in 1977 by the union-backed Janata Party, it was not long before it returned.

Nationalist circles could not agree on what should happen with the vacuum left by IBM and other multinationals in the late 70s and early 80s. The trade unionists and socialists who had succeeded in pushing IBM out were sidelined, and the effectively empowered bureaucracy aligned with the private sector to dismantle regulation. Seeking relief from the foreign currency crisis, software exports, always intended to be a temporary money-making venture, slowly became a main staple of India’s computing industry. As the microcomputer emerged and hardware development was becoming more realistic for countries with fewer resources, Menon, once again, urged a cautious approach, fearing that moving too quickly might result in India relying too much on imported parts. The private sector paradoxically framed this as evidence that Menon was suppressing the computing industry from blossoming, and he was ousted.

Reliance on imported hardware and technology increased, but technological knowledge transfer and investment in research did not. Instead of a strong public sector approach, the industry became fragmented and scalability was difficult. What Banerjee refers to as “body shopping,” the deployment of Indian engineers to foreign firms, “reshaped India’s technical workforce and education system” (p. 188). Domestic companies had less access to talent, and those who had gone abroad were disconnected from India’s computing industry. Liberalisation, through successive governments, increased over time, reducing whatever incentives had remained for investment in a domestic hardware industry. IBM returned in 1992 to a markedly different reception by the government, and India’s position began to crystallise. Banerjee uses the example of the Indian company Infosys to illustrate this point further. Infosys, a “celebrated symbol of India’s technological achievement” (p. 193), ran on imported hardware, with patents elsewhere and profits that primarily benefited foreign investors. Banerjee also cites Prime Minister Modi’s Make in India initiative as an example, which he argues has not done much to stem the flow of workers out of the country, and the enormous investment has resulted in comparatively meagre manufacturing capacity.

These narratives lay bare some of the mechanisms described in World Systems Theory, which, emerging through critiques by socio-economist and historian Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s, considers the nation-state (as a unit of analysis) as secondary to its geopolitical function in the story of global capitalism. In this case, India’s experiences of colonisation, the existence of the Cold War, and even the rise of computing can be viewed through a world systems lens. The timeline over which patterns can be observed is measured in centuries, not decades, revealing the slow-moving, pernicious drift toward the interests of the world hegemon, the “core,” at the expense and extraction of the “periphery.” The “semi-periphery” operates in between, mirroring some of the strategies of the core toward others further on the periphery, some striving to become part of the core over time. In this way, the semi-periphery both legitimises the core and is extracted by the core.

The subjects of Banerjee’s analysis could be viewed as “semi-peripheral agents.” On the one hand, they were the high caste, influential people, connected to the government, who would have been educated at international schools in the Western model, or may have even studied abroad. A fully socialist or state-planned industry might not have been as appealing (or familiar, perhaps) as a technocratic approach driving innovation. On the other hand, they were not White, European, or part of the powerful industrial core of the time. Their efforts to pursue a lucrative computer hardware industry were disrupted in several systemic ways: the British wartime monetary policy that left India in financial dire straits in the 40s and 50s, the foreign exchange crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its predatory behaviour toward the new independent states, the influence of Cold War dynamics and US Policies to prevent the spread of socialism. If not the details, the broad strokes of this experience are familiar to countries considered parts of the Global South. Other emerging economies that rose in hardware and computing fields in the latter half of the twentieth century did so with affirmative support from either Western or Soviet superpowers.

As he contemplates the choices and experiences of other countries, like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China, we begin to see more clearly what his narrative presents as the major differences in their experience compared to India – The fragmentation of the India’s private sector made scaling any industry difficult, in comparison with China (for example), where the state was much more directive in strategic planning. Pursuing selective partnerships in strategic areas, such as Taiwan and Korea, while adopting a more expert-oriented industrialisation might have paved the way for more partnerships like the unrealised CDC example than the IBM one to emerge. More generally, taking a “disciplined” approach (a term that Banerjee deploys several times) to investment, which a strong state apparatus can offer, might have changed something for India, which Banerjee argues was inverted at the time – the state absorbed all the risk, without being able to direct investment or monitor compliance. Instead, profit and the private sector drove investment.

However, Banerjee stops short of advocating for a socialist model of state-planning. He writes that “democracy itself was not at fault,” but rather the way India chose to interpret democracy, prioritising the interests of the elites over popular reforms. In this sense, the book touches upon a much larger debate about balancing the interests of powerful elites (with money to invest) alongside those of governments – a particularly thorny issue when elites are also influencing the government. However, here, we get to the heart of his argument – India could/should have used the post-colonial movement to really think about and make transformative changes to the organisation of society — land redistribution, for example — that might have improved state capacity and authority in driving industrialisation. Banerjee suggests that it is the earlier “revolutionary promise of decolonisation” that must be revived, the “fundamental social and political transformation” that has the best chance of disrupting the world order in relation to technological sovereignty (p. 215).

It is interesting, therefore, that Banerjee spends so much time unpacking the motivations and experiences of the figures in his book, just to show how ineffectual they were in leading the technological revolution that the title of the book suggests might have been. Perhaps it serves as a reminder that India, like the rest of the Global South, has talent, ambition, and creativity. However, it leads me, as a reader, to consider which audiences Banerjee is hoping to reach with this analysis. Is it the tech founders and professionals, now returning to India, hoping to contribute to India’s start-up boom? Does he wish to caution them against the self-interest and fragmentation that disrupted previous attempts? Is it Prime Minister Modi’s government, looking to build a semi-conductor industry and embed Artificial Intelligence as a strategic technology, making the same cautions as Bhabha and Menon before him about short-term gains versus long-term stability? Is it trade unions and left-leaning opposition groups that may find themselves in power one day? Banerjee calls India a cautionary tale and asks continually how things might have “unfolded differently” (p. 199), but the target of this caution remains somewhat nebulous.

Though the author is careful to point out that his work is not decolonial in its strictest definition, because it doesn’t emphasise indigenous knowledge and approaches, it is trying to make space for them. By the end of the book, I find myself thinking that there is precisely where the answer to his question lies.