The Indian Institute of Science: Foundation and Early Research

The Indian Institute of Science, or IISc, in Bangalore was formally established on May 27, 1909, through a vesting order issued by the Government of India. Its first director, Morris Travers, had arrived in India in 1906 to organize its creation, but the institute did not begin admitting students until 1911.

The initiator, Jamsetji Tata, wanted to connect higher education with industrial needs. His collaborator Burjorji Padshah surveyed educational institutions in Europe and America and proposed an institution centered on research and postgraduate teaching. Existing universities emphasized examinations and awarding qualifications; the new institution was intended to enable teachers and students to produce knowledge in laboratories, rather than merely test their command of textbooks.

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Tata pledged income from property to support the plan, but private donations could not cover all construction and continuing operating costs. The organizers therefore sought support from both the Government of British India and the state of Mysore. Bangalore gradually emerged as the location, with Mysore’s ruler providing land and government grants combining with Tata family donations to support campus construction.

Negotiations were difficult. Viceroy Curzon questioned whether there would be enough postgraduate students and employment opportunities and worried that the government would have to cover persistent financial shortfalls. After Tata died in 1904, Dorab and Ratan continued supporting their father’s plan. Significant progress on government funding came only around 1905.

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Travers’s autobiography provides the builder’s perspective. The main building housed the library and administrative offices, with laboratories on either side and room for expansion behind; further laboratory land was reserved to the south. Staff housing and student hostels stood near the research facilities, bringing study, experiments, consultation of reference materials, and everyday life onto one campus.

Construction also required attention to foundations, contracts, and budgets. Students were given single rooms, while kitchens and dining facilities were arranged in groups to accommodate dietary restrictions among people from different regions and communities. The organizers had to assemble engineers, accountants, and clerical staff, as well as create conditions in which researchers could live and work over the long term.

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The research university originally envisaged by Tata and Padshah encompassed natural science, medicine, and the humanities and social sciences. Travers instead advocated concentrating limited equipment, funding, and talent on science and engineering. He strongly questioned proposals to add anthropology and a tropical-medicine research institution. Determining the organization’s form therefore also meant choosing how to allocate research resources.

The two goals were never fully reconciled. Travers left in 1914, while the institute continued along a more focused scientific and technological path. Balaram emphasizes his foundational contribution; Datta, by contrast, points to the narrowing of the ideal of a comprehensive research university.

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In 1926, B. Sanjiva Rao, V. P. Shintre, and J. L. Simonsen published research on wood essential oil in the institute’s journal, listing the Department of Organic Chemistry as their affiliation. The subject was Erythroxylon monogynum, commonly known as false sandalwood, not true sandalwood. The paper explained that the laboratory already had experience researching sandalwood oil and wished to compare the volatile components of another wood.

Sastry, who had previously studied Mysore wood oils, supplied the samples. The three authors fractionated the oil, measured physical properties, and used chemical derivatives to test its constituents. They compared their measurements with existing data from Sastry and the European firm Schimmel. Local raw materials, sample exchange, laboratory procedures, and comparison with literature from elsewhere thus became parts of one research process.

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The paper identified some constituents but did not treat every color reaction as sufficient proof. Some expected crystalline derivatives could not be obtained, and small quantities of alcohols could not be fully separated. The authors reported these limitations so that later researchers could distinguish established findings from unresolved questions. Cooperation here meant not only shared authorship but also comparable data and the disclosure of uncertainty.

The early institute also pursued applied research such as sandalwood-oil extraction and soapmaking from vegetable oils. The wood-oil project reveals the practical mechanism behind such work: outside parties supplied materials, researchers analyzed them using shared facilities, and scholarly publication circulated the results.

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