South Asia and the Institute: Transformative Connections, at MIT’s Maihaugen Gallery, opens on 14 October 2022 and will be at the gallery for one year.  Register here to attend the Opening Celebration which will also feature performances by student groups Ohms, MIT Nritya, and MIT Bhangra. Or here to view the gallery after the opening.

South Asia and the Institute: Transformational Connections showcases the longstanding connections between MIT and South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal) that go back more than 140 years.

The Institute’s past and present has been enriched as much by South Asian students and faculty as their lives have been shaped by the Institute. Perched at the forefront of technological revolutions across the globe, MIT’s South Asians have negotiated a changing world of race and immigration in America, and decolonization and nation-building in South Asia.  South Asia and the Institute makes these transformative connections visible.

This exhibition is part of a larger oral history project and digital archive led by Sana Aiyar, Associate Professor,, History, MIT, Dr Ranu Boppanna '87, Past President, MIT South Asian Alumni Association, and Nureen Das, Managing Director, MISTI India. Since January 2021, more than 25 students have joined the team in a History Lab. They have done extensive research digging into the Institute’s archival records at MIT’s Distinctive Collections and have collected nearly 90 oral histories from alumni, staff, and faculty at the Institute.

 For background, the very first student from what was then British-ruled India attended MIT in 1880, just two decades after the founding of the Institute. For Indians aspiring to freedom, technical education and skills were the need-of-the-hour to alleviate the poverty and underdevelopment facing their country after more than a century of colonization. Then, as now, South Asians looked to MIT as a model institute where they could acquire this knowledge.

After independence in 1947, the Institute served as a guide and partner in the challenging work of decolonization and nation-building that South Asians embarked upon. At the same time, with the reform of discriminatory anti-Asian US immigration policies in the mid-20th century, a growing diaspora of South Asian Americans found a home in MIT.

Since then, thousands of MIT’s South Asian alumni, dozens of South Asian faculty, and a large number of academics with a research interest in South Asia have been an active and large presence in all five of MIT’s schools.

 â€œMIT is an institution that is continually looking to the future, but in uncovering its history, we learn much about ourselves,” says Dr Ranu Boppana ‘87.

Rujul Gandhi ‘22, saw connections between MIT and Boston’s international community, noting, “MIT seemed to have a large concentration of international students, so it became the hub of where people from different campuses would come to meet.”

Researching history in the MIT archives is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, according to senior Jupneet Singh. “You get a name from here, a picture from here” and you begin to piece together stories about people from the past, says Singh, who dived into the archives for class 21H.S04 (South Asian MIT Oral History and Digital Archive), a special topic in history taught by Associate Professor Sana Aiyar.

For Singh, whose parents immigrated to the United States from India to provide “a better life to their children,” this work is personally meaningful. “These are the people who paved the way,” she says.

“This is a story that’s broader than just MIT,” Professor Sana Aiyar says. “The South Asian experience at MIT becomes a lens by which we can explore and understand the historical context of important contemporary issues such as race and immigration in America and decolonization and nation-building in South Asia. Students in this class — what I like to call the history lab — learn to historicize and contextualize their archival research and the deeply personal individual oral histories they conduct with alumni in multimedia class projects. They aren’t just students of history — they get to be historians.”

Media Contact- Nureen Das, Managing Director, MISTI MIT-India ​​mit-india@mit.edu

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