Between College and Town: Envisioning the First Indian MIT and the Planning of the Indian Institute of Technology (1951) in Kharagpur

Abstract

After India gained independence from British rule in 1947, the nation embarked on an ambitious technoscientific mission of planned progress. A major component of this development was higher education, and in a relatively short time, the government built a large number of new academic campuses. An early and important type of institute was a higher technical institute, and the first of its kind was built in 1951 at Kharagpur, seventy miles west from Calcutta. It was named the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and drew inspiration from none other than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. Yet, as this paper shows, the Indian condition was extraordinary—the requirements for living and learning at IIT-Kharagpur juxtaposed the fields of campus design and town planning to create, in hindsight, arguably India's first college town. Previous architectural history accounts have largely overlooked and dismissed the planning and design for the campus. However, as this paper argues, IIT-Kharagpur informed many subsequent campus design ideas in India—greater integration of town planning principles, improved administrative procedures for campus development, and a shift in the selection of campus architects from the government to the private architectural sector.