Vikram Sarabhai, “the father of the Indian space programme,” laid the methodological foundation for contemporary Indian rocketry and astrophysics in the 1960s. As opposed to the mass civilizational value placed on other Cold War-era space research missions during that time, the aims of Indian space research had the “modest” scope of national scientific development vis-à-vis ionospheric research. Sarabhai realized these goals via a creative blending and reconstruction of outside theories and technology to create a distinct Indian methodological approach to astrophysics.
Contemporary Indian space research has seen unprecedented progress and achievement across various missions—from the Chandrayaan-3 south pole lunar landing to the Mangalyaan mission making India the first Asian nation to reach Mars. The fruits of Indian astrophysics have stood as a trenchant indicator of political modernity. These accomplishments, however, could not have been worked if not for the vision of Vikram Sarabhai, laying the epistemological foundation of Indian astrophysical methodology in the 1960s for all future domestic space research. Efforts to understand with greater breadth the Indian flavor of astrophysics must observe through the lens of Vikram Sarabhai’s philosophy of science, the political contexts, and the methodological base of India’s leveraging of astrophysical research.
Via the 1962 founding of the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), the institutionalization of Indian astrophysical research was born during a time of peak global excitement toward space research and exploration. The Cold War era often employed an evocation of rocketry technologies as a measure of civilizational modernity; however, the United States and USSR scientists doing such work had at their disposal the resources of the two most powerful global economies (lab technology, national scientific excitement, advanced rocket construction materials, etc.). India’s space programme had, conversely, a much smaller scope, identified by Sarabhai as a “very modest one indeed,” emphasizing primarily ionospheric and, contained therein, electrojet research. Unlike the civilizational metaphysics attached to astrophysical discourse at the time, the aim of Indian rocketry was a humble post-colonial scientific development.
For the developmental mission, Sarabhai propagated from the early days the “leap-frogging” of technological processes—that is, bypassing the conventional scientific stages of development and exploiting the most advanced space infrastructure and astrophysical theories so space research could, thus, “materially assist developing countries, such as India to leap-frog from their present status.” Methodologically, this was most effectively done by taking the best of what foreign space research provided and adding it to the Indian lexicon of understanding; the 1963 inaugural rocket launched blended Soviet (M-100) and French (Centaure) equipment to an American rocket environment synthesized by Indian equations.
Sarabhai took the emphatic position for a deconstruction of foreign scientific norms and a creative reconstruction in the Indian context, exemplified in his position that: “Many people suppose that there is the absence of the imaginative and intuitive element in the pursuit of science in contrast to philosophy, literary or artistic endeavour. This surely is a fallacy.” Indian astrophysical methodology was not to employ a mere transplantation of Euro-American scientific precedent, nor to generate an entirely new language of cosmology born from empirical nationalisms—it was a matter of meddling with theory, apparatus, and accounts of what the apparatus is doing. In the epistemological base of Indian astrophysics, a chimerical disavowal of Euro-American cosmological thought made no more sense than a blinkered infatuation with it. This apparatus was a developmental mission to promote Indian science as an instrument for domestic, institutionalized intellectual progress.