Becoming a Scientist: South Asian Students in British Universities and the Making of Postcolonial Scientific Lives, 1950-2000

This ESRC-funded doctoral project, Becoming a Scientist: South Asian Students in British Universities and the Making of Postcolonial Scientific Lives, 1950-2000, examines how scientific lives were shaped through postcolonial academic mobility. The research focuses on scientists from India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka who pursued doctoral training in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. The project is jointly supervised by Dr Sally Horrocks (University of Leicester) and Dr James Poskett (University of Warwick), and the interviews are intended to be deposited in the British Library's Oral History of British Science collection.
Drawing on thirteen life history interviews alongside archival and administrative sources, the project explores how individual aspirations intersect with institutional structures and geopolitical shifts to shape scientific careers across national and global contexts. It interrogates the postcolonial dynamics of academic mobility, the transnational circulation of scientific knowledge, and the formation of scientific identities. These accounts challenge diffusionist models that portray scientific knowledge as flowing unidirectionally from the West to the Global South. Instead, this project demonstrates how scientific knowledge was actively co-produced, translated, and reoriented across transnational and institutional settings, particularly as returning scientists responded to national priorities and state-building ambitions.
The intersection of personal histories with major political and historical events emerged as a central theme across the interviews. Narratives of return, such as to India during the post-Nehruvian expansion of nationalist science, offer compelling insights into the tensions between national obligations, personal aspirations, structural opportunities, and constraints. Exploring these intersections provides a nuanced understanding of how significant historical events resonate within personal lives, emphasising the intimate scale at which history unfolds.
The research also examines the influence of global institutions and state policies on structuring academic opportunities and expectations. Mechanisms such as the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (CSFP) were key in facilitating access to higher education while enforcing return and national service embedded within the broader logic of postcolonial development. These dynamics profoundly shaped decisions around settlement and future career trajectories. This thesis further explores how scientists navigated competing pressures of global engagement and local responsibility, often contending with asymmetries of recognition, authority, and collaboration within international scientific networks.
Ultimately, this project offers a historically grounded and narratively rich account of how South Asian scientists forged postcolonial scientific lives shaped as much by transnational mobility and aspiration as by their rootedness in home institutions, obligations, and the intersections of personal and professional ambitions. By centring lived experience, the study foregrounds how these scientists made sense of, and at times contested, the roles and responsibilities ascribed to them as postcolonial actors, returnees, and global knowledge producers.