The science beyond borders

Jacques Blamont and Vikram Sarabhai (right) at Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station in 1962. Pic courtesy/Cnes

During the era of the Cold War, between the 1940s and the '80s, India was just moving away from its colonial identity and maintained strong control over international partnerships. At that time of instability, France was the only country that came close to India - from being a science partner to a strategic partner," Pranav Sharma shares. It's a fact that fascinated the astronomer and science historian enough to make it the focus of a new portal.

APPLE Satellite being tested in India before launch

The initiative to document this history has kickstarted with a website launched by the Embassy of France. It hosts virtual exhibitions where you get to read about familiar personalities from science textbooks including Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan. It was Sarabhai who met Jacques Blamont, the founding technical director of the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), the French government space agency, in 1963. CNES supported ISRO's sounding rocket programme. There are also informative pieces on breakthroughs like the Ariane Passenger PayLoad Experiment (APPLE), a satellite launched by Ariane-1 from Kourou, France, that Indira Gandhi referred to as "the dawn of India's satellite communication era". In the future, the website will be complemented by physical exhibitions and a book , too.

Pranav Sharma

The concept of this initiative was rooted in Sharma's work as curator of the Space Museum at Hyderabad's BM Birla Science Centre. "I realised that the 20th century history of science narrative is missing from common discourse. For example, we know what the Emergency looked like but we don't practically know how the nuclear programme started. I thought it would be an interesting idea to document this," he says.

It was in the Space Museum last year that two exhibitions on Indo-French partnership in space sciences came to be, in collaboration with Alliance Française of Hyderabad, Institut Français en Inde and CNES. The website draws on both these showcases but specifically looks into Indo-French scientific partnership from the 15th to the 20th century. The project, according to Sharma, reflects the message that all great endeavours are never done alone. "We had limited resources at that time and somebody came to help. That's real friendship."

Log on to hos.ifindia.in