Place · research institute · India
Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Also known as IISc, Indian Institute of Science, Tata Institute, IISc Bangalore, IISc Bengaluru
India's first and foremost scientific research institute, founded in 1909 on a Bengaluru tract the Mysore government under Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV deeded for the purpose, after a decade of planning that began with Jamsetji Tata's 1898 endowment of most of his personal fortune. The Nizam of Hyderabad Mir Osman Ali Khan contributed one of the largest early donations. Morris Travers was first director; C.V. Raman was the first Indian director from 1933. The Institute's postwar growth — radio astronomy, aerospace, molecular biology, electrical communication engineering — made it the apex of Indian scientific research.
- Date
- 1909–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- Tata · Wadiyar · Asaf Jahi
- Tradition
- IISc centenary history; Tata Trusts archives; Mysore State records on the 1909 land grant.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.022, 77.567
Worth knowing
Jamsetji Tata's 1898 letter proposing the Institute went first to Lord Curzon, who was uninterested; the proposal survived because of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV's offer of land and seed capital at Bangalore, which was then outside British India. The campus's main building is still called the Tata Memorial.
Connections (8)
- Founded byJamsetji Tata
Jamsetji Tata endowed the proposed Indian Institute of Science with most of his personal fortune in 1898 — a bequest that was legally activated after his death in 1904 — and set out the Institute's mission as scientific research of the highest order, not teaching alone. The 1898 proposal survived more than ten years of colonial inaction and was realised only when the Mysore government offered land and seed capital in 1909. Vivekananda's 1893 shipboard conversation with Tata is traditionally credited with planting the idea.
- Founded byKrishnarāja Wadiyar IV
Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, Mysore's maharaja from 1902, offered the Mysore government's Bengaluru tract for the Indian Institute of Science in 1909 after Jamsetji Tata's trustees had spent a decade trying to find a British Indian site. The Mysore land grant was unconditional and was accompanied by an endowment that matched the Tata trust's own contribution. The Institute's foundation at Bangalore rather than at Calcutta, Bombay or Madras is the result of this princely-state willingness that the colonial administration lacked.
- PatronageMir Osman Ali Khan, VII Nizam of Hyderabad
Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh and last Nizam of Hyderabad, contributed one of the largest early endowments to the Indian Institute of Science — a 1933 donation that funded the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, among the first in the subcontinent, and that reflected the Nizami state's broader twentieth-century commitment to scientific and technical institutions. His patronage of IISc complements his funding of the deposed Ottoman family through Durru Shehvar's marriage: two directions of institutional giving from the same Nizami treasury.
- Site withinLahore
The Indian Institute of Science sits in the Malleshwaram area of Bengaluru, on a 160-hectare campus between the city centre and Yeshwantpur. The Institute is the city's anchor scientific institution, and its founding on the Mysore government's land grant in 1909 is one of the formative acts that transformed late-colonial Bangalore from a small Mysore cantonment into the subcontinent's twentieth-century scientific capital. The surrounding research and technology ecosystem — the National Centre for Biological Sciences, the Raman Research Institute, the Indian Space Research Organisation headquarters — all orbit IISc.
- DirectedC. V. Raman
C.V. Raman was the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru from 1933 to 1948. He reshaped the Institute from a workshop-oriented practical training centre into a research university on the German model, built up the Departments of Physics, Chemistry and Astrophysics, and founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1934 as a Bangalore-based alternative to the Royal Society of Calcutta. Several of his institutional decisions — the recruitment of G.N. Ramachandran, the appointment of Homi Bhabha as reader, the building of the Raman Research Institute next door after his retirement — defined postwar Indian scientific institutional geography.
- Worked atC. V. Raman
Raman left Calcutta for Bangalore in 1933 as the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science, where he spent four stormy years in office and the next three decades in research. His disputes with the Tatas and the Government of India over the institute's direction were legendary; so were the diamond, mineral and acoustical studies he carried out there.
- Associated withM. Visvesvaraya
M. Visvesvaraya sat on the Court of Governors of the Indian Institute of Science from the 1910s and in 1917 founded the Government Engineering College at Bangalore (now UVCE), the first engineering college in Mysore state. The two institutions together put Bangalore on the Indian scientific map a generation before independence.
- Worked atJayant Narlikar
Jayant Narlikar founded IUCAA at Pune in 1988; the Centre collaborates closely with IISc.