June 28, 2021 | Reflections
Jahnavi Phalkey is a historian of science and technology. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India (2013) and is presently the Founding Director, Science Gallery Bengaluru. In 2020, she produced and directed the documentary film Cyclotron.
Cyclotron is a film about the world’s oldest functional particle accelerator and the people who keep it running today. The particle accelerator was built in 1936 at the University of Rochester, United States. The entire set-up was dismantled, sent to India in 1967, is now housed at the Punjab University, Chandigarh, and has been running for nearly fifty years in Chandigarh. In this post, Joseph Satish interviews Jahnavi Phalkey about the film, her tryst with the history of science and with film-making, and the need for academics to foster public engagement with science and its practices.
Atomic Science (2013) was a path breaker in presenting the rise of nuclear science in India. Most best-selling authors would follow up with another book. What made you venture into film-making?
Before I entered graduate school at Georgia Tech, I was working on a doctoral thesis on silent cinema at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. During my archival research, I spent a lot of time with filmmakers at the Film and Television Institute of India. While I completely moved my field of study, after a decade, I did return to the idea of film-making at University College London and started working on Cyclotron as my first assignment.
Around the same time, I was invited to serve as a Lead Scholar and External Curator to the Science Museum London for an exhibition on India which established, for me, the importance of public engagement with history of science. This was an interesting temporary distraction from scholarly writing and I have continued down that path.
How did your skills as a historian help you in the course of making Cyclotron?
This is a historian’s film. It is based on my doctoral research on the beginnings of experimental nuclear physics in India where I studied six laboratories that wanted particle accelerators before and after independence. Luckily for me, two new archives opened up during my research which meant I was able to write my thesis, and later my first book on the first three laboratories in India – Calcutta (Kolkata), Bangalore (Bengaluru) and Bombay (Mumbai) – to attempt experimental nuclear physics.
The three laboratories that did not make it into the book – Chandigarh, Kanpur, and Kolkata –had strong connections to technical assistance from United States and to the Atoms for Peace programme, making a compelling case for an ‘American Decade’ of nuclear physics in India – something I sort of promised to write about for my Junior Research Fellowship at the Imperial College London. Instead, I made a film.
Parts of Cyclotron describe the tension between North and South India, and between castes. Did you encounter any difficulty on how to present such themes in the film as opposed to a journal article?
Cyclotron is a story of everyday science in a regional Indian university with a historically extraordinary machine. Everyday life in the laboratory is always deeply embedded in the immediate and not so distant context and imaginaries within which it functions. As such, questions of region, caste and other fault-lines along which life in India is organised are visible in the film’s footage. Tanya Singh, the editor of the film, and I discussed how to best draw out the social practices within which the Chandigarh laboratory functions.
Academic research is deeply embedded in scholarly traditions and seeks to bring archival material into a conversation with existing historiographies. A journal paper on the Chandigarh cyclotron can be written within the frameworks of “technology transfer”, an object biography, as institutional history, as history of science education, a story of the technicians, or through a biographical exploration of the lead protagonist of this story, Professor Hans – and I am doing so now.
Academic writing, though, is not always accessible to the public at large. Rigorous academic research and complex ideas can be presented in accessible ways. A film is one such form which allowed me to present this complexity through the eyes and the words of the people who rebuilt the machine and have kept it going for more than fifty years!
How has the public response to Cyclotron been so far?
I am overwhelmed by the response and did not expect such wide-ranging engagement at all. I met many from the nuclear physics community in India during my research and most were aware of the Chandigarh cyclotron. However, I have recently met young physicists, other scientists, as well as historians and sociologists of science who do not know about it at all!
The audacity of an ambitious young physicist wanting to return to India who thought he could simply ship a cyclotron to India from the United States in the mid-1960s and establish an experimental nuclear physics facility is impressive. Wanting to pursue nuclear physics in a university setting as opposed to a Department of Atomic Energy facility, his cyclotron became the pivot of research and training in experimental nuclear physics in Northern India. The reassembly was accomplished by a group of technicians and engineers most of whom had never seen a working cyclotron before! I wanted this audacity, ambition and struggle to create an experimental research culture to be understood and appreciated.
My initial thoughts were that the film might interest Indian physicists and historians of transnational science. I was quite surprised to find that people across the board found something to connect within the film.
Do you see any parallels between Prof. Hans’ journey in bringing the cyclotron to North India and your own journey in directing the Science Gallery Bengaluru?
Your question is an opportunity to explore what it means to build institutions in India, and why certain kinds of difficulties persist across time, region and mandate. Grounding a new institutional mandate in India is difficult for at least two reasons: finding the right people and a fragile ecosystem that may not be able to scaffold the growth of a new idea. Higher education in India is siloed. As a student, this means that one can go through an undergraduate engineering or medicine or science education without any contact with a fellow student of history, cinematography, law or architecture. It becomes, therefore, very difficult to recruit people who can imagine careers beyond disciplinary boundaries that build on strong disciplinary training.
Second, as seen in the film, the national laboratory, which emerged as the preferred research institution after WWII, also informed the creation of “institutions of national importance” in India. This was why a university department of physics, like the one where Professor Hans worked, was underfunded. The ecosystem to support the establishment of an experimental laboratory of the 1960s was fragile, as is the case today, for building a public institution for research-based engagement.
How do you think scholarly societies like 4S can collaborate in the public engagement with science in India?
Scholarly communities and public spaces for science have the responsibility to provide critical commentary on science and its practices, explore science in culture, explain science in context, and provide insight into processes of knowledge production. There is a huge distance between research and the public. We have a strong professional responsibility to bridge that distance.
Those of us working in the global North might want to be cautious to not mistake the geopolitical significance of the places we work in or about, as markers of significance for our own work in the field. We might cultivate a symmetrical sensibility to treat work coming from and about the global South for the kind of insight it offers into historical processes – and not limit our question to “why is this relevant to the larger story” which usually translates to a relational historiography centered on the global North. This, if any, is the primary collaboration that must be built by organisations like the 4S with our colleagues across the globe.
Please reach out to Jahnavi Phalkey if you are interested in the film.
Image Courtesy: Adriana González
Published: 06/28/2021