Imagining a Bigger World: Soviet and Indian Science over the Indian Ocean

Scholars have framed Soviet-Indian cooperation during the Cold War as largely driven by the twin imperatives of the global Cold War and debates over national development within India. Here, the principal actors are usually Soviet and Indian (and, often American) elites in government, industry, and economic planning who navigated through a number of Cold War flashpoints as well as more ‘local’ ideological battles among different political actors and bureaucracies.

This paper explores Soviet-Indian technoscientific cooperation at the ground-level through an investigation of a largely forgotten initiative in the 1960s that brought together Soviet meteorologists and physicists to study the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. Co-sponsored by the Soviet Main Administration of the Hydro-Meteorological Service (GUGMS) and the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Soviet scientists, engineers, and technicians traveled to the southern Indian state of Kerala for months at a time to set up launch stations for weather rockets. There, they worked closely with their young Indian counterparts, to study geophysical phenomena spanning the Indian Ocean world.

This paper argues that such programs need to be wrested from their assumed high-political Cold War dynamic and placed within clusters of two overlapping scientific imaginaries that both foreground the power and instrumentality of geography. On the ground, Soviet actors saw this meteorological initiative as part of a deeper conception of Soviet scientific internationalism, a commitment that allowed them to be in touch with scientists from a large number of countries through an Indian “middle ground” as the facilitator of global connections. From the Indian perspective, this project was less about material aid from the Soviet Union than it was about initiatives in post-colonial India to map, catalog, measure, and frame Indian national space as part of a larger South Asian world stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.