The Leapfrogging Visioneer: Vikram Sarabhai and India's Moral Leadership in the Global Space Age, 1958–72

Narratives about the birth of the Indian space program cannot but invoke the image of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971), who held leading positions over the nation's space enterprise throughout its early development in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thanks to his educational background abroad and international connections, Sarabhai brought extensive international cooperation and cross-border exchange of expertise into the space program, the 1963 sounding-rocket launch in Thumba being an illustrative example. Yet, what Sarabhai was particularly well-known for is his 'leapfrogging' vision, where social applications of space technology could help India 'leap-frog' from poverty to advancement. With Sarabhai's persona as a central locus, this cooperative, civilian and peaceful impression of the Indian space program was indeed unique, particularly in view of the backdrop of the global Space Race. The program's strong humanistic anchor deviated from the militarizing incentives of space technology and appeared to restore the innocence of space science.

By interrogating official accounts of Sarabhai and the scientist's ego-documents, this paper probes the underlying rationale for constructing the civilian and cooperative impression of the Indian space program, and how Sarabhai's character played a role in motivating this cultural construction. It argues that, while corresponding to the larger national agenda of scientific modernization, Sarabhai's leapfrogging vision of space technology served to propagate an Indian nationalism that granted India moral leadership in the world. On the one hand, his international profile facilitated transnational importation of knowledge for India’s industrial development. On the other, Sarabhai's humanitarian articulation of space science compensated for India's industrial backwardness by situating the nation as a model of space technocracy and a peaceful mediator of the global space age. This morally-anchored nationalism revealed the way India used global space technopolitics as a stimulus for its own socio-economic development and political self-propagation.