International networks and aircraft manufacture in late-colonial India: Hindustan Aircraft Limited, 1940-47

This paper examines the beginnings of aircraft manufacture and maintenance in India through a study of Hindustan Aircraft Limited (est. 1940). Promoted by industrialist Walchand Hirachand, HAL was set up with the help of capital (initially fifty per cent) from the Mysore Government, which also provided land and other facilities for the company’s factory in Bangalore. Historians of science and technology have yet to study in depth the early history of this specialised industry in India. Further, scholars of 1940s India have, following the point of view of actors like Walchand, seen the aircraft industry primarily as an example of colonial imperatives subjugating indigenous entrepreneurship and skill. This is in line with the larger historiography, which often sees S&T in India as being either ‘colonial’ or ‘nationalist’. However, recent work by historians has begun to emphasise the need to understand Indian S&T as an integral part of broader, often extra-imperial, networks. This paper will further develop this historiographical approach by placing the technical practitioners of HAL centre stage. The plant in Bangalore was commissioned by a team of American engineers under W.D. Pawley, who would arrange for manufacturing licences, machinery and materials through his American company, Intercontinent Corporation. These American experts supervised a team of Indian engineers and technicians; the factory was run by the US Army during the latter years of World War II. Using a variety of sources (including the biography of Walchand Hirachand; official records and correspondence in the British Library, and printed material in the Karnataka State Archives), this paper examines the politics surrounding the founding of HAL, and the training and recruitment of its technical experts. It argues that at a time when colonial institutions were still geared primarily towards teaching civil engineering, American (and British) collaboration, Indian capital, the policies of the princely state of Mysore, and German expertise played an important role in the birth and development of aircraft manufacturing in India.