ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Splitting Modernisms: Art and Industry in India's Nuclear Program

• In Event: Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy and the State

English Abstract

I examine how Homi J. Bhabha's triple role as physicist, artist, and patron created a striking internal contradiction within India's atomic energy program itself: exhibitionary practices promoting aesthetic modernism clashed with the institution's own nuclear modernization agenda. Drawing on TIFR/DAE archives and museum displays, I trace how this visual culture—emerging from within the same institutional space—subtly undermined the program's industrial and technological imperatives.

Author

• Dwai Banerjee, Science, Technology, and Society (STS), MIT