In ‘Engineering a Nation’, Aparajith Ramnath Reconstructs the Life and Legacy of India’s Most Influential Engineer

The New India Foundation has awarded Aparajith Ramnath the prestigious Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2025 for his ambitious biography, Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya. Selected from a competitive shortlist by an eminent jury including N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, and historian Srinath Raghavan, the work stands out for its meticulous scholarship in reconstructing the life of arguably the most famous Indian engineer of the 20th century. 

As we sit down to discuss his award-winning work with Ramnath, it becomes clear that this biography represents years of painstaking research across archives, site visits, and an attempt to understand not just a man, but an entire era of Indian modernisation. The book grapples with a figure whose influence extended far beyond the technical realm into the very foundations of independent India's development philosophy—and whose century-long life witnessed the nation's transformation from colony to independent state.

Beyond the Engineer's Day Icon

M. Visvesvaraya (1861-1962) occupies a curious position in Indian collective memory. Every engineer recognises his name—15 September, his birthday, is celebrated as Engineers' Day—yet paradoxically, as Ramnath observes in our conversation, "very little is known about his engineering career." Instead, popular accounts focus on his role as Diwan of Mysore, leaving the technical foundations of his influence largely unexplored. "We think of him as an engineer, and of course, Engineers Day is on his birthday. You ask anybody who is Visvesvaraya, the first thing they say is, he was a famous engineer, but actually very little is known about his engineering career," he notes.

This gap is particularly striking given that Visvesvaraya's working life spanned over 70 years, touching everything from flood prevention in Hyderabad to constitutional reform in the 1920s. Born in 1861 in Muddenahalli, a village in what is now Karnataka's Chikkaballapur district, Visvesvaraya lived through the entirety of India's transformation from colony to independent nation. His lifetime, stretching to 1962, encompassed what Ramnath describes as "the canonical period" of modern Indian history. "If you pick up a textbook on modern India, it will be either starting from Battle of Plassey or starting from the War of 1857, going up to 1947 and his life was 1861 to 1962," he explains. "It’s almost completely overlapping with that time."

An engineer himself who later discovered the history of science and technology, Ramnath found Visvesvaraya particularly intriguing during his doctoral research on the engineering profession in India. "He didn't seem to fit into the larger trends that I was seeing for Indian engineers at that time. He seemed to have gone much beyond what was possible for most Indian engineers, career-wise, and in terms of his impact," he recalls. 

The Research Challenge

Ramnath's 700-page volume, with approximately 500 pages of text, plus extensive footnotes and bibliography, emerged from what he describes as "an iterative process" of research and writing. 

The research took him across multiple archives—from the Maharashtra State Archives for Visvesvaraya's work in Bombay PWD to the Telangana archives for his Hyderabad projects, and the British Library for material on his time as Diwan. Beyond archival work, Ramnath made site visits to locations such as Visvesvaraya's engineering college in Pune. "At least I can go and visit the site, because it still exists. So I went there, looked at the layout, and tried to imagine what it must have been like in his time," he explains. This immersive approach helped fill gaps where documentary evidence was lacking.

Crucially, Ramnath approached his subject analytically rather than hagiographically. "I wanted to understand him in an analytical fashion, not in a kind of hero-worshipping fashion," he emphasises. "I respect his achievements greatly, and I think he’s a very inspiring figure but biography writing has to be more objective and, and that's what he would have wanted."

From Engineer to Nation-Builder

The book reveals a figure who had to contend with colonial racial prejudices from his student days at Poona Civil Engineering College, where British authorities held that Indians were inherently unsuited for engineering careers. When Visvesvaraya topped his class and joined the Public Works Department in 1884, he faced a glass ceiling he would never breach—symbolised poignantly by being awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind medal in 1906 but denied its gold edition because he was Indian.

Visvesvaraya's subsequent career in the princely states—particularly his work on the Osman Sagar reservoir in Hyderabad and, crucially, his tenure as Diwan of Mysore from 1912 to 1918—saw him transform from engineer to technocratic administrator. The Krishnaraja Sagar dam, completed in its early phases in 1911, represented a major triumph that preceded both the Nehruvian dam projects of the 1950s and even America's Tennessee Valley Authority dams of the 1930s. Under his stewardship, Mysore industrialised rapidly, establishing iron and steel works, major dams, and factories producing everything from sandalwood oil to electric bulbs—transforming Bangalore into one of India's most technologically robust regions by independence.

For Ramnath, Visvesvaraya's most significant contribution lies not in any single engineering feat but in "his thinking on national development, which for him primarily means improving the material prosperity of the nation and eradicating poverty, creating a comfortable, hygienic and well ordered national life for as many people as possible." This vision remained consistent throughout his life. "You can see that everything else that he does, his work as irrigation engineer, what he does as Diwan, his interventions in education, his interventions in economics, all are directed towards that goal," Ramnath observes. "I think that his biggest legacy is as a development thinker, as a technocrat, as someone who believes in the power of science and technology to solve these large problems."

His famous declaration "Industrialise or perish!" placed him in direct ideological opposition to Gandhi's advocacy for village economies, representing what one contemporary account described as "the irresolvable tug-of-war betwixt modernity and tradition."

Perhaps most remarkably, after resigning as Diwan in 1918—partly due to his inability to engage with the complexities of caste politics and the non-Brahmin movement—Visvesvaraya embarked on a 40-year career as elder statesman. He produced what scholars describe as "dozens, perhaps hundreds of documents" on constitutional reform and economic planning. His 1920 book Reconstructing India advocated for dominion status, and he maintained close relationships with Congress leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mukund Ramrao Jayakar whilst remaining in dialogue with British officialdom. 

Limitations and Contemporary Relevance

Ramnath identifies critical blind spots in Visvesvaraya’s achievements, particularly relevant to contemporary debates. The philosophy of "domination over nature"—where Visvesvaraya considered unused river water flowing to the sea as "waste"—failed to account for environmental impacts. "For him, everything had to be used in a way that was of use to humanity but we now realise that some of those interventions have ecological impacts which are quite serious," Ramnath observes. 

Similarly, Visvesvaraya's modernisation model, based on observing nations like the United States and Japan, overlooked how colonialism and slavery underpinned their development. Most tellingly, Visvesvaraya's faith in rational solutions sometimes meant he "underestimated human nature's intricacies." As Ramnath explains, "He would say, Okay, this is a rational solution. This is good for everyone. Why don't you go along with it? But people don't always move like that. They have sentimental attachments to particular places. People don't always do a cost-benefit analysis when going with a particular policy."

In reconstructing this storied life with remarkable nuance and depth, Ramnath has produced not merely a biography but a lens through which to examine India's complex relationship with modernity, technology, and development—questions that remain urgently relevant as the nation continues to grapple with the legacy of its most influential engineer-statesman.