Ishwar Das Varshnei
Ishwar Das Varshnei
Ishwar Das Varshnei—a pioneer of India’s glass industry and the first President of the Indian Ceramic Industry—attended MIT as a Special Student in Chemical Engineering from 1904-1905. Varshnei was born in Aligarh in 1879 to a well-known cloth merchant. After receiving his early education in Aligarh, Varshnei went to Japan to study sugar technology at Tokyo’s Higher Institute of Technical Training. He switched to studying glassmaking in response to a claim that indigenous glassmaking was impossible in India. Varshnei arrived in the United States in 1904 sailing from Kobe (Japan) to San Francisco in August 1904 on the SS Coptic. He went to the US to see the 1904 World's Fair (The Louisana Purchase Exhibition) intending to continue on to Europe. But instead he chose to stay on at MIT, impressed with the technical education and training in industry there and enrolled as what he would later call as “a special postgraduate student in glass". During his time in Boston, Varshnei worked in a factory for three months.
On leaving MIT, Varshnei toured Europe as part of a delegation of American Chemists, continued his education in Germany and worked at another factory in Germany before returning to Aligarh in 1906 to start his own glass company.
The institutes that he studied in in Tokoyo and Germany were like MIT, simultaneously combining study and training in industry. In a way, these models were also the inspiration for his ID Technical Institute which he established in Bahjoi, India
Technology Review: (1907, page 137)
Around this time, Varshnei was recruited to lead the glassmaking efforts of the newly formed Paisa Fund, which sought to not only produce glass, but also to produce glass workers. More broadly, the Paisa Fund Glass Works—established in part by nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak— offered hands-on technical instruction to artists and employees, and supported Swadeshi industries. Varshnei leveraged his technical skills to innovate and educate within the glass technology industry and the factory went on to provide significant employment training and glass products that helped maintain India’s economy—and independence efforts—during World War I. After his contract ended in 1915, Varshnei went on to work at a glass factory in Ambala and eventually opened another glass factory in Bahjoi called U.P. Glass Works which became the first Indian business to successfully produce window panes.
Varshnei was a highly skilled entrepreneur who influenced and trained many of India’s future glass producers.
Brief Biography of Ishwar Das Varshnei, Technology Review, 1907
Ishwar Das Varshnei registration page