Birendra Chandra Gupta 1907, SM 1922
Birendra Chandra Gupta '07, SM '22 was the first South Asian undergraduate student at MIT. Arriving from Dacca, India (now Dhaka, Bangladesh) in 1905, Gupta studied Electrical Engineering at the Institute. While a student, he worked at the General Electric Plant in Lynn, MA, where he met his future wife Ethel Colcord. They married in India in 1910.
After returning to India, Gupta refused to work at British-owned companies. Instead he worked as an electrical engineer in the princely-state of Kashmir at the Srinagar Substation and Silk Factory for two years, before moving back to Bengal to teach electrical engineering at the Bengal Engineering College in Howrah.
Gupta then returned to MIT with his wife and three daughters, as a graduate student in Engineering. Like many other South Asians at MIT who came after him, he was vocal about his criticism of British colonial rule. While at MIT, in an interview to the Boston Daily Globe in 1922 at the height of the non-cooperation movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, Gupta stated that India would “take back home rule from the British”.
Gupta interview, Boston Daily Globe, 1922