The First 10 South Asian Undergraduate Students at MIT
Starting in 1880, the earliest South Asian students came to Tech from what was then British-ruled India, encompassing present day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They enrolled at MIT as Special Students and graduated without a formal degree. It was only in 1907, about forty years after MIT’s founding, that the very first South Asian received an undergraduate degree from the Institute. Over the next two decades, a couple of students from India graduated from MIT with an SB in Engineering every few years. These first ten South Asian undergraduates were highly qualified men who had already completed a university degree in India. They belonged to a generation that was committed to making India free of colonial rule by modernizing their nation through technological improvement and entrepreneurial ventures. They were deeply influenced by Swadeshi, a nationalist ideology that called for the boycott of British manufactured goods and colonial educational institutions, and the establishment of Indian-owned and managed businesses and universities. MIT’s earliest South Asian alumni were also connected to several princely states that were not directly ruled by the British. Some students were sponsored by princes who employed them on their return to India to bring the state-of-the-art engineering to their states.
