46 Priya Jain Texas A&M University Between College and Town: Envisioning the First Indian MIT and the Planning of the Indian Institute of Technology (1951) in Kharagpur Abstract After India gained independence from British rule in 1947, the nation embarked on an ambitious technoscientific mission of planned progress. A major component of this development was higher education, and in a relatively short time, the government built a large number of new academic campuses. An early and important type of institute was a higher technical institute, and the first of its kind was built in 1951 at Kharagpur, seventy miles west from Calcutta. It was named the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and drew inspiration from none other than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. Yet, as this paper shows, the Indian condition was extraordinary—the requirements for living and learning at IIT-Kharagpur juxtaposed the fields of campus design and town planning to create, in hindsight, arguably India’s first college town. Previous architectural history accounts have largely overlooked and dismissed the planning and design for the campus. However, as this paper argues, IIT-Kharagpur informed many subsequent campus design ideas in India—greater integration of town planning principles, improved administrative procedures for campus development, and a shift in the selection of campus architects from the government to the private architectural sector. INTRODUCTION In 1969, almost twenty years into India’s independence, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored the publication of a reflective book titled Campus Design in India: Experience of a Developing Nation. 1 The Harvard-trained Indian architect Achyut P. Kanvinde (1916– 2002) and American architect H. James Miller coauthored this authoritative text. Arguably the first publication to focus on the architecture and planning of campuses in India, it signified the importance and exponential growth of higher education as part of India’s postwar developmental agenda, which led to an increase from a mere twenty universities prior to the World War II to almost eighty campuses within two decades after the end of the war. Indeed, the crowning achievement was the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Between 1951 and 1968, not one but five IITs were founded and built. In fact, in 1969, at the time of the publication of Campus Design in India, Kanvinde’s firm had just completed construction on the fourth IIT, built near Kanpur. At the same time, agricultural universities based on the land-grant college model in the US were also being set up in each Indian state, with Miller as design advisor for the ones in Hyderabad and Bangalore (renamed Bengaluru in 2014). 2 It was clear that the American paradigm of higher education and its architec- tural realization as a self-contained college campus was firmly established in India. However, the design and construction of the very first of these postwar institutes—IIT-Kharagpur (1951), which is located seventy miles west of Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in