To engineers across India, September heralds the one day of the year – National Engineer’s Day – when their tribe is acknowledged. For this, they have Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (1861-1962), who was born on September 15 in a village called Muddenahalli 60 km northeast of Bengaluru and celebrated during his lifetime as ‘one of the very ablest of India’s engineers,’ to thank.
Knighted in 1915 by King George V, Sir MV was so admired in his own state that he acquired folk hero status, becoming a metaphor for extraordinary intelligence, rectitude, and discipline. To this day, in Kannadiga homes, it is common to describe a bright youngster as ‘Vishveshvarayya-n taley’ (Visvesvaraya’s brain). Legends abound about his uprightness, like the one in which Sir MV fetched a different pen and inkwell to help a friend fill a form, instead of using the ones he had been using for his work, because he would not use the government’s resources for personal business. And his near-unreasonable insistence on punctuality had even ministers showing up at his door five minutes early, knowing that they would be turned away if they knocked even a minute after the appointed time.
If this aspect of his personality made him an unusual Indian, there was another, that put him in ideological conflict with his towering compatriot, Mahatma Gandhi. Even though Sir MV was the older by eight years (and a couple of weeks), it was he who was the more ‘modern’ in his approach to development; he embraced the western industrial-capitalist model, exhorting the country to ‘industrialise or perish’, while Gandhiji advocated for self-sufficient agrarian village republics. So much of Sir MV’s work as a civil engineer, however, was about building dams, irrigation systems, and reservoirs, all of which benefited farmers, that Gandhiji had nothing but praise for him.
{{/usCountry}}If this aspect of his personality made him an unusual Indian, there was another, that put him in ideological conflict with his towering compatriot, Mahatma Gandhi. Even though Sir MV was the older by eight years (and a couple of weeks), it was he who was the more ‘modern’ in his approach to development; he embraced the western industrial-capitalist model, exhorting the country to ‘industrialise or perish’, while Gandhiji advocated for self-sufficient agrarian village republics. So much of Sir MV’s work as a civil engineer, however, was about building dams, irrigation systems, and reservoirs, all of which benefited farmers, that Gandhiji had nothing but praise for him.
{{/usCountry}}In a remarkable career spanning seven decades – he retired from the board of Tata Steel at the age of 95 – Sir MV spent only 23 years ‘in harness’, working for the British Indian government in Bombay Presidency. In that time, he designed an intricate irrigation system in the Deccan Plateau, gave recommendations for water supply and drainage systems in Aden (today’s Yemen), and patented his design of automated weir floodgates for dams. In 1908, having opted for voluntary retirement, he travelled to Europe for a closer study of industrialized nations.
In 1909, after a successfully executed commission from the Nizam of Hyderabad to design a flood-protection system for the city had turned him into a celebrity, the Mysore Diwan, V P Madhava Rao, invited Sir MV to take over as Chief Engineer of Mysore, which he graciously accepted. Thus, at long last, did the best-known alumnus of Bengaluru’s Central College wend his way homewards.
In 1912, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV appointed Sir MV Diwan of Mysore. In a too-brief seven-year stint, he founded several enduring institutions, including the State Bank of Mysore, the Government Engineering College (now the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering), the Bangalore Press (whose calendars continue to grace so many homes), the Century Club, and a whole slew of industries and factories that catapulted Mysore unequivocally into the 20th century. In 1918, the staunch secularist and meritocrat, who believed that religion was a plague and caste inequalities were best addressed by means of education and community leadership, courted huge controversy when he resigned in a huff, in opposition to the Maharaja’s proposal to bring in affirmative action.
Today, in Sir MV’s erstwhile home on Museum Road, his descendant Satish Mokshagundam lovingly preserves, among other souvenirs, the peepal leaf-shaped medallion that was bestowed on ‘Thatha’ in 1955, making him the very first recipient from Karnataka of the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)