Satish Dhawan

In writing on J.R.D. Tata, Dhawan (1994), then about ten years into his retirement, began with these words: “In human affairs, it is given to some to embody attributes and live a life that raises them far above the ordinary. Such individuals leave indelible marks on the sands of time.” He also commented on the “fervour of his vision”. These remarks could well be made about Dhawan himself. It is hard to believe that he accomplished so much considering that he retired around 64 years of age and had no executive role after that (although he continued to serve in an advisory capacity on the Space Commission, National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL), and Raman Research Institute (RRI)). What did he himself think of his life? Could he have foreseen his impact? To my great regret, I never asked him about his personal sense of accomplishments and philosophy. Nor have I had any special access to his private papers. The part I know well is his published science, but it is impossible to describe it better than Narasimha (2011). It is thus uncertain that I have a consistent insight to offer, yet I am emboldened to write this article in equal parts because of the high esteem and affection in which I held Dhawan and the regard I have for the editors of Bhāvanā. But I must warn the reader that it comprises a mixture of facts and personal views that emerged naturally but randomly over the years.

Much has already been written about Dhawan in blogs, interviews, and personal recollections of people who worked with him, and also in the form of brief obituaries from noted individuals such as his thesis advisor, H.W. Liepmann of Caltech, and his long-time colleague in aeronautics, S.R. Valluri. But I should cite a few articles that stand out. Narasimha (2002) gives an excellent account of Dhawan’s mentorship of students, personal charm, versatility, creativity, and transformational impact on the Indian Institute of Science (IISc); Kalam (2003) and Kasturirangan (2003) provide glimpses of Dhawan’s leadership at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), his capacity to conceptualize, plan and execute the Space agenda for the country, his ability to bring out the best in numerous people with whom he worked at different levels, his love of the environment, trees, bird flight, etc., and his conviction that the benefits of high-level science should reach common people. Narasimha and Siddhartha (2015) provide a brief summary of his career and professional impact. There are also some informative articles in the same issue of Resonance to which K. Kasturirangan, A.P.J. Kalam, and R. Narasimha contributed. These authors, and almost everyone who has said something about Dhawan, have stressed the universality of his character.

Dhawan’s reputation remains strong some 20 years after he passed away. It is obvious that the country and his former colleagues remember him well and fondly. His name is now enshrined in several different ways: Satish Dhawan Endowed Visiting Chair established by ISRO at the Department of Aerospace Engineering of IISc; Satish Dhawan Visiting Professor/Scientist Program launched by IISc; the naming of the satellite launch centre in Sriharikota as the Satish Dhawan Space Center; Satish Dhawan Fellowship at Caltech, established by ISRO; Satish Dhawan memorial lecture at the Asian Congress of Fluid Mechanics; renaming of his alma mater in Ludhiana as the Satish Chander Dhawan Government College; naming of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Building at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar as the Satish Dhawan Block, etc.

How exactly does one build one’s reputation so it stays intact beyond one’s lifetime? We also know scientists whose reputations were strong while alive but diminished in lustre later; some others, like Dhawan, have fared well. There are some delicate issues here but, presumably, posthumous reputation requires adherence to some general principles while one is alive: mean what you say, appreciate and support others without seeking benefits for yourself, accept responsibility without berating colleagues, be constant so others may know what to expect, set a high threshold of performance for your co-workers, and stand with them in their successes and failures alike, and most importantly, possess an inner compass that prevents you from going astray. All of this is somehow subsumed under the dictum, `act with integrity’. Dhawan had that characteristic in abundance.

It is given to some to embody attributes and live a life that raises them far above the ordinary

In the Mahabharata episode of Yaksha Prashna, Yama, disguised as a Yaksha, poses a number of questions to the oldest of the Pandava princes, Yudhishtira, on the proper values that should guide one’s life. One of them was, “What is the right path?” Yudhishtira answers: “Arguments lead to no certain conclusion; the shrutis are different from one another; there is no one Rishi whose authority is accepted by all; the truth about Dharma and duty is hidden in the cave of our hearts; therefore, that alone is the right path that the great have traversed.” This answer rings true to me. Great people live among the rest of us and handle the same vicissitudes of life, but emerge victorious because their intuition is finely honed. We can, of course, admire them from a distance but can do better by learning a little more about them to personalize in our lives. It is one reason why we celebrate such people, and cherish their birthdays and centenaries.

My interactions

I have reluctantly decided to include a few personal details here as a partial basis for my perspective on Dhawan. But I acknowledge and regret that they put me as part of the narrative.

I joined the Indian Institute of Science as an Aeronautics Master’s student in the fall of 1968. Dhawan was already the Director of IISc for some six years. The initial challenges and intrigues connected to his appointment, posed by some senior faculty at IISc–-Dhawan was only 41 at the time of his appointment–-had been resolved and subsided by then, and he was well-rooted in his position. Thus, he and I were many layers removed–-me at the base of the pyramid whose pinnacle he had reached years earlier.

My personal encounters with Dhawan were few and sporadic, and the outcomes of some early ones were, in fact, not favourable to me; I say this because my admiration for Dhawan was not spontaneous–-but slow to develop and hence deep-rooted and rational. In the first year of my Master’s Degree, I interviewed for a student position in a new branch of aeronautics, called Rockets and Missiles. At that time, Dhawan was interested in the details of running IISc and would sit on almost all committees. He had assembled an array of about a dozen professors to sit on the other side of the table, Dhawan in the middle dominating the proceedings. I was intimidated by him and my performance was feeble. I was not selected–-quite fairly, I should say–-but never once regretted it.

The impression that some of us students had of Dhawan was that he had become unapproachable after he had become the Director (in contrast to the time he was a professor). We had heard stories that he was somewhat imperious with some professors, and was quite prone to giving them motivational lectures on how they should do research, why quality matters, and things like that–-almost as if he was talking to children. But I saw him quite differently more than once. A few student leaders once went to his office after the magazine Blitz published an unsavoury article about Dhawan’s management of IISc. One of us asked him why he chose not to fight it, to which he responded that he could simply not afford to divert his institutional responsibilities as Director—though it was clear that the article had pained him a lot, especially because he thought that even such baseless accusations could drag down IISc. There I saw him as a very different person from his public image, in which he rarely showed his emotional or personal side.

Some three years after I went abroad for my postdoctoral work, my IISc professors advised me that it was time for me to write to Dhawan for a job, which I did. Some seven months went by and no response came. In my moment of dejection, I accidentally saw on a bulletin board the advertisement for an assistant professor at Yale and immediately sent my application. I received a call for an interview three weeks later and had a job offer a month after that. Soon after I accepted that position, however, I received a letter from Dhawan offering a position, which began with apologies for the tardiness, etc. It was only much later that I understood the serious considerations that he went through at that time, and why it took so long. Be that as it may, I wrote back that I had just accepted the Yale job, and so couldn’t honour his offer immediately; I would, however, take it the following year if he would keep it open until then. I am sure many people from the U.S. had promised to take a job a year later but never did; “another one of those!” he may have thought, and didn’t respond.

Great people live among the rest of us and handle the same vicissitudes of life, but emerge victorious because their intuition is finely honed

Dhawan retired a few years later (in 1981 from IISc and then in 1984 from ISRO) and, while on a visit to Bangalore, I received a call asking if we could meet. I was greatly pleased to meet him at his ISRO office in Cauvery Bhavan; if he remembered anything about our past interactions, he didn’t say–-and I didn’t ask. Our meeting was very cordial and leisurely, and it was then, and in a few later conversations, that I learnt more about him: his love for reading (with a lament that he could no longer read as rapidly as earlier), his dream and challenge of making India’s space program and communications technology relevant to its society, the numerous Indian scientists and engineers he had met, especially during the time he was heading the Avro inquiry and his ISRO years–-and how they would thrive with only modest mentoring (at which he was superb from all accounts)–-some amusing stories about the great scientists he knew, the call he received from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi when he was at a party in Hans Liepmann’s house at Caltech (he was on his sabbatical) offering him the position of Chairman of ISRO (I regret I didn’t press him for details), why it was important for ISRO to be outside the Delhi orbit, etc.

I never detected in him the “old-boys-network” or “back-slapping” mentality

Among the items I remember discussing were my own aspirations. I mentioned a measure by which I would judge myself as a success or otherwise, and it was Dhawan who told me that success or failure is not a “black and white thing” but had many shades of grey; that while he had no objection to the specific goal in front of me, I should go easy on it. It impressed me to hear this from a man who had met several challenges in life successfully, transcending various hurdles along the way.

In one conversation, Dhawan expressed mild regret that he didn’t keep up with his research, contrasting himself with Professors C.N.R. Rao and R. Narasimha; delivering on his responsibilities was of paramount importance to him. Research is mostly a personal accomplishment (sometimes with a small group of students and colleagues) but leading a large organization is about enabling others to do their best and taking pride in their accomplishments–-and he was by and large content with that outlook.

Now I wish to cite two instances that reflect my personal gratitude towards Dhawan; they should leave no doubt in the reader’s mind about how I felt about him. Around 1992, Professor R. Narasimha made a serious attempt to have me succeed him as the Director of NAL, and I knew that Dhawan was in agreement. Under different circumstances, it would have been a terrific opportunity, but my preoccupation with myself allowed less appreciation for the possibilities, so it didn’t come to pass. But I am to this day grateful to both of them for their confidence. Secondly, when I was chosen as the inaugural Satish Dhawan (visiting) Professor at IISc, I regarded it as a great honour. I gave a lecture on Ludwig Prandtl during my term as Dhawan Professor, which he and his wife attended. I told him that my task was to entertain him, and I tried. I visited him at his home once later. Likewise, after he passed away, the Asian Congress of Fluid Mechanics instituted a lecture in his honour, and I regarded it as a distinctive privilege to have been asked to deliver the first of them.

Dhawan’s work on public record

Dhawan’s life encompassed many aspects such as teaching, research, technology development, the leadership of academies and large national institutions, providing scientific advice to the Indian government and various scientific institutions at the highest levels, etc. Exceptional performance in any one of them would have earned him kudos (and most others would be content with it), but Dhawan was superb in all of them. But his lasting legacy is his personal research (of which teaching was an integral part), his successful transformation of IISc, and his leadership of the space program. His contributions hidden from the public eye, for example as an advisor to NAL, RRI, and other governmental agencies, are not yet fully assessed, and would be a worthy project for someone to undertake.

a. Teaching: When I joined IISc, there were still some people in the Aeronautical Engineering department who had attended Dhawan’s courses and thought highly of them. They would agree with Narasimha’s (2002) statement that “Students liked his classes very much indeed, and for a variety of reasons; the first of these was… Dhawan’s general cheerfulness in his approach to the subjects as well as students. He took his teaching very seriously, and supplied his class with plenty of notes, datasheets, diagrams and so on. He worked hard on all these–-one would often see him in his office late at night–-and he expected the students to work just as hard–-which many of them cheerfully did.” He obviously mentored some excellent students (who were, however, mostly left to their own resources after he became busy with the directorship). If he had done nothing else but mentor the young Roddam Narasimha, with whom he did some spectacular research and whom he nudged towards Caltech, that is important enough. (That Narasimha would have done as well under any other circumstances does not negate the statement.) There were other successes such as S.K. Ojha, M.A. Badrinarayanan, G.N.V. Rao and T.S. Prahlad.

b. Scientific research and experimental aerodynamics: As a researcher, Dhawan did not publish much. At IISc he had time enough before becoming the Director to build various facilities and get some research students started on their work. Even though he left active science when he was only 42 and published very little research after that, each of his papers was thorough and displayed excellent taste and became classical. They reflected his great skill in making things with his hands, a trait that he retained throughout his life.

(i) The Caltech work

Shock boundary layer interactions (Liepmann, Roshko and Dhawan 1951)
The paper is important because it was pioneering, but it continues to be cited even today on occasion. In this work, the authors measured the reflection characteristics of shock waves from a flat surface with laminar as well as turbulent boundary layers. The Mach number was about 1.5 and the Reynolds number about 10^4. They studied upstream influence of a shock wave impinging on a given boundary layer, showing it to be of the order of 50 boundary layer thicknesses in the laminar case as compared with about 5 in the turbulent. They showed that separation almost always occurred in the laminar boundary layer, but was restricted to a region of finite extent upstream of the shock. In the turbulent case, no separation was found.

Direct measurement of skin friction (Dhawan 1952)
The boundary layer theory was well established by Dhawan’s time, but the measurement of the friction at the wall, which is one of the key parameters in the theory, had not been measured directly. In fact, Dhawan was motivated by an important technological challenge of that era, namely supersonic boundary layers. After making a survey of existing methods, he concluded that the experimental determination of skin friction by existing indirect methods was subject to many errors. He built a device to measure local skin friction on a flat plate by measuring the force exerted upon a very small movable part of the surface of the flat plate. His measurement of the skin friction in low-speed flows, from the laminar state all the way to the turbulent state through the transition region, went into the famous book on boundary layers by H. Schlichting almost immediately, and became world-famous. He went on to measure the friction in high-speed flows, including some in supersonic flows. He noted very good agreement with von Kármán’s theory, but prudently resisted the temptation to endorse it.

(ii) Father of experimental aerodynamics in India

Dhawan has been described as the father of modern experimental research in fluid dynamics in India. To see why he deserves this recognition, I will quote from Dhawan (1982), but without his figures:

On a personal level, most people recall seeing him always with a confident smile even if there were some failures along the way

Dhawan (1982) listed the following areas of research that he initiated (I have combined two of them in (a)): (a) Studies in transition and controlled production of spots (Narasimha 1958, Pantulu 1962, Rao 1966); (b) Reverse transition in diverging channel flow (Badrinarayanan 1958, 1966) and in supersonic flows negotiating a corner (Vivekanandan 1963); (c) Leading edge separation and laminar bubbles (Ojha 1965); (d) Boundary flow control and wall jets (Parthasarathy 1964). The most famous scientific outcome from those days is the paper by Dhawan and Narasimha (1958), which I shall briefly discuss below. Among the above themes, Narasimha and his students followed up on reverse transition in particular (e.g., Narasimha and Sreenivasan 1979); it is astonishing that it took three generations of work to understand the problem well.

Dhawan published little with his students but made an exception to the transition work with Narasimha. When making the skin friction measurements at Caltech, he was already aware that the transition did not occur in a steady fashion at a fixed critical Reynolds number. He endorsed the intermittent nature of the transition (as had been noted by then at Dryden’s group at the National Bureau of Standards and briefly by Liepmann at Caltech), and offered the physical picture that the transition may be related to the work of Emmons at Harvard, who had observed that the breakdown of the flow into turbulence occurred in spots that grow and coalesce. Emmons had thought that the spots were formed everywhere in the laminar boundary layer; but this did not agree with measurements. Dhawan and Narasimha made the bold hypothesis that the spot creation originated at a fixed position in the direction of the flow (though randomly in time and spanwise direction), and showed by ingenious measurements that the inferences from their hypothesis agreed well with their own data and those of others. Besides giving a definite meaning to the notion of a fixed transition position along the flow direction, their conceptual framework explained all the main features of transition in simple terms, and laid out the fact that, while the breakdown is abrupt, the evolution to fully developed turbulence is gradual. With the so-called intermittency factor as one parameter, their work enabled predictions of the boundary layer thickness, local skin friction, etc. The work is indeed a tour de force!

(iii) Bird flight
I will make a distinction between research and scholarship. Dhawan’s scholarship comes across uniquely, I think, in his book on bird flight and which found expression first in a longish Sadhana article (Dhawan 1991) written after his retirement, though he had been working on it for the best part of twenty years prior, and had presented it at various places; the Sadhana article was also issued as a slim volume by the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1991 and by the National Book Trust in 2002. The book, which I reread in large parts before writing this article, is a true delight. It is an erudite essay that pulls together important topics like bird anatomy, kinematics of bird flight, muscle metabolism, aerodynamics, flight mechanics of soaring and powered flight, etc. I am sure that Dhawan spent enormous amounts of time on observations including high-speed movies of different birds in various flight configurations. He delighted himself with the fact that the science of flight has much to learn from bird flight, and was taken by the diversity, complexity, and flying habits that differed vastly from one species to another.

c. Transformation of the Indian Institute of Science: Even as late as 1968, most departments at IISc were quite traditional and operated as silos under department heads who ran them essentially according to their norms. And it is hard to imagine that such a pre-eminent place did not cover subjects such as pure mathematics, theoretical physics, ecology, atmospheric science and oceanography, computer science, automation, solid state chemistry, molecular biology, biophysics, and the like–-in short, anything modern. Nor did it own a decent computer (a few IISc researchers went to TIFR, Mumbai, for their computational work). Dhawan was instrumental in making huge changes that brought IISc to modernity. I myself believe that some of these changes were instigated by a review of the Institute as a whole which occurred in the early 1970s (I met the committee as a student representative); it is amazing that IISc, under several directors since, hasn’t had an institutional review. It is also possible that the year’s sabbatical that Dhawan spent at Caltech was instrumental in shaping his transformational thoughts.

From a distance, it appears to me that Dhawan’s contributions in this regard, having long-lasting institutional impact, comprised the following:

(i) Administrative: Dhawan instituted the Divisional and Decanal structure which brought the administration closer to the intellectual pursuits of IISc’s departments and centres; he replaced permanent department heads by department chairmen with fixed tenure (with the decision-making now shared by the so-called Committee of Professors). This has had a huge impact on IISc’s mindset.

(ii) Intellectual growth: Dhawan was instrumental in establishing many new activities (some of which are listed above) in IISc by means of independent centres or units which brought the Institute closer to frontiers of science and engineering. Among the new centres was an unusual one called the Center for Applications of Science and Technology for Rural Areas, ASTRA. It was clear that he wanted to bridge the gaps between focus areas of the departments and, starting some new centres, instead of shaking up the departments themselves, was his way of injecting interdisciplinary research into IISc. The centres unshackled some creative professors already at IISc by opening up the boundaries between disciplines and enriching the whole environment.

(iii) Dhawan saw this expansion as the opportunity to recruit first-rate people such as Krishna Athreya, Madhav Gadgil, Sulochana Gadgil, N. Mukunda, J. Pasupathy, R. Rajaraman, G.N. Ramachandran, C.N.R. Rao and E.C.G. Sudarshan, to name a few. Though parts of the institutional machinery were involved in these recruitments, Dhawan’s personal prestige and engagement were what enabled them. Some of the centres were built around exceptional people.

Dhawan’s ISRO appointment in 1972 distracted him from running the Institute to the same level of attention to detail. Thus, while he was responsible for initiating this transformation, he began to depend more and more on others to execute it. Some IISc professors were unhappy with him because he could not pay as much attention to IISc as before and, surprisingly for IISc with no history of formal unrest among faculty and students, there were agitations among both students and faculty (for different reasons). The main point is that Dhawan responded to the demands for change with a sensitivity that is characteristic of genuine leadership, and IISc became a better institution in the end.

d. Chairman of ISRO, Chairman of the Space Commission, and Secretary for the Department of Space: Dhawan’s predecessor, Vikram Sarabhai, was a visionary scientific leader who gave a blueprint for the Indian space program and, more importantly, had convinced the government about its importance for the country’s progress, following the Russian Sputnik launch. He created ISRO and gathered good scientists and engineers, but Sarabhai was playing several roles at the time of his death: for instance, he was the Director of the Physical Research Laboratory (which he had earlier founded) and the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He also had many other interests: he was instrumental in establishing the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad; created the Electronics Corporation of India in Hyderabad; had a role in running the family business; and, with his famous dancer wife, had founded the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad.

If Sarabhai laid the foundation for India’s space program, Dhawan built a superb superstructure and translated the vision into reality. Just as some IISc professors were unhappy, some in ISRO initially thought that he was a reluctant leader because of his insistence on keeping the directorship of IISc, but this distrust evaporated quickly. As a practical and creative engineer who loved details of planning, design, and execution, he built an open culture of technical reviews that were highly educative and rewarding for the participants, and involved external experts from IISc, the IITs, NAL, HAL, etc.

If Sarabhai laid the foundation for India’s Space Program, Dhawan built a superb superstructure and translated the vision into reality

While Dhawan wanted ISRO to remain away from the Delhi orbit, he clearly realized that it was necessary to restructure its links with the government. He created the Department of Space and the Space Commission with a direct link to the Prime Minister. Combining the offices of Chairman of ISRO, Chairman of the Space Commission, and Secretary for the Department of Space in one person ensured seamless integration of concepts, political support and funding. Under his stewardship, ISRO progressed greatly in the development of launch vehicles, satellites, and space applications, and expanded into various centres and facilities with specialized activities.

Perspective on Dhawan’s uniqueness

India has been blessed with many excellent academic as well as science and technology leaders, each with a different style. Since proper style is as important as the substance in instilling confidence, internally and externally, I will list some characteristics of Dhawan’s style of leadership, as I saw them. While Dhawan’s cautious nature would not allow him to create new institutions (unlike, say, Bhabha and Sarabhai), he transformed every institution he led or advised, and left his own special imprint on them.

a. On a personal level, most people recall seeing him always with a confident smile (even if there were some failures along the way). He injected openness to the process of making decisions and was deliberate in coming to conclusions. His management style combined grace and sternness with a commitment to objectivity–-and I never detected in him the “old-boys-network” or “back-slapping” mentality. If he showed any impatience, it reflected his frustration when an otherwise good person did not perform adequately under pressure in front of people like himself. He valued being both proper and, at the same time, projecting the appearance of propriety.

b. He appreciated the talent present in his organizations, and that within the country at large, and inspired many because he never put himself ahead of the well-being of his team. As a scientific leader and administrator, he transcended various divisive tendencies that affect lesser leaders and served his country exceptionally well when he had the opportunities to do so, and gracefully retired when his turn was over.

c. He had an impressive commitment to social values. It is fortunate that both Sarabhai and Dhawan had championed the view that space was to be aligned with civilian uses, not military.

d. While Dhawan was close to political power, he did not succumb to the temptation of becoming a structured part of it. For instance, when he was offered the position to head ISRO, he insisted that its headquarters be located away from Delhi, probably one of his important decisions.

e. Dhawan did not take a public stance on any controversial topic, as long as he was in service. I was pleased to discover, however, that he was occasionally more open to embracing controversial positions after retirement. For example, he went out of his way to defend in print his erstwhile colleague in the so-called ISRO spy scandal (Dhawan et al. 1997). It is clear that he felt that ISRO might have been played by a foreign organization for its own ulterior purposes. It similarly speaks to his commitment to the environment that in 1988 he signed a petition asking for a fair hearing of the controversial Narmada Valley dam project.

While Dhawan was close to political power, he did not succumb to the temptation of becoming a structured part of it

Most important of all, Dhawan was a great human being. Narasimha (2002) quite accurately stated: “With his death, the country lost one of its most distinguished sons, and the scientific community a truly unimpeachable representative.” It is no surprise that he received many awards, both national and international. Among them was the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1999. The citation calls him “one of our foremost scientists, teachers, and national builders… who has made multidimensional contributions to scientific education, research, policy formulation, and implementation and is deeply concerned with the solution of national problems through the use of science.” I believe it sums him up very well. He himself might have thought that he was just doing his job!

References

1. M.A. Badrinarayanan. 1958. “An experimental investigation of base flows at supersonic speeds.” AIISc thesis. Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
2. M.A. Badrinarayanan. 1966. “Inverse transition from turbulent to laminar flow in a two-dimensional channel.” PhD thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
3. S. Dhawan. 1952. “Direct measurements of skin friction.” NACA TR 1121.
4. S. Dhawan. 1982. “A glimpse of fluid mechanics research in Bangalore 25 years ago.” In Surveys in Fluid Mechanics, eds. R. Narasimha and S.M. Deshpande, printed for the Indian Academy of Sciences by Macmillan India Press, pp. 1-15.
5. S. Dhawan. 1994. “JRD Tata and the Indian aviation.” Curr. Sci. 66, 452-454.
6. S. Dhawan and R. Narasimha. 1958. “Some properties of boundary layer flow during the transition from laminar to turbulent motion.” J. Fluid Mech. 3, 418-436.
7. S. Dhawan, T.N. Seshan, U.R. Rao, Yash Pal, R. Narasimha and S. Chandrashekar. 1997. “ISRO spy scandal—An unending witch hunt.” Curr. Sci. 62, 359-360.
8. S. Dhawan. 1991. “Bird flight”. Sadhana 16, 275-352.
9. A.P.J. Kalam. 2003. “Satish Dhawan—A creative teacher.” Resonance 8, 56-62.
10. K. Kasturirangan. 2003. “About Prof. Satish Dhawan.” Resonance, 8, 48-55.
11. H.W. Liepmann, A. Roshko and S. Dhawan. 1951. “On reflection of shock waves from boundary layers.” NACA TN 2334. Also NACA Report 1100, 1952.
12. R. Narasimha. 1957. “A study of transition from laminar to turbulent flow in the boundary layer of a flat plate.” AIISc thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
13. R. Narasimha. 2002. “Satish Dhawan.” Curr. Sci. 82, 222-225.
14. R. Narasimha. 2011. “Satish Dhawan.” In Voyage through Turbulence‘. eds. P.A. Davidson, Y. Kaneda, H.K. Moffatt and K.R. Sreenivasan, Cambridge University Press, pp. 373-392.
15. R. Narasimha and V. Siddhartha. 2015. “Satish Dhawan.” Obituaries of Members of the US National Academy of Engineering. 19, 96-102.
16. R. Narasimha and K.R. Sreenivasan. 1979. “Relaminarization of fluid flows.” Adv. Appl. Mech. 19, 221.
17. S.K. Ojha. 1965. “A study of laminar boundary layers and separation bubbles near the leading edge of two-dimensional airfoils.” Ph.D. thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
18. P.V. Pantulu. 1962. “Studies on the transition from laminar to turbulent flow in a pipe.” MSc thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
19. S.P. Parthasarathy. 1964. “Two-dimensional turbulent wall jets with and without a constant outside stream.” MSc thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
20. G.N.V. Rao. 1966. “Effect of convex transverse surface curvature on transition and other properties of incompressible boundary layer.” PhD thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.
21. R. Vivekanandan. 1963. “A study of boundary layer expansion fan interactions near a sharp corner in supersonic flow.” MSc thesis, Dept. Aero. Engg., IISc.

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