The year 1876 is a significant mark in the timeline of the world’s scientific history. In the western hemisphere, USA’s first research university, that put the American higher education system on the path to world domination, was founded by Daniel Gilman, an educationist, blessed with the unfettered philanthropy worth $ 7 million left by the deceased businessman of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, to start a university and a hospital. The founding of the Johns Hopkins University was the most decisive event in the history of higher education in America, where advancement of knowledge through research was integrated with teaching, and the success of the model was shortly adopted in a number of institutions that emerged as the national asset and pride of America. The research universities played a pivotal role in the 20th century economic growth of the US through generation of new knowledge, advancement of new ideas, innovations, developments of products, creation of jobs and the overall health and wealth of that country.
The Birth of IACS
In the far east in India, the same year of 1876 witnessed the foundation of the first scientific research organization, the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, briefly IACS, by Dr Mahendralal Sircar, a medical practitioner and social reformer, in collaboration with his Jesuit priest friend, Reverend Father Eugene Lafont, with the same vision: “if our country is to advance at all and take rank and share her responsibilities with the civilized nation of the world, it can only be by means of Science…”. Sircar did not have the fortuity of any philanthropist’s windfall like Johns Hopkins or JN Tata. His organization was started with a paltry sum of Rs 80,000 accumulated over several years by donations from the city’s intellectuals that ushered in a period of what is known as the Science Movement. The fund was adequate, though, to acquire the iconic lecture hall of IACS, which was one of the largest in the city at the time, and to equip the laboratory with the state-of-the-art equipment to conduct research in physical sciences. But, it was inadequate to employ any full time scientist to conduct scientific research.
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Repeated pleas of the founder with eloquence and arguments to institute professorship at IACS didn’t yield adequate response from the affluent class of the society. As proclaimed by Sircar, “If we want to make scientific education worth, we must be unmindful of the cost. The cost whatever it may be would be nothing as proportion to the gain…. a Faraday, a Koch or a Pasteur would be a cheap purchase at a million…” After the demise of Sircar in 1904, the Indian Nation commented in the obituary note: ‘The Association is an institution, nobly conceived, but one in advance of the age, if not wholly unsuited to this country… No one in this country cares for an education that is not directly convertible to money. The science that plays in the market is the science of the factory…’
Dearth of funds but not of resolve
For over three decades since its foundation, the scientific research initiative at IACS could not gather momentum owing to paucity of adequate funding and till the end of the first decade of the 20th century. During this period, the research at IACS was a mere amateurs’ endeavour, and the major activities were limited to arranging scientific lectures and demonstrations on contemporary scientific discoveries in Europe, conducting practical classes to make the science enthusiasts of different city colleges aware of the contemporary discoveries and science popularization. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, who established himself as the first complete scientist of modern India and one of the tallest personalities of the National Science movement, joined the Presidency College following his return from England in 1885. He was one of the lieutenants of IACS initiatives and conducted practical classes over several years along with his teacher Father Lafont. However, his financial need and commitment to his job at Presidency College didn’t permit him to pursue opportunities at IACS, although the scientific facilities of IACS lab at that time were in no way inadequate compared to the best laboratories in Europe. Bose’s contribution in the advancement of nationalistic science and upholding of nationalistic values in science practice is irrefutable. He founded the Basu Bigyan Mandir(1917), officially Bose Institute, a national institute of natural sciences under the administrative control of the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
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As a close follower of Sircar’s philosophy in the propagation of science education and research, Sir Ashutosh Mookherjee started delivering lectures at IACS from 1887, at a young age of 22, on subjects like pure mathematics, mathematical physics and electromagnetic theory of light. By that time, Mookherjee had gained international recognition as an acclaimed mathematician, as the elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, London Mathematical Society, American Mathematical Society and Calcutta University. However, he had to abandon his career in mathematics at IACS to explore a legal career to meet the financial needs of the family. As the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University (1906-14), he directed with a great foresight the philanthropic endowment of Sir Tarakhnath Palit and Sir Rashbehari Ghosh, worth Rs. 37.5 lakh, in establishing the University College of Science and Technology wing of Calcutta University in 1914, and offering CV Raman the 1st Palit Professor of Physics chair, PC Ray the 1st Palit Professor of Chemistry chair and the post of the 1stGhosh Professor of Botany chair to the eminent plant scientist and morphologist SP Agharkar, to develop a strong research culture with teaching. The first batch of the students of the college produced luminaries like Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha, and many others. In 1946, Professor Agharkar founded the Maharashtra Association for the Cultivation of Science (MACS) on the IACS model, and currently the institute is known as the Agharkar Research Institute under the administrative control of DST.
Nurturing India’s Only Science Nobel Laureate
The only Nobel Prize winner in science till date for research carried out solely on Indian soil is Sir C V Raman, and the country celebrates February 28 as the National Science Day to mark the date of announcement of the discovery in 1928. As a young revenue officer of the government of British India, Raman arrived in Calcutta in 1907. Over the next three decades, through his seminal discovery of the new type of light scattering phenomenon, called the Raman effect, he single-handedly made IACS familiar to every scientific community across the globe. Raman started his research at IACS using the available scientific facilities in the field of physics of sound of the string and percussion Indian musical equipment, working only beyond the busy schedule of his office. However, within a decade, he earned enormous fame for his phenomenal research success. Raman continued with this arrangement until 1917, when a new post of the Palit Professor of Physics, instituted at the newly established University College of Science of Calcutta, was offered to him. Sir Ashutosh Mookherjee persuaded Raman to accept the offer, for which the salary was much smaller compared to his wages as the revenue officer. Raman accepted the offer and succeeded in convincing Mookherjee that he would be allowed to continue his research at IACS beyond his university teaching hours. From this time on, light scattering and molecular diffraction of light turned out to be the major direction of research of his group, and his fame pooled many scientific talents from different corners of the country to work at IACS. Interestingly, most of them were part-time researchers, but their enthusiasm and success helped Raman build a strong Calcutta School of Physics, proceedings of which were renamed subsequently as the Indian Journal of Physics.
The coworkers and students of Raman and many other scientific personalities during the period of science movement and in subsequent years were associated with IACS in various capacities and they made enormous contributions in building the scientific bases and formulating the science policy in independent India. According to Nobel laureate German physicist Max Born: ‘Sir CV Raman occupies a very special place in the scientific landscape of India. His contribution to science was monumental both in scale and scope. He also played a pivotal role in shaping the Indian science institutions and redefined the ways in which science was done in India.’
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Raman left IACS and Calcutta University in 1933 to join the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore as its first Indian director. Subsequently, in Bangalore he built the Raman Research Institute in 1948. The co-discoverer of Raman Effect, Dr KS Krishnan took over the charge of IACS in 1933 as the first Mahendralal Chair Professor, created with the benefaction of Raja Veharilal Mitra that fulfilled the cherished wish of the founder. Krishnan made enormous contributions in the field of crystal magnetism and crystal optics after Michael Faraday and made the foundation of the modern day’s condensed matter physics and solid-state chemistry. He was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London in 1938. Krishnan left IACS in 1942 during World War II to build a school of physics at the Allahabad University. The contributions of only a few more of Raman’s collaborators at IACS, who played an important role in building new institutions dedicated to scientific research across the country, are touched upon with the proclamation that the list is in no way exhaustive.
Kedareswar Banerjee
One of Raman’s direct students at IACS, Kedareswar Banerjee, is credited as the first X-ray crystallographer of India. He laid the foundation of research in this field in the country and took over the post that Prof K S Krishnan handed over on his departure. Banerjee was the first to determine the atomic arrangements in crystals of organic molecules, viz., naphthalene and anthracene, in 1924, and this research brought him international fame. In 1933, he proposed a direct method to address the crystallographic phase problem and paved the path of the discovery of modern methods of X-ray crystallography. He was a close associate of the international crystallographic leaders of his time like William Henry Bragg, William Lawrence Bragg and many others. He served as the reader of the newly founded physics department of Dhaka University, now in Bangladesh, during 1934-43 and professor of physics at Allahabad University (1952-69) and also the Director of IACS.
Dr Kalpati Ramakrishnan
Dr Kalpati Ramakrishnan, the first director of the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, was a student of Raman’s group at IACS in 1921, and he made a vital observation in the early stages of the discovery of Raman Effect. He noticed in 1923 the occurrence of red shifting of a beam of nearly monochromatic light when diffracted in water. It was due to Raman Effect, though, the observation was reported erroneously as feeble fluorescence. In 1925, Ramakrishnan joined the Indian Meteorological Department as a senior scientist, and later served as the director of the Colaba and Alibag magnetic observatories, and the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory. He was instrumental in the founding of the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism and Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Over the span of his scientific career, he made important observations on monsoonal pattern over India and characteristics of solar radiation, and established the Dobson ozone spectrometer stations across the country.
Suri Bhagavantam
Suri Bhagavantam, an eminent physicist and one of Raman’s coworkers at IACS from 1928, who made important contribution in the discovery of the Raman Effect, served as the first scientific advisor to the Indian High Commission in London after India’s independence, and as the Vice Chancellor of Osmania University. He became the director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1957. During his directorship, IISc got the special status of Deemed University. He prevented the government’s attempt at that time to convert it to an IIT and thus maintained its special identity. As a reputed scientist and an able administrator, Bhagavantam joined the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) as a Scientific Advisor (SA) to the Defence Minister in 1961, succeeding Prof DS Kothari. Within the first 18 months as scientific advisor, he set up 17 new defence laboratories to meet the challenges of the Army on all three frontiers. The defence ministry faced a difficult time after the bitter experience of the India-China war in 1962. Bhagavantam served DRDO with immense dedication and added 14 more DRDO laboratories before his retirement in 1969.
LA Ramdas
LA Ramdas hailed from Palghat, Kerala, and was an eminent Indian meteorologist after whom important atmospheric phenomena, the Ramdas Effect and the Ramdas Layer are coined. He carried out research at IACS during 1923-26 as a Palit Research Scholar with CV Raman on the light scattering phenomenon. After getting his PhD from Calcutta University, he joined the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) at Simla, became an expert on agriculture meteorology and started the division of agriculture meteorology at Pune, where he served as the director of the institute. His major work on ‘weather in relation to crop’ resulted in the creation of the ‘Agri Met’ division of IMD, and he was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1958.
Prof Meghnad Saha
One of the remarkable scientific personalities of India in the 20th century who played a very active role in leading IACS and pushing the conviction of IACS forward in building institutions, was Prof Meghnad Saha. Before independence, Saha was elected as the president of IACS and during his presidency in 1947, IACS received the first annual recurring grant of Rs. 2,66,700/- from the government of India. Saha was also the first salaried director of IACS, from January 1, 1953. However, his sudden death on February 16, 1956, was a blow to the expansion of IACS. Saha is considered to be the first astrophysicist of India and became famous for the formulation of what is known as Saha Ionization Equation. He was the founder of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Calcutta, National Academy of Sciences (1930), Indian Physical Society (1934), and was the chief architect of India’s river planning and the Damodar Valley Project. In his own observation: ‘Science and Technology are as important for administration now-a-days as law and order.’
A Note on IISc
The other century old institution, established in 1909 that made great service to the nation in the development of science and technology, is the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). However, it is worthy, for the sake of history, to take a brief look at the stances of the founders in spite of having similar objects. IISc was founded with the initiative and greatest benevolence in education in pre-independent India by the Bombay industrialist and philanthropist Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, with a promise of endowment worth half of his personal fortune. Although Tata did not survive to see the functioning of his institute from 1911 with the support of Mysore State, the proposed mode of functioning, by employing only highly paid foreign professors, was in great contrast to the vision of the founder of IACS. In fact, the first three directors — Morris Travers, Sir Alfred G Bourne and Sir MO Forster — were all British nationals; in 1933, Raman became the first Indian director of the institute. In contrast, according to Mahendralal Sircar, “The objective of the Association is to enable the natives of India to cultivate science in all its departments…. And we wish that the Institution be entirely under the native management and control…”. From the inception, the aim of the founder of IACS was to impregnate nationalistic feelings in the practice of science, and his visions were also reflected in the first scientific policy statement (1958) of independent India, “to foster, promote, and sustain by all appropriate means, the cultivation of science, and scientific research in all its aspects – pure, applied, and educational…. It is only through the scientific approach and method and the use of scientific knowledge that reasonable material and cultural amenities and services can be provided for every member of the community.”
A pertinent question is the relevance of having any nationalistic feelings in practicing science in the world we live in, where technology has brought every corner of the globe at our fingertips, and in the light of the fact that scientific knowledge is innately universal. Regrettably, the research targets in much of today’s world are driven by the business shrewdness of publication houses, and the worst is the craze to increase publication numbers from the perspective of career advancement of science practitioners. The cumulative effects of several factors have given rise to a situation where the originality is compromised through repetitive works, and exigencies of the societies remain grossly unaddressed. Arguably, an individual’s thought process and intellectual make-up are inseparable from the imprints of the society, therefore, being indifferent to societal concerns in academic activities of a country is not natural and also the fact that much of the scientific research warrants substantial quantum of public funding. It is to be hoped that the assessments and appreciation benchmarks will be reassessed and the values aimed to be inculcated into the young generation through the New Education Policy of the government would bear positive effects in favour of national interests.
*The writer is Vice Chancellor, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, West Bengal, and former professor at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
