TIMES INSIGHT GROUP
Towards
the second half of the 19th century, the world began to take note of
Indian scholars. From particle physics to human rights, their work began
to be seen as world class.
One of the incredible stories of
modern Indian scholarship is also one the most tragic. Born to a poor
family in Tamil Nadu’s Kumbakonam in 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a
brilliant mathematician with almost no formal training, made enormous
contributions to number theory and the study of infinite numbers before
he died of illness and malnutrition at the age of 32. English
mathematician G H Hardy recognised the prodigy and invited him to work
with him at Cambridge. Ramanujan’s brief, brilliant and tragic story was
immortalised in ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’, a book by Robert Kanigel.
Meanwhile,
through his demonstrations of remote wireless signalling, earlier than
the much more famous Italian inventor Marconi, and his research into
plant physiology through which he argued that plants could feel pain,
Jagadish Chandra Bose drew the attention of Western scientists in the
late 1800s.
Around the same time as Ramanujan, C V Raman was
born near Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu. He taught physics in Kolkata and,
later, Bangalore. He was awarded the physics Nobel in 1930 for
discovering changes in the wavelength of light that occur because of
scattering by chemical molecules when it passes through a transparent
object. The phenomenon is called the Raman effect. India celebrates
National Science Day on February 28, the day he discovered the ‘Raman
effect’. Raman was the first non-white to win a Nobel in the sciences.
Raman’s
nephew, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel in physics (with
William Fowler) in 1983 for discovering the ‘Chandrasekhar limit’, an
upper limit to the mass of a star in its
last stages of evolution. In 1930, he was awarded a scholarship by the
Indian government to study at Cambridge, after which he joined the
University of Chicago. He later became a naturalised US citizen. NASA’s
premier X-Ray observatory was named the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Physics
has been the standout field for modern Indian scholarship. Satyendra
Nath Bose, a quantum mechanics physicist whose contributions were
rediscovered following the recent detection of the possible Higgs-Boson
particle (bosons are named after him), was taught by J C Bose at
Kolkata’s Presidency College. Bose-Einstein statistics and the
Bose-Einstein condensate are named jointly after him and Albert
Einstein, who he corresponded and collaborated with.
At
the turn of the century, Hargobind Khorana was born in what is now
Pakistan and moved to the US, where he became a citizen. He shared the
1968 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W Nirenberg and
Robert W Holley for research on nucleic acids and thecell’ssynthesisof
proteins.TheKhorana Programme, named after the scientist who died in
2011, aims to build a shared community of Indian and American scientists
and entrepreneurs.
With Independence came a new breed of
scientists whose work was allied with nation-building. Homi Bhabha,
‘father of the Indian nuclear programme’, founded the Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Bhabha convinced
Jawaharlal Nehru of the need for India to have a nuclear programme.
Vikram Sarabhai, who did research under Raman, worked with Bhabha to
establish India’s space programme.
Another Indian Nobel laureate
is Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, a Chidambaram-born biochemist and
biophysicist who shared the Chemistry Nobel in 2009 with Thomas A Steitz
and Ada E Yonath for his study of ribosomes, the large complex
molecules found in all living organisms that help form protein.
Ramakrishnan did his BSc in Physics from Baroda on a scholarship after
which he moved to the US.
The great Bengali poet, artist and
freedom fighter, Rabindranath Tagore, was the first Indian Nobel
laureate for literature, the first non-European to win the award. Tagore
revolutionized Bengali literature, freeing it from classical shackles,
andhishumanist principles as well as his criticism of imperialism
illuminated his work. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh
are Tagore songs. Tagore was the architect of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan.
Contemporary
Indian historians like Bipin Chandra, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib
have revolutionised the telling of Indian history. Sociologists Andre
Beteille and M N Srinivas contributed the most important studies of
caste in India which became central to policy-making. Most illustrious
among today’s social scientists would be Amartya Sen, winner of the
economics Nobel, and a pioneer of development economics. Sen has made
his work on human development accessible to millions through his
speeches and writings. One of the creators of the human development
index, Sen advises governments, including the Indian government, on
welfare economics. His ‘capability approach’ has revolutionized the
dialogue on rights and services. Sen was one of the first to draw
attention to India’s skewed sex ratio. He teaches at Harvard and
Cambridge.
Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time| Rabindranath Tagore
