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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Unequal Eminences
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| A book that highlights what is not really news: the dominance of the upper caste male over Indian science in the first half of the 20th century |
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Published : 1 November 2011 |
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COURTESY RAMAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE LIBRARY |
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| Nobel Laureate CV Raman, who discovered
that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the
deflected light changes in wavelength.
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| I |
N THE PREFACE to his book, Alternative Sciences, Ashis Nandy observed how determined many Indian scientists and those writing about them have been to uphold the image of science as a “bloodless affair”. |
One would imagine this to be a natural corollary of the valorisation of science, from the Age of Enlightenment onwards, as an activity professedly divested of human imperfection by its ability to create order through systems and laws, and by its emphasis on exactitude, rigour, empiricism, objectivity and rationalism.
The idea of science as a modernising force, symbolising the triumph of reason over irrational beliefs and practices, gave the activities of the British colonial administration in India in the 19th century—including the introduction of Western education; the production of surveys, studies and censuses; and the building of irrigation canals, railways and so on—the aura of a civilising mission.
The idea was further perpetuated in the post-Independence era and enshrined in the ‘temples’ of modern India: in power plants, hydroelectric dams, steel factories, institutes of technology and national laboratories. Jawaharlal Nehru, a powerful votary of science’s transformative capabilities, urged scientists to think not only of the pursuit of truth but of bettering the lot of India’s people.
This idealised view of science, however, has been repeatedly challenged by postcolonial scholarship and by a growing interest in the social history of science in India, evident among both scientists and humanities scholars. We no longer think of the British, for instance, as mere disinterested reformers but understand their efforts as part of a highly-charged political enterprise. We also question the progressive claims of the developmental model adopted by independent India, raising concerns over the deleterious impact on the environment and on various communities.
But to judge the encounter between modern science and a native environment purely by motive or consequence is to blind oneself to the creative possibilities of the phenomenon and the unexpected forms it can take. And perhaps the best place to consider Indian science from the latter perspective is the first half of the 20th century.
| COURTESY MN SAHA ARCHIVE, SAHA INSTITUTE OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS |
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Posing with the Cyclotron at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1948 (L-R, front row): AP Patro, BM Banerjee, Meghnad Saha. |
The early 1900s saw the emergence of indigenous modern science, especially in the form of scientific publications and a demand for scientific institutes entirely under native management and control. To be a scientist in India in the early 1900s, however, was to deal with a plethora of difficulties: low pay, inadequate resources and bureaucratic obduracy and thoughtlessness that undermined even individuals of distinction. To add to these handicaps was a strong element of racism that revealed itself in various subtle and not so subtle forms.
These hurdles notwithstanding, the period saw world-class research being carried out by Indian scientists. Botanist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), having conducted successful wireless signaling experiments in the late 1800s—possibly ahead of Guglielmo Marconi, who is credited as the inventor of radio—was doing landmark work on plant growth and sensitivity. Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944), known as the ‘father of modern chemistry’ in India, was building on his work on the compound mercurous nitrite. Homi J Bhabha (1909-1966) distinguished himself with two startling papers, on positron physics and the cascade theory of cosmic showers.
Indian scientists were also caught in a wave of nationalism that manifested itself in many ways, one of which was an inclination to design research so as to highlight peculiarities of the indigenous environment. The young Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971) observed cosmic rays in tropical latitudes; Bhabha conducted experiments in the Kolar Gold Fields mineshaft, one of the longest in the world; and CV Raman (1888-1970) took advantage of India’s abundant sunshine to study the scattering of light.
To read about those times is to enter a world of excitement, eminence and discovery. It is also to encounter rivalry, difficulty and competitiveness. At one level, these negative experiences stemmed from India’s relative disadvantage in a Western-dominated world; at another level they reflected inequities closer home.
The latter point is one that Abha Sur seeks to forcefully make. Her book claims to be “a socially informed micro-history of physics in India in the first half of the twentieth century where caste and gender are the primary analytical tools for understanding knowledge production and institution building in science”.
The pivotal figure in Sur’s exposition is the formidable CV Raman, distinguished physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. Juxtaposed with him—the ‘subordinated populations’, as Sur would have it—are the eminent Bengali scientist Meghnad Saha (1893-1956) and three women graduate students in CV Raman’s laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore: Anna Mani, Lalitha Doraiswamy and K Sunanda Bai.
CV Raman was born in a village in the Tanjore district of Madras Presidency. In 1907 he joined the Financial Civil Service, conducting scientific experiments on the side at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta till 1917, when he moved into physics fulltime. His strength was the study of waves, which he pursued through research in optics, vibrations and musical instruments. He was best known for his discovery of the effect, or scattering, named after him and for which he won the Nobel: ‘scattering’ refers to the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. Raman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924 and received a knighthood in 1929.
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