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Bangalore Affair: the C. V. Raman Conflict

[This chapter outlines a conflict involving] Saha, Bhatnagar and C. V. Raman in the period 1930-1938]

[With the advent of railways and post, there was better communication among scientiests] and opportunities arose for both status and power that were not just local in character. ... a few talented and ambitious scientists no longer depended on local support alone; instead they had built significant international reputations that brought them to the attention of local and central authorities.

As the only Nobel Prize winner from India, Raman attracted unprecedented media and political attention, and this brought a very bright light shining onto disagreements in the scientific community. p.57

In this period, Saha influenced the establishment of academies, research institutions, and journals as a result of foreign recognition for his work...

The Indian Institute for Cultivation of Science (IACS)

Saha was very focused on the politics within institutions in Calcutta, although he lived a twenty-hour train journey away in Allahabad. This is how he became engaged in a conflict with Raman in the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), founded by the rich homeopathic doctor Mahendralal Sircar in 1876 in Calcutta. p.58

Laboratory facilities at IACS were constructed in 1892, after Sircar cured
the maharajah of Vizianagaram in of a rare disease and asked for a laboratory
instead of payment.  ... C. V. Raman was elected an ordinary member and began
to use the equipment in this lab for his research in 1907. He started work in
the lab early in the morning, then went to the Finance Department to his
employment, and returned again in the evening. This pattern continued [for
ten years].  Raman was the first person to use the building consistently for
research; otherwise it had been used like a scientific gentlemen’s club.  He
worked there alone for ten years, publishing papers in physics, while
advancing upward in the Finance Department. This is precisely what Sircar and
others had imagined in the 1870s — intelligent and curious Indians would turn
up to do experimental science and learn to do it, not just talk about it, on
their own terms. After all, Jagadish Chandra Bose had already blazed a path
in that experimental direction before 1900 and was soon successfully
advocating government support for research in the university.

When Raman became the first Palit Professor of Physics at the university in
1917, he left the Finance Department, to the great surprise of those who
expected him to advance to a high position in government.  [the new job paid
half his finance officer’s salary. p.60]

Raman taught at the university but continued to do all his experiments in the
association building.  Slowly gaining control over the operation of the
institution, as honorary secretary of IACS, Raman attempted to limit new
membership to those of whom he approved, to make it more professional and
less like the gentlemen’s club it originally was.  This created tension with
a group of older members in the association who eventually opposed Raman.
... some members said Raman favored South Indians at the association, of whom
there were now a small numbe (his main assistant, K. S. Krishnan, and good
students like Raman’s nephew S. Chandrasekhar and others; many came after
Raman’s Nobel Prize) p.59

Though based in Allahabad, Saha became a leader of this opposition to Raman
and used this charge of “favouring South Indians” against him.  It would be
misleading to say that Saha caused the conflict, but he appears to have
seized this opportunity to make a new kind of reputation in Calcutta. ... It
is possible that other members of the association used Saha’s willingness to
confront Raman for their own objective of promoting Bengali identity and
autonomy, a sign that Bengali elites had not forgotten losing the capital of
India to that dusty distant place called Delhi.  Raman’s reported plan (what
it really was has never been made very clear) threatened Bengali prominence
and perhaps cast doubt on the clublike atmosphere in an attempt to
professionalize the IACS; instead they polarized it.

In addition to their insatiable egos, Saha and Raman had a curious
unconscious thing in common: Saha had wanted to sit the examination for
employment in the Finance Department but was barred in 1916 because of his
political commitments. In bitterness he rejected that secure way of life
entirely, well knowing the poverty of educated people who could not get civil
service jobs. He therefore had to ride his bicycle through the rain to houses
of students who needed to be prepared for exams, to make money for his
family. Raman had no such commitments and already excelled at that very same
examination. He had good career prospects and a large civil service salary...

Saha came to despise the Finance Department and those who worked for it,
ultimately controlling as it did the very funds for the university where he
studied and worked.

Raman perceived as unsympathetic to nationalist cause

[Another difference was in their commitment to nationalism.]  during the
noncooperation movement of 1919–20, Raman broke through the cordon of
students trying to deter teaching of regular university classes and brusquely
insisted on holding classes.

At the time  Saha was teaching in the same physics department.
Fifteen years later they were to have a full confrontation. 60

Before the conflict with Raman took its larger shape, Saha’s stature had
changed by being elected FRS in 1927. When it was clear about 1930 that Saha
expected to get the appointment to a new chair in physics at the University
of Calcutta, the lines were clearly drawn. The intermittent but lengthy
build-up to the confrontation occurred while Raman gained his knighthood in
1929 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930. 

Saha Belittles Raman in front of Sommerfeld (1928)

K. S. Krishnan, who was present, reported that during the Sommerfeld visit
of 1928, at the time of the discoveries of spectral (“combinational”)
scattering later called the Raman effect, Saha stood up after Raman’s
lecture, with Sommerfeld present, and said that the discovery was no more
than a confirmation of what Smekal had predicted. Saha also published a
letter in Nature that belittled Raman’s work and suggested it was
wrong. 

Saha’s reference to Smekal was well informed — Raman always referred
to his work as testing and proving “Smekal’s surmise” — but Saha’s attack
had no effect on Raman’s world scientific reputation.  This subject was, after
all, hardly Saha’s field of greatest competence, and so his remarks in
Sommerfeld’s presence and the letter in Nature just before Raman was
awarded the Nobel Prize may have had an adverse effect on Saha’s scientific
reputation.

Raman refuses Saha's request for a chair

[Saha asks Raman for giving him a chair that Raman had gotten Sircar to
create.  Raman refuses, saying that it was meant for a younger person who
could assist him.]

Incensed by Raman’s refusal to support him, Saha mobilized the sons of
Mahendralal Sircar and Asutosh Mookerjee to “save the association,” at the
same time undermining Raman’s reputation with respect to the Sircars, donors
of the proposed chair, and Sir Asutosh Mookerjee’s family, also Raman’s
patrons.  Sir Asutosh’s son was Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, now vice-chancellor
of the University of Calcutta, politically aligned with the Hindu Mahasabha
Party, and later to play a major role in Bengal’s politics.

Using Bangla-language newspapers too, Saha mobilized people around a
call to save the association, a personal opposition to Raman and his known
arrogance, with a subtext of resisting South Indian dominance in science in
Calcutta. A physicist like K. S. Krishnan, who worked closely with Raman
on his experiments, was implicated in this resistance. New members of the
IACS were introduced and given voting rights, preparing for a dramatic
showdown in an extraordinary meeting, at which a majority voted against
Raman as honorary secretary of the IACS. As a result Raman’s position was
intractable, and despite his years of work for it, he left the association in
1931.

[Raman] soon left Calcutta, where he had lived twenty-six years, to be the
first Indian to become the director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
in Bangalore; he was recommended to the post by Sir Ernest Rutherford,
director of the Cavendish Laboratory. 

Saha gains mastery over the IACS

after Raman left Calcutta for Bangalore in 1932, the council of the
IACS was reconstituted with Saha as an influential member.” 

Saha’s influence increased over the next ten years, so that, in his words,
“he has virtually controlled the destinies of the Association since 1943,
because Sir U. N.  Brahmachari had such faith in Saha that he left all the
management to his discretion.”   Saha became president of the association in
1946 and was responsible for building a new laboratory in South Calcutta,
near the new nationalist Jadavpur University; when he left the university in
1952, he became the director of the IACS laboratory. 

One cannot say that Saha, based in 1931 in Allahabad, confronted Raman in
order to take over the IACS, but it was one of the eventual results of the
confrontation. One of the other results was a boost to the scientific
fortunes of the IISc in Bangalore, which had not yet fulfilled the
expectations of its influential founders, the Tata family.

Raman had also acquired a reputation for unpredictable or argumentative
behavior,  which extended around 1940 to what eventually became a very
public disagreement with Max Born about lattice dynamics.

During 1968–69 the total monthly computer time used by SINP scientists was
over 200 hours per month, with the Theoretical Physics Division alone using
150 hours. Computation was being done on computers at five locations: the
closest two machines were in Calcutta at Jadavpur University and the Indian
Statistical Institute, but the rest involved long journeys. The computer at
Jadavpur was plagued with operating problems and did not use the common
FORTRAN computer language, and the Statistical Institute computer not only
cost twice as much per hour as other machines (Rs 500 compared with Rs
250–300) but also had “such a small memory that we need three programs to run
through one integral,” as one theoretical physicist said. The third computer
used by SINP was at IIT Kharagpur, an hour away by frequent train, but too
small for very complicated work and notoriously slow in processing work. 339

Most SINP computation was thus done at IIT Kanpur, 1,000 km away, and TIFR
Bombay, 1,800 km away. Theoretical physicists from Calcutta were thus often
locked into long journeys on the train carrying their precious boxes of
computer cards. Of the 69 computers then in India, TIFR had the one with the
largest memory (a CDC 3600 with a 13k memory). This was the big machine
Bhabha bargained for with Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith just after
the 1962 conflict with China, when American military assistance to India
was accepted. It took up an entire air-conditioned clean room in Bombay.

In spite of their location in research establishments, these machines were
already used for administrative purposes of government and private business,
including the advanced calculations of banks, which could afford to
pay the higher fees. The access to computers needed by scientists, therefore,
was becoming more competitive and the electricity and personnel costs of
maintaining these big machines was being distributed among those who
could pay, both state and private institutions.

Protests against computers

[When the SINP announces plans to purchase an IBM 1130 computer made in Indian
under license to ICL.]

the Calcutta University Employees Union demonstrated in Science College
against the installation of the computer, saying that it would be used for
clerical work and reduce their employment. There were a number of
anti-automation protests going on against the installation of computers in
Calcutta and other cities, though by a combination of stealth and force a few
computers were finally installed at banks, government offices, and major
firms during President’s Rule in 1969.  341

[opposition to computers - see also p. 412]

During the colonial period, and for a long time after it, [Indian scientists
seemed] too oriented to Europe to be real Indians in a cultural
sense.  534

we observe Saha’s learning German at school in Dacca and translating
Einstein’s papers into English in 1919 in Calcutta; Saha’s 1921 sojourn at
Nernst’s lab in Berlin; Bhatnagar’s attempts to learn French in Paris in 1920;
Bhabha’s sojourn in Germany, where he met Heitler and Heisenberg; Raman’s
knowledge of German and success in bringing the German physicistrefugee
Max Born to Bangalore in 1938. By the 1920s Raman was visiting
Caltech and by the mid-1930s Saha was visiting Harvard and Berkeley and
meeting Bhabha in Copenhagen. By 1939 Saha’s student Nagchaudhuri was
studying at Berkeley... 

The age of genius haunts India still. Its scientists were and still are at the
center of its great collective life, nudging its directions in history. The cities,
which seem to draw scientific genius in and hold it for ransom (“give
us more, give us more”), now compete for the best minds in India; these
minds do not all stay where they grow up... 

When Saha left Calcutta in 1923, Chandrasekhar left Madras in 1930, Raman
left Calcutta in 1931, Bhabha left Bangalore in 1945, and Khorana left Delhi
in 1951, they were doing what scientists have done everywhere, migrating to
better conditions of work.  

But one would be wrong to conclude that everyone stayed in the city for the
benefits and security... two recent examples will illustrate a wider and older process
of out-movement, echoing P. C. Ray’s founding the Bengal Chemical
Company in 1901 and Meghnad Saha standing for election in Parliament in
1952. 

P. Parameswaran and the People's science movement

The first example is M. P. Parameswaran, a nuclear engineer at BARC,
with a doctorate in 1965 from the Moscow Power Institute, who established
the Bombay unit of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) among Malayalis
in that city in the 1960s. With a leave of absence from the DAE, he
acted as the assistant director of Kerala’s Institute of Languages between
1969 and 1973, a government-funded institute that was the source of much
of the KSSP’s science promoting activities.

This was the new basis, established first in a small way in Kerala in the
late 1950s, to launch what would be called a peoples’ science
movement—including translating writings of J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal
to Malayalam, teaching science to poor people with little literacy, writing
new textbooks, taking adversarial positions on new technological projects in
the state, and so on. As Dhruv Raina says,

	Popular writing on the sciences in Indian local language celebrating
	Baconian science dates back to the first half of the nineteenth
	century. However the peoples’ science movements broke out of the
	self-constructed enclaves of Indian science. Half a century ago [in
	the 1960s] the movement was restricted to the state of Kerala.” 
		[Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: Historiography of 
		Science and Modernity in India, 2003, p. 41]

Anil Sadagopal and the Hoshangabad project

In the second illustration of moving out of an established lab, Anil
Sadgopal was trained in molecular biology at Caltech and worked in the
TIFR group with Obaid Siddiqi until 1974; until then he and others had
spent some of their time building up science teaching capacity in poor
schools of Bombay and surrounding rural areas. 

By the mid-1970s he began building a study and action center at Hoshangabad
in Madhya Pradesh and succeeded in persuading some TIFR and IIT professors to
join him in adapting a science curriculum suitable to the world of
nonliterate tribal and nontribal people. He was leaving the institute! Some
genuinely helped and responded to his call, a few shook their heads,
privately thinking he was wasting a unique opportunity to work in one of the
premier biology research groups. 

one / Introduction				                   1
two / Building scientific careers in the 1920s: Saha and
        Bhatnagar, from London to Allahabad and Lahore          23
three / The Bangalore Affair, 1935–38: scientists and conflict
        around C. V. Raman                                      57
four / Imagining a scientific state: Nehru, scientists, and
        political planning, 1938–42                             79
five / Homi Bhabha confronts science in India, 1939–44          97
six / Indian scientists engage the empire: the CSIR and the
        idea of atomic and industrial power                     107
seven / Saha, Bhatnagar, and Bhabha in contrast, 1944–45        123
eight / Restless in Calcutta: Meghnad Saha's
        institution-building                                    133
nine / Bhatnagar builds a chain of national laboratories and
        steps upward                                            149
ten / Bhabha builds his institute in bombay                     169
eleven / The politics of the early Indian atomic energy
        committee and commission                                183
twelve / Scientists’ networks, Nehru, and India's defense
        research and development                                205
thirteen / A scientist in the political system: professor Saha
        goes to parliament, 1952–56                             227
fourteen / The Indian cabinet and scientific advice in the
        1950s and 1960s: Bhabha, atomic energy, and reforming
        scientific and industrial research                      249
fifteen / A new scientific elite: Sarabhai builds another
        atomic energy network, 1966–71                          277
sixteen / A day in the life of two research institutes in
        bombay and calcutta                                     291
seventeen / Governance, management, and working conditions in
        research institutes founded by Saha and Bhabha          311
eighteen / Governance and influence in the research institutes
        bhatnagar built                                         351
nineteen / Articulating science and technology policy for
        Indira Gandhi's cabinet                                 369
twenty / Building a high-technology economy through atomic
        energy, space, and electronics                          395
twenty-one / Nuclear expectations and resistance in india's
        political economy                                       427
twenty-two / Scientists in India's war over self-reliance       443