In the 1880s, British trained Indian scientists- most notably J.C Bose & P.C Ray- started making original contributions in STEM subjects. Sadly, there were more than a few duds- like Sarojini Naidu's dad who had a PhD from Edinburgh but whose brains rotted away in Hyderabad. Indeed, he took to conducting alchemical experiments.
Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, the father of the founder of India's current ruling party, was a distinguished mathematician who received an MA degree in Maths & Physics from Calcutta University. His 1886 paper- "A Note on Elliptic Functions"- gained international recognition when he was 22. He took to the law and made a lot of money before being elevated to the Bench. He, together with two other wealthy Bengali lawyers, created a new Dept of Physics at the Calcutta University Science College in 1916. C.V Raman, S.N Bose, and Meghnad Saha were three young members of the 6 member faculty. Within about one decade, three extraordinary discoveries came from these young men---Saha ionization equation in 1920, Bose statistics in 1924, Raman effect in 1928 (for which he got the Nobel Prize).
In the case of Bose, there is a story that he had approached Ganesh Prasad- who had established good relations with leading German mathematicians- with a view of doing a PhD in Math. But Prasad, who was from U.P, was a difficult man to get along with. Thus Mukherjee's new Physics Dept saved Bose from unemployment. Saha & Bose worked well together. Both soon produced first rate papers. Bose's 'deduction of Rydberg's Law from quantum theory of spectral emission' was published by the Philosophical Magazine in 1920. Bose was just 24 years old.
His next big break was the offer of a Readership at the new Dacca University Physics Department which enabled him to get away from the overcrowded Dept in Calcutta. It is also said that he had a spat with Sir Ashutosh. Sadly, in Dacca, he was informed that his contract would not be extended because of a dispute as to funding between the provincial and the Central government and higher than expected construction costs. It appears this was resolved by the University agreeing to funding a 2 year travel sabbatical in return for the acceptance of revised pay scales. Then, once again, he got lucky. His 2024 letter to Einstein- which fully explicated the doctrine of indistinguishability for quantum particles which had been anticipated by Władysław Natanson in 1911- opened the door to a two year sojourn in Europe after which he got a full Professorship in Dacca. Sadly, he was not able to make any progress on the two problems Einstein set him- viz. whether the new statistics implied a novel type of interaction between light quanta; and second, how the statistics of light quanta and transition probabilities would look in the new quantum mechanics. Bose believed one could separate the propagation of a quantum of light energy (a photon) from electromagnetic influence. It was a reasonable belief at the time. I suppose, one could say that if Bose had done a Math PhD under Ganesh Prasad, his approach might have been different. Perhaps he too would have done Post-Doctoral work in Germany and thus would have been abreast of all the latest developments. Still, the fact is, Bose built a successful academic career and, quite unexpectedly, actually got into the history books. Bosons are named after him just as Fermions are named after Fermi. Not bad at all for a lad who had once contemplated working as a clerk in the meteorological department! Einstein's support meant Bose could become a full Professor even though he lacked a PhD. It must be said, there were plenty of 'Senior Wranglers' and blokes with European PhDs cluttering up Indian Universities.
Though viewed, at a later time, as the veritable arsehole of the Turd World, Calcutta, at one time, was an important commercial city and this remained the case even after it ceased to be the capital of British India. Its University, founded in 1857, maintained quite high academic standards even up to the Sixties. The British had set up an 'Indian Education Service' in 1896 so as to raise standards and to spot and support outstanding students (like Srinivas Ramanujan). IES officer, like W.A Jenkins- Bose's head of dept in Dacca- had official standing and could protect promising young scholars from the Police (which, being recruited from non-graduates, was considered an inferior cadre).
Sadly, as India became democratic, standards fell. The Education Service stopped recruiting in 1924. India was not able to maintain momentum in STEM subjects. Smart people emigrated. If they returned, they mouldered away without intellectual companionship or stimulus. By contrast, Japan- which had got into modern Science some four of five decades after the Indians- went from strength to strength. So did the Chinese who preferred elite Universities rather than democratic 'degree mills' where students spent their time agitating.
Aeon has an article on S.N Bose, by Soma Bannerjee who teaches in Tennessee. It maintains that 'The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters'. This is odd. The British called Calcutta 'the second city of the Empire'. Bose wasn't at 'the periphery'. He was a subject of the King Emperor and there was a dedicated cadre of British civil servants in India whose job it was to encourage people like him. Moreover, very influential people- like Justice Ashutosh- were backing him. There were wealthy Indian landowners and industrialists keen to invest in STEM subject research. Sadly, Indians were more interested in a stupid type of politics rather than getting ahead through the application of science and technology. We may say, Saha, Bose & Raman wanted to develop indigenous institutions. If so, they failed. As Bose described himself- they were 'comets' who appear once and seem to herald great things but which then vanish without trace.
Soma writes-
Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire,
What was the name of the Mayor of Calcutta in 1924 (the year of his letter to Einstein)? It was Chittaranjan Das- hardly an English name. The fact is, India could have got from the new Labour government in London, what Ireland & Egypt & Afghanistan had got two years earlier- i.e. independence. Soma is being disingenuous. He is trying to make out that Bose was a darkie working in the cotton fields under the lash. Viceroy would frequently sodomize him. Yet he managed to learn foreign languages and mathematics and physics and so on. The truth is, he was taught by JC Bose & PC Ray, both of whom had studied under the best savants in Britain in the 1880s.
facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist:
He was free, not 'colonised'. While the Brits were around, Hindus could teach safely in Dacca University. When they departed, the Hindus had to run away.
limited resources,
sufficient resources.
isolation from international peers,
because the Brits refused to let Indians to write letters to European scientists. Indeed, Bose's letter to Einstein was smuggled out up Mahatma Gandhi's bum.
and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements;
It explains them. You had really smart older Bengalis pushing younger Indians like himself. This had the backing of the Brits and the Indian landlords and industrialists.
instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light.
But Soma won't supply that light. He won't say that people like SN Bose or Amartya Sen's daddy were only safe in Dacca while the Brits were around. Both relocated to Calcutta from Dacca university when the Brits departed. Otherwise they may have been killed by Muslim mobs.
His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone,
He was doing what he was trained to do. Unlike a lot of his European contemporaries, he hadn't had to fight in the Great War. Britain had lost 900,000 of its young men. France had lost 1.3 million. Germany lost more than 2 million. India lost 74,000 but virtually none of them belonged to the 'educationally forward' castes. Meghnad Saha was exceptional because he was from an 'untouchable' caste. Bose wasn't.
but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.
Post-colonial. Already there was Dyarchy- but only because Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in 1922. Tagore was smarter. He warned the Hindus that they would lose lives and property in East Bengal if the Brits ran away.
Incidentally, Bose wasn't 'thinking differently'. He was thinking in the same way as others of his cohort. He just didn't move on to the next stage (QMT) preferring to return to India to do 'institution building'. Sadly, Partition destroyed that building- at least as far as Hindus in Dacca were concerned.
The popular telling of this episode often casts Bose as a lucky outsider
he was picking cotton in a Southern plantation whose trees bore 'strange fruit'.
whose discovery was a fluke elevated by Einstein’s patronage.
Physicists were naturally interested in the possibility of a new state of matter- though this could only be empirically confirmed seventy years later. I suppose if the technology had been better at that time, Bose would have focussed on empirical work. Like his dad, he had no objection to getting rich by inventing cool stuff or mass producing stuff embodying STEM subject discoveries.
But Bose’s real story is actually far richer.
and sadder. He had to run away from Dacca. India turned into a bureaucratic shithole. Students wanted degree certificates. They didn't want no edumication. Everybody wanted to do crazy political shite or pose as a Gurudeva or Mahatma or Imam-e-Hind.
His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges
there were none. The challenge was staying alive while running away from Muslim mobs. Tagore's 1916 novel ends with such mobs raping, killing and looting Hindus. It is no wonder that Sir Ashutosh's son founded the pro-Hindu BJP. If they don't get elected in West Bengal, Hindus will soon have to run away from there.
By the early 1920s,
the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. Had India not needed the British umpire, it would have become independent in 1924.
quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures.
Forward caste Hindus- particularly Kayasthas & Baidyas- gained intellectual freedom from the Brits. Back in the 1820s, many such defied caste and religious taboos. But that tended to mean alcoholism and getting syphilis. By the 1850s, young Bengal preferred the straight and narrow path of trying for academic excellence and then rising through the law courts till, like Amartya Sen's grandfather, you were appointed a Judge. The civil service, however, tended to become less lucrative as corruption decreased.
As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum
which Bose didn't do. He preferred to focus on statistical foundations. I think this is because the Indians had a strong 'sankhya' statistical tradition which was useful for administrative purposes. Indeed, the only non Western Institution imitated by Western academia was Mahalanobis's Indian Statistical Institute. But this reluctance to do 'interpretation' was a weakness. At a later point, D.D Kosambi started proving the Reimann hypothesis by statistical means! My point is, if a smart dude remains in India, his brains turn to shit- Marxist shit in Kosambi's case.
provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’
Mahalanobis liked 'scientific colonialism' (i.e. racialist anthropology) so much that his first paper, in 1922, was titled 'Anthropological observations on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta'. It was his influence which caused Tagore to very foolishly opine that India had a race problem- not a problem of religion. I should mention Mahalanobis & Tagore were tall, fair skinned & had 'sharp features'. They thought they were the pure Aryans. Eurasians were filth who had absorbed the worst qualities of both the Europeans and the Asiatics. This is why Gandhi said India & Britain should separate and maintain a proper distance from each other. The alternative was the bumping of uglies and the perpetuation of an evil, mongrel, breed.
that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India,
There wasn't a single White in his Department. I suppose Europeans were too busy slaughtering each other in the trenches at that time.
which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.
i.e. the interests of the people of the colony. If they get richer, the administration has more money to play with.
In 1921, a few years after the First World War, Bose left Calcutta to join the physics department at the newly founded University of Dacca (present-day Dhaka in Bangladesh). The move was strategic. Dacca University, established by the British in 1921, offered state-of-the-art laboratories and better access to international journals than crowded Calcutta could provide.
No. Kayasthas & Baidyas thought it would be less Brahmin dominated. Amartya's grandfather, a retired judge, was the first bursar of the University. But Calcutta was richer and had better access to everything.
Bose’s reputation as a top student had preceded him: Dacca’s vice-chancellor, Philip Joseph Hartog, personally invited him to take up the post. In his new role, the 27-year-old Bose taught advanced physics courses.
This was a familiar phenomenon. New Departments or Colleges could get in talented youngsters who actually taught students. Older men were lazy and preferred to spend all their time on office politics. One reason young lecturers were preferable is that they sought a simpler way to present material knowing that investing a little time on this would mean they could give the same course for the next forty years. Bose was trying to give a cleaner derivation for Planck black-body radiation. With help from Einstein, he succeeded. But his true interest was 'institution building' as well as practical applications- e.g. extracting helium from hot springs in Odisha. Nothing wrong with that at all. If a country makes money out of science, it will have more and more scientists. If politics is the path to wealth, you will have too many politicians.
(Bose) first submitted his manuscript, ‘Planck’s Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis’, to the British journal Philosophical Magazine.
edited by J.J Thompson who was a champion of classical mechanics. 'When his son, G.P. Thomson, proved that electrons behave as waves (electron diffraction) in 1928, J.J. saw it not as proof of the new quantum mechanics, but as confirmation that the electron had a complex structure consistent with classical mechanics'.
It was met with silence. Perhaps the editors in London did not know what to make of this audacious paper from distant Dacca, or maybe it was an example of the biases that colonial scientists often faced.
Why not ask Grok or Copilot or whatever? The fact is J.J Thompson's prejudices were well known.
Undeterred, Bose took a remarkable step.
He wrote to Einstein. Why? Bose was part and parcel of a 'bhadralok' network active across Universities in Europe & America (particularly true of the Jugantar revolutionaries). They compared notes. Britain had too many great, but rather old, Professors attached to classical methods.
Still, the fact is, lots of people were writing to Einstein at that time. Since he was a Swiss citizen, he was the bridge between German science (brought into disrepute by the Great War) and the 'civilized' world. Also, Einstein was very productive. Hilbert thought he could beat him to a tensor representation of the General Theory. Einstein got there first. What is more he was right. Hilbert got the math wrong.
Bose wasn't that interested in 'pure' theory though, at Einstein's behest, he did his best. Still, the fact remained, Bose was a Professor in a poor country. The one good thing you could say about it, was that it was peaceful, well administered, and could do 'catch up growth'. Bose used his two year research sabbatical to Europe to firstly study with de Broglie in France. But Bose wasn't interested in 'pilot-waves' or what would later become Bohm type mysticism. He was concerned to learn the latest techniques in X-ray spectroscopy and crystallography. In other words, this guy was less interested in gaining fame than doing something useful for his country. Amartya's father did his Phd in soil silence in London. Why? Soil science is important for a big agricultural country like India. Getting tenure at Harvard for stupid shite, even if one is a darkie, doesn't help India at all.
Interestingly, in his second year, when Bose moved to Germany, he worked, amongst others, with Michael Polanyi. I believe their political and economic ideas were similar. Polanyi, later on, was close to T.S Eliot while Bose was close to Tagore.
The tale of Bose’s 1924 breakthrough is often told with Einstein as the hero who ‘rescued’ an obscure Indian physicist.
Einstein was the greatest physicist of his generation. Bose was a good man but not in the same league.
While it’s true that Einstein’s support was invaluable, the reality is more nuanced.
The reality is that Bose was a collaborator of Einstein rather than the independent discoverer of anything important. With Fermi-Dirac statistics you have a collaboration of equals. Not so with Bose-Einstein.
Einstein engaged deeply with Bose’s work not out of charity but because Bose had solved a problem Einstein genuinely cared about.
Einstein saw that Bose's simplification (ignoring the density of the field) removed a needless complication. What is more it had predictive value. Bose thought the way forward involved separating the propagation of the quantum of energy from any electromagnetic influence. Would this have been the case if he'd done a PhD in math?
Their exchange was a meeting of minds across continents, a collaboration that demonstrated how science could bridge the divide between empires, races and cultures.
They were irrelevant. Physics in Calcutta is the same as Physics in Copenhagen.
Einstein, an outsider in European society (a Jew in 1920s Germany),
Foreign Minister Rathenau was a Jew. Einstein was Swiss. True, by virtue of being a Professor in Berlin (and hence a 'beamte' civil servant) he was also a citizen of Germany. But the Swiss were not outsiders- Jewish or otherwise.
perhaps felt a kinship with Bose, who hailed from the colonial ‘periphery’.
Which had remained peaceful while Europe tore itself to pieces. The German government said that over 700,000 Germans had starved to death during the Great War. Germans who had been interned in India thanked their lucky stars.
And Bose, for his part, was no supplicant; he approached Einstein confidently, as an equal in enquiry.
If Einstein says 'you've got it right', you know you are on to something. The fear is he will say 'Professor X proved this last year.'
I describe Bose’s stance as a form of ‘local cosmopolitanism’,
i.e. he lived in a particular locality. He wasn't diffused across the cosmos.
rooted in his Indian context yet fully capable of engaging with the global scientific community as a peer.
Because he was a Professor of Physics. He wasn't a fucking monkey.
The Bose-Einstein partnership exemplified how knowledge can flow in multiple directions.
By then, Germany was better at Sanskrit philology than India. But this had become true before Bose was born.
A discovery in colonial Asia could revolutionise physics in Europe,
Only if 'colonial Asia's' physics had previously been revolutionized by Europe.
just as ideas from Europe could inspire breakthroughs in Asia.
Japan- sure. But smart peeps would end up in America. Eistein moved there. So did C.V Raman's nephew.
Their story is a powerful rebuttal to the old notion in the history of science that science moves only from a civilised centre to a passive periphery.
It really isn't. Some Bengalis- like PC Ray & JC Bose- moved to Europe in the 1880s to study science. They returned and taught some other young Bengalis who got funding for research sabbaticals in Europe. The periphery was passive because this early sign of promise didn't lead to very much. Japan and then China, however, stopped being the periphery. They became part of the 'core'.
Yet, despite Bose’s global connections, he could not totally transcend politics at home.
Nor could Einstein who had even better 'global connections' but still had to run away to the US. Bose too had to run away from Muslims in Dacca. His 'local connection' to Hinduism in India meant that he could resume his teaching career in West Bengal.
Throughout his career, the backdrop of colonial India’s struggle for independence was ever present.
The Indian struggle had to do with whether Hindus would continue to be safe in Dacca. The answer was not after the Brits transferred power.
Like many Indian intellectuals of his generation, Bose had to navigate a complex relationship with British rule.
Not really. His work was good. He hadn't taken part in Jugantar or the later Non-Cooperation movement. Might he be a Communist? That was the only concern.
On the one hand, the colonial government had established the institutions that educated him, and he benefited from the laboratories, libraries and funding that came with that system.
No. Indians took the initiative- at least in Bengal. Macaulay was only repeating what Dwarkanath & Roy told him to say.
On the other hand, he was keenly aware of living in a nation that was subjugated.
He wasn't stupid. He understood what Tagore was telling his people. Muslims were an existential threat. It would be nice to take power from the Brits but Hindus couldn't be sure of kicking Islamic ass the way the Brits did.
Bose was determined to contribute to India’s intellectual self-reliance and disprove the notion that Indians were incapable of high scientific achievement under their own steam.
The Brit kept saying 'Indians are hella smart. They can be great mathematicians or scientists. What they can't do is govern themselves. This wasn't true. But Partition had to happen first.
Bose’s personal choices reflected this delicate balancing act. Early in life, he consciously decided not to join the elite Indian Civil Service,
You can say he chose not to try to join it. Similarly, I chose not win the Fields medal by reading Spiderman comics in Math class.
the prestigious administrative cadre of the Raj. The British partition of Bengal in 1905, a divide-and-rule policy that sparked widespread protests in Bose’s youth, left a deep impression on him.
It was reversed in 1911. Then the Hindus realized they would be subject to Muslim tyranny unless it was reversed- which is what happened in 1947.
It steeled his resolve to avoid serving the colonial regime.
which kept him safe from Muslims
Instead, Bose chose the path of science and education, where he could excel and uplift his fellow citizens without directly bolstering imperial rule.
or directly bolstering indigenous rule. The guy could have joined the administration of an Indian Prince or the Maharaja of Nepal.
(In this, he mirrored his father, who had left a government job decades earlier.)
to go into private enterprise which was more risky but also more profitable. Had Bose been a revolutionary, he would have ended up studying at Berkeley or Columbia before shifting to Germany or Bolshevik Russia.
During the 1920s, Bose quietly kept company with nationalist and even revolutionary circles. He was associated with the Anushilan Samiti,
which inspired the creation of the Congress Seva Dal and the RSS. Hardikar & Hegdewar were medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. But, by the Twenties, it was obvious that the real threat to Hindu Bengalis was from Muslim Bengalis.
a revolutionary organisation in Bengal, and maintained contacts with Indian activists abroad, such as Abani Mukherjee.
a Communist in Soviet Russia who had been put in charge of an 'Indian Military School'. The idea was to invade India through Afghanistan & maybe also Tibet.
Unsurprisingly, these connections drew the suspicion of colonial authorities.
as they would the suspicions of the American or British or French or Italian authorities with respect to their own purely White citizens.
In 1924, as Bose was preparing to travel to Europe, the British Indian police feared his trip might be a cover for political activity rather than scientific research.
They didn't arrest and beat him till he 'confessed'. India, at that time was under the rule of law. The Mayor of Calcutta was a pal of Sir Ashutosh who was Bose's patron.
They pressed Dacca University to cancel his sabbatical.
thus covering their backs
Bose’s burgeoning scientific renown, however, came to his rescue.
No. It was in the interest of Dacca University to stand up for their man. Otherwise they would come under increasing scrutiny.
The French author Sylvain Lévi
the French had handed back Savarkar & neutralized Aurobindo in Pondicherry. The had just as much reason to fear uppity niggers
wrote to vouch for Bose’s bona fide scholarly intentions. Likewise, Dacca’s vice-chancellor Hartog defended him. Largely thanks to Lévi’s intervention (and Einstein’s postcard, which underscored Bose’s standing in the scientific community), the authorities backed down.
The Police backed down. But they had already covered their backs.
Upon returning to India in 1926, Bose continued advancing science while contributing to his country’s intellectual emancipation.
by the British
He firmly believed that science should be accessible to the masses in their own languages.
It was the British who promoted vernacular languages like Bengali and Tamil
Unlike many of his contemporaries who published exclusively in English, Bose frequently gave public lectures in his native Bengali and wrote essays about science for general readers in Bengal.
Because his association with Einstein had made him famous. Otherwise, nobody would have cared.
He believed that educating people in their mother tongue
which was done under British auspices.
was crucial for fostering a scientific culture in India,
Clearly, he was wrong.
particularly in a nation striving to shed its foreign dominance.
By trying to get jobs in the British administration or Army or Educational establishment. Also there was competition to get into the new British created Legislative Assemblies.
This commitment to science in the vernacular was a subtle yet powerful form of resistance to colonial cultural hegemony,
just as it was a subtle yet powerful form of resistance to being an unemployed 'ghar-jamail' living off the charity of his in-laws.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that the fact that Bose's mother tongue was Bengali rather than Swahili represented significant resistance to Homophobia and bigotry against lesbian goats in Ludhiana.
as well as aligning with the broader Swadeshi ethos of self-reliance.
Which is why, instead of going to France or Germany, he travelled to Bihar and Odisha in order to study Physics. I suppose, if Dr. D.M Bose had not been interned in Germany during the Great War, more advanced ideas would have circulated for younger men like Bose & Saha- i.e. Calcutta Physics would have been more autonomous. Some say that Bose couldn't do much in Dacca because of the poor quality of the students there. But, without a PhD, it would have been difficult to get a Professorship in Calcutta. There is a hilarious story that D.M Bose was giving a speech in which he mentioned his having been invited to the Cuomo Conference in 1927. S.N interrupted to say DM was invited by mistake. The invitation was meant for SN. This reminded the audience that the older, richer, better educated man hadn't worked with Einstein. The younger, poorer, fellow- working in Dacca- had done so. This showed that Bengal was progressing. DM had leant SN some books after returning from Germany. SN brought glory to Bengal by beavering away in the boondocks. DM was delighted with this outcome. A nation makes progress when the older people take pride in the greater advances made by their juniors.
It is true that Bose, being a perfectionist and having many other interests, was not as productive as Saha, Raman or Sir K.S. Krishnan. But, thanks to the 'boson', his name will be remembered when others are forgotten.
In the late 1940s, the geopolitical landscape around Bose underwent a dramatic shift.
No. The geopolitical landscape shifted when Japan invaded Burma and menaced India. The Brits were no longer prepared to remain even at the centre (provincial autonomy had gone through in 1937. The result was famine in 1943 and ethnic cleansing in 1946. Hindus in East Bengal understood they would have to run away to the West.
The partition of India in 1947 split Bengal into two parts, with Dacca falling in the newly created East Pakistan, and Calcutta remaining in India.
Hindus insisted on the partition they had previously opposed in 1905
Bose, a Bengali with deep roots in Calcutta, decided to return to his hometown.
because he didn't want to be killed by Muslims
Even before partition, he had accepted an offer in 1945 to become a professor of physics at the University of Calcutta.
Which was more prestigious than Dacca Uni.
Returning to a free India, he helped rebuild and develop the country’s scientific infrastructure after the end of colonial rule and division.
He didn't achieve much.
In the history of physics, Bose stands as a reminder that great science can emerge from
teachers with PhDs from the top schools provided they teach in big commercial cities like Calcutta rather than Dacca. Even then, great science needs the imprimatur of the Professors working at wherever the current scientific Mecca happens to be.
unexpected quarters.
Dacca was a new university (though its precursor did educate Saha). That's why it had some smart, ambitious, young people teaching there. But Aligarh University once had Andre Weil on its Math faculty.
His work on quantum statistics was pivotal; it underpins much of modern physics,
His is the most inconsequential name in a list which includes Planck, Einstein, Fermi, Dirac, Pauli, Von Neumann & Feynman.
from the behaviour of electrons in solids to the properties of stars and the expanding Universe. And yet, remembering how Bose made those contributions is just as important.
Sir Ashutosh & two other Bengali lawyers funded a new Physics Dept. They paid Bose & Saha & Raman so they could stick with science rather than become clerks in the civil service.
He achieved his 1924 breakthrough not in a Cambridge or Göttingen, but in a modest laboratory in colonial India,
India under 'dyarchy'. Indians were the Mayors of both Calcutta & Dacca. The Education Minister- responsible for funding Universities- was Indian.
with no large research team or sophisticated equipment at his disposal,
Einstein was a fucking patent clerk between 1902-09. Compared to him, Saha & Bose had it easy. Also, because of the War, a lot of Germans- even Professors- were malnourished. Bhadralok Bengalis were both safe and well fed.
and initially without the validation of the Western scientific establishment.
Nonsense! British Professors were part of the 'Western scientific establishment'. There were British people in the Indian Educational Service who ensured that Indian public Universities taught to an acceptable standard. Herzog, the VC of Dacca, was a chemist by training.
His success was a triumph of intellect and determination over circumstance,
No. It was the product of the circumstance that some Indian lawyers were so rich, they could fund Scientific research and instruction. Guess who created the legal system under which they operated. Was it lesbian Zulus? Yes. It wasn't British dudes wearing Solar Topees.
a testament to creativity flourishing in an out-of-the-way locale
which the Brits had put on the map.
through sheer force of will.
That's a description of the British. It isn't a description of a bunch of guys who blessed the day Clive saved them from the Muslims.
However, Bose’s life demonstrates that he was no one-hit wonder,
Half a hit. The other half was Einstein.
but a multifaceted thinker and institution-builder.
i.e. he was provincial. Nothing wrong in that. What matters is when he had a good idea he sought to bring it to the attention of those who could make best use of it.
Bose was not a mythologised figure of serendipity, nor merely Einstein’s sidekick;
No one says he was. They say 'a young Physics Professor in Dacca had an idea which Einstein appreciated'. They don't say 'Bose was a street urchin from Dacca. One day, by chance, he saw a foreign Professor writing some equations on a black board. He became curious. He studied the equations. Suddenly, inspiration came to him. He wrote out the solution at the bottom of the board. The foreign Professor chanced to return at just that moment. He caught the urchin by the hand and said 'who wrote that solution? Tell me, or I will hand you over to the police!' Since the Professor was Einstein, he spoke in Yiddish. By serendipity, the urchin had been brought up in a Lutheran orphanage and thus could speak a bit of German. Thus he was able to understand Einstein and convince him that it was he who had found that solution. Einstein immediately married his own daughter to the urchin and took him to live with him in a big Palace in Berlin. Fortunately, the boy was able to escape and return to India but not before discovering Higgs's boson- the God particle. After that the boy dedicated himself to imbibing milk of spirituality from pulpy breasts of Mother Ind. GoI granted him title 'Einstein-choddh' on him though he had not in fact fucked Einstein- just his slut of a daughter.
The other story is that when Einstein donned Batman's cape, he choose Bose to be Robin. Sadly, this tale involves paedophilia and thus NSFW.
he was a complex individual who combined curiosity, creativity and a strong sense of identity.
In other words, he never got confused and thought he was actually a goat.
He helped lay the groundwork for scientific research in a country that, during his prime years, was fighting for its independence.
Some were fighting for Congress domination. Others were fighting against it.
He proved that being at the periphery of political power
He wasn't. He could have stood for election and become an MLA or even a Minister in India or an MP or a Lord or a member of the Privy Council in England. After 1937, he could have become the Premier of Bengal. After 1950, he could have been the head of State of the second biggest republic in the world. The Bengali Kayasth wasn't at the periphery of shit
did not mean being at the periphery of knowledge.
No smart person with access to a library need be any such thing. The fact is, he became a Lecturer at the age of 20. Einstein was 30 when he got his first academic position.
In the years following independence, Bose became a symbol of his nation’s scientific potential.
No. He was a symbol of India's retreat into Gandhian stupidity. The country would soon become unable to feed, let alone defend, itself.
Apart from Amal Kumar Roychaudhuri. Hawking & Penrose highlighted his contribution in the Sixties. Foreign interest in his 1955 paper emboldened him to try for a Doctorate. Wheeler, his external examiner, praised his work. Only then did he get academic employment. The lesson was not lost on the younger generation. Do your BSc & MSc in India by all means. Then get the fuck out.
His forward-looking emphasis on education and science outreach in the local language was decades ahead of its time,
No. It built on Raja Ram Mohan Roy's polemics in the 1820s.
and it remains a model for scientists in developing countries today.
The model is get the fuck out of shitholes.
Celebrating Bose now is not to indulge in hagiography but to recognise
he was a darkie. Black Lives Matter! Students in Tennessee should hear the story of a little darkie plucking cotton in Calcutta- in between being beaten and sodomized by Viceroy Sahib- who resolved to learn Bengali and thus become a great scientist.
his life’s larger lesson. In a world where science is increasingly global yet still shaped by inequalities,
e.g. the fact that the dude who wrote this is as stupid as shit which is why he had to switch from Physics to Grievance Studies
Bose’s life speaks to the possibility of creativity under constraint.
His students may be too stupid to tie their own shoelaces. Nevertheless they can show creativity by doing some finger painting- using their own faeces- to protect against Donald Trump.
He was not just ‘Einstein’s Indian collaborator’,
correspondent. The collaboration failed.
but a thinker who saw science as a universal human endeavour.
As opposed to one confined to clever Yids.
Whenever we speak of bosons
which is seldom
or marvel at a quantum technology,
or watch the Marvel movie- Quantumania
we are invoking his intellect, context, and enduring place in the story of modern physics.
Nonsense! Bose was a good man as was Sir Ashutosh. They showed dedication and public spirit. They didn't spend their time whining about Whitey. They wanted India to develop into an affluent, industrialized, country. Sadly, Indians preferred talking bollocks and playing politics.
The truth is STEM subjects cost money and effort. It is patriotic to spend money and expend effort on their burgeoning. It is unpatriotic and politically mischievous to allow non-STEM whining to crowd out worthwhile scholarship.
It may be that some other young man, without a PhD- i.e. without the blinkers imposed by older supervisors (Natanson's supervisor was J.J. Thompson and he was in his late fifties when he formulated something like 'quantum indististinguishability)- would have got to Bose statistics sooner or later. But facts are facts. It was Bose, in Dacca, who made the breakthrough. Perhaps, if he had stayed on in Europe, he could have fleshed out other ideas he had- e.g. re. photon spin- but the 'opportunity cost' would have been the loss to students in Dacca- more particularly those who wanted to work on X-ray applications or other such technological fields. I suppose subsequent generations of Indian Science professors did not have as strong a motivation because students were less interested in doing path-breaking research and more concerned with getting a job and acquiring power and influence. Alternatively, they felt the old men who ran things would not let them get ahead. The other side of the equation was that Indian scientists became increasingly sought after in the West as budgets for Scientific research greatly expanded. In India, the feeling was that 'pure' Science was a luxury and, in any case, smart people would emigrate. Perhaps, Trump will turn out to be the Messiah of Indian Science as the country retains more talent and benefits to the economy start to flow in more ample measure.
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