A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose’ tries to reinvent a hero

Dinesh C Sharma

Advertisement

Jagadish Chandra Bose is easily one of the most well-known Indian scientists of all time. Several generations of Indians have grown up with the stories of how he discovered ‘life’ in plants and how his pioneering work on short electromagnetic waves was misappropriated by western scientists, who claimed credit for developing wireless radio. It was only in 1997 that the scientific community recognised that the coherer device used by Guglielmo Marconi to receive the first transatlantic wireless signal on December 12, 1901, was based on a new wireless detection device Bose had invented and had disclosed at a meeting of the Royal Institution in London in 1899. Marconi made a modified version of it and obtained a patent for the same. Bose was offered huge sums of money by companies interested in commercialising his invention, but he did not do so. Nor did he patent it.

Several biographies of Bose written in the past century (the most recent in 1999) have brought out all these aspects of his work and life. Bose was a much-celebrated scientist in his lifetime. He regularly presented his work to scientific societies in India and Britain and was featured extensively in newspapers and magazines in Europe. Rabindranath Tagore got the Maharaja of Tripura to support his research. The Bengal government extended him huge grants to start laboratories in Darjeeling and Sijberia. The British decorated him with the title of ‘Companion of the Order of the Star of India’ and Calcutta University honoured him with the degree of Doctor of Science. He then founded the Bose Institute (which is now a government lab). Dozens of fellowships, awards, etc, in contemporary India commemorate him. Therefore, for a new biography to use tags like ‘unsung’ and ‘unprivileged’ for Bose is inappropriate and rather intriguing.

The active scientific career of Bose had two phases — radio physics and plant physiology. In the second phase, Sister Nivedita — a disciple of Swami Vivekananda — became his close associate. She was not a scientist but assisted Bose in writing research papers and books. Bose was a Brahmo and a believer in iconoclasm, while Nivedita was a Hindu idolater. Was the plant physiology work of Bose (signifying the unity of all life forms) influenced by Nivedita’s Vedantic ideas? Bose researchers have investigated this question for a long time. The author of the present biography, Kunal Ghosh, has tried to prove the Vedantic influence without providing adequate or new evidence. He calls Nivedita the ‘scientific soulmate’ and ‘inspiration and light’ of Bose. He believes Bose’s distaste of patents too was based on the wisdom of ancient sages that ‘knowledge was never limited or restricted, but available for all’.

Ghosh does not find any disconcerting notes in the Bose-Nivedita relationship, while other researchers have pointed out that the two differed on mixing spiritualism with science. Biographies of Nivedita mention that Bose, at one point, told Nivedita not to influence him — ‘Give me the right words, yes, but only the words! Leave me the idea, I claim.’ Such sentences, however, have been carefully purged from English and Bengali translations of Nivedita’s biography originally written in French, as pointed out by researcher Siladitya Jana in Current Science. In scientific publications, normally scientists acknowledge people who help them conduct experiments or write manuscripts. Bose never did so for Nivedita. Was Bose afraid of being seen under influence of the spiritual ideas of Nivedita? Ghosh avoids such critical questions and does not even quote available evidence, in his quest to prove the Vedantic link. Incidentally, he has dedicated the book to Sara Chapman Bull (spiritual mother of Vivekananda), saying ‘she protected India’s lone scientist with motherly care when he was struggling to survive’.

The author draws heavily from secondary material like books in Bengali published by the Bose Institute and a hagiography written by Patrick Geddes, a member of the Vedantic circle and close friend of Bose. Dozens of pages have been wasted on giving encyclopaedic information on high school science when it could have been explained in just a few. PC Ray, though a contemporary of Bose at Presidency College, gets only a passing mention. Correspondence has been quoted verbatim throughout the book, breaking the narrative. References have been mixed up (chapters 1 and 2), which is a serious lapse for a history book. Overall, instead of answering critical questions about Bose, the book leaves one with more questions.