My latest book, Jagadish Chandra Bose - The Reluctant Physicist, was released at the Bangalore Lit-Fest 2023 in Bangalore on 3 Dec, 2023. Before the event, I had a chat with Shevlin Sebastian, with whom I was to converse during the book launch. Here is the summary of the chat, which throws a good amount of light on the "behind-the-scene" things of the book.
[Shevlin] How did you get the idea to do a biography of JC Bose?
[Sudipto] It so happened that I had to deliver a lecture on 5G at a seminar sometime in early 2019. To make the lecture a little more engaging I wanted to delve a bit into the history of 5G, sharing some interesting facts and figures. That’s when I chanced upon a paper published in a European journal divulging this intriguing tidbit that millimetre waves were first used for wireless communication close to 125 years ago in Calcutta by the Indian scientist JC Bose – that was more than a year before Marconi demonstrated “radio” in London. Incidentally, 5G is again using millimetre waves for wireless communication, more than a century later than Bose did. Knowing that was quite embarrassing for me, especially when I am a communication engineer, who takes pride in India and her history and culture. More embarrassment awaited me when I figured out that the world’s first patent on a semiconductor device was granted to none other than the same guy – JC Bose – in 1904. Today, we can’t even think of a world without wireless and semiconductors, which are at the heart of almost everything that controls our lives, from the phone to the laptop to the car, even the FASTag sticker. And, here is an Indian scientist who is at the core of both, almost unknown to everyone. That is not all. Totally orthogonal to wireless and semiconductors, Bose also happens to be the father of biophysics and some of the very latest research areas like plant neurobiology, plant cognition, etc. He also happens to be the first Indian scientist of the modern times, and the first Indian professor of Science in India. My ignorance about Bose pulled me to knowing him more, learning about him more, reading his papers, his books, his lectures.
But what attracted me more is not Bose the scientist – the Nobel Laureate CV Raman, the other Bose of the Bose-Einstein fame, the Rocket Boys Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai are much more celebrated scientists. What attracted me more was the man that JC Bose was, a scientist who hunted tigers in the Terai jungles, rode horses, participated in rowing competitions on the Cam River in Cambridge, was an avid Himalayan trekker and the writer of the first-ever Himalayan travelogue in any language, and especially the time he lived in, and the people around him. As Charles Dickens said, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times: the timeline of my book – mainly between 1890 and 1911.
The British empire is past its zenith – the Boer War in South Africa almost brought them to their knees. For the first time in more than a hundred years, they were on the verge of losing a war, and that was the beginning of the end of the Empire. The same is happening in their science. For centuries it has been British science that has ruled the world with the Newtons, the Maxwells, the Faradays, and the Kelvins. But suddenly now there is German science, Italian science too. In geopolitics, the British as well as European Empires are battling for global domination and hurtling unwittingly towards devastating wars, leading to the First World War in a decade. Bose’s life is some sort of a mirror of what’s happening around the world, every major event having a bearing on him in some way or the other.
Back home, the Swadeshi movement took shape, with the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Here, Bose emerges as a Universalist, Pacifist, and advocate of self-rule or self-reliance not through terrorism and violence, but through science and innovation. Incidentally, the British have made all efforts to deprive Indians of scientific research and innovation, the very thing that has catapulted the West to a sudden growth trajectory.
I felt awareness about Bose, what he did, and what he stood for are more relevant now than it was perhaps during his lifetime. Unfortunately, there’s very little written about him for a non-academic audience. Hence the urge to write a bio that would go under his skin and reveal the man with all his virtues and vices.
[Shevlin] Why do you think Bose is almost forgotten now? As you mentioned, eminent psychologist Ashis Nandy termed Bose a “lapsed scientist.” Why is it so?
[Sudipto] It’s an act of serendipity that the person who was one of the two most popular Indians in the West – the other being Tagore – in the 1920s was suddenly forgotten both in the West and in his own country – India. My book is meant to delve into this.
It’s well acknowledged now that Bose was a co-inventor of radio, alongside Marconi and Nikola Tesla. In fact, Tesla was granted priority over Marconi in what became the first-ever patent litigation to have reached the Supreme Court in the US in the 1940s – by then both Marconi and Tesla were already dead. In the 1990s, it was proved beyond doubt that Marconi, in his much-publicized first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission between Cornwall in South West England and Newfoundland in Canada in 1901, had actually used Tesla’s transmitter and Bose’s receiver. How the Marconi Company managed to propagate a totally different narrative for so long is indeed a chilling account of all that an extractive and monopolistic institution can do in collusion with a corrupt and duped government machinery, in this case, the British. National Geographic did an investigative story recently that had the other wireless companies in the world not been so threatened by the Marconi Company of costly legal battles that had already killed most of the competition distress calls from Titanic fitted with Marconi wireless could have been picked up by non-Marconi wireless sets from the nearby German ships, which didn’t even dare to read a Marconi-wireless message.
But interestingly, Bose was not forgotten because of Marconi. Tesla was, till he was resurrected in the 1980s. Bose was forgotten because of many things, and his own countrymen, too, played a role in it. I personally feel he himself was responsible to a great extent for his own oblivion. First and foremost was perhaps his over-dependence on this remarkable and multi-faceted personality, Sister Nivedita, Margaret Noble, who shielded him like a child to such an extent from the external world that when she suddenly died in 1911, Bose was left almost orphan for the rest of his life. Had she been alive, things would have been totally different.
[Shevlin] Talking about Sister Nivedita, a few people played a very important role in Bose’s life. They include Sr. Nivedita, Sara Chapman Bull, Swami Vivekananda, and Tagore. What were their influences on Bose?
[Sudipto] Sister Nivedita’s influence on Bose was paramount, as was Mrs. Sara Chapman Bull’s, both western disciples of Swami Vivekananda – Nivedita Irish and Mrs. Bull American, a rich widow of the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull. Ashis Nandy, elder brother of Pritish Nandy, did Bose’s psycho-analysis. He concluded that both Sister Nivedita and Mrs. Bull filled the void of a much-needed tender but tough mother figure that Bose’s mother had been in his life. Bose’s relationship with these two women – Nivedita a decade younger than him and Mrs Bull close to a decade older – raised eyebrows after Mrs Bull’s death. Leading newspapers and tabloids in the US ran titillating stories about them. That Bose called Mrs. Bull Mother, and Nivedita privately referred to Bose as her “child” added enough fodder to these stories.
In reality, these two women created a safety net around Bose. It was only under Mrs. Bull’s persuasion that he finally agreed to file a few patents, making her his co-applicant. Sister Nivedita acted as Bose’s secretary, editor, and even writer, to a great extent, of most of his papers till she lived – Bose would often demonstrate an experiment to Nivedita and she would then write the paper. She promoted Bose vociferously in the West, as she did for Swami Vivekananda as well. She pursued leading journalists in England and the US to write favourably about Bose. She fought with anyone who said anything not-so-good about him. She once wrote to the manager of a hotel, where Bose was supposed to stay in the US, insisting that the manager ensure Bose, being unaccustomed to the American ways, didn’t face any problem, whatsoever.
I think Bose was so much used to this pampering and caregiving that when both the women died almost simultaneously, he never managed to deal with many worldly things alone – one of those being creating followers that would keep him alive, and carry on with his unfinished tasks. Even the eponymous Bose Institute that he founded didn’t have a battalion of his followers. So, he faded away soon.
Tagore was Bose’s closest friend for many years, though they drifted apart a bit later in their lives. Bose made Nivedita translate one of Tagore’s short stories, making that his first work to be translated into English. In fact, Tagore started writing short stories when Bose demanded he create one every day during one of Bose’s trips to Shilaidaha, Tagore’s estate in Bangladesh. Both the poet and the scientist strongly felt that India must be awakened with tales of selfless love and heroic sacrifices found in old ballads, fables and mythologies from all across the country. They sifted through Buddhist, Maratha, and Sikh histories and thus came into being “Katha,” an anthology of long poems curated from all ages and regions of India, perhaps the first of its kind intended to integrate the whole country through a common cultural thread. That was also a template for what the Indian resistance should be – not through arms or terrorism or hatred, but through inner strength, self-reliance, resilience, selflessness, sacrifices, and love. Tagore dedicated “Katha” to Bose.
[Shevlin] What was Bose’s view of the Swadeshi Movement, and the Partition of Bengal in 1905?
[Sudipto] Bose believed that science and innovation were the keys to self-reliance. Complimenting that was Tagore’s idea of a self-reliant, self-driven, self-sustained Swadeshi Samaj, built on the foundations of true education that would arouse and awaken inner strength, self-esteem, determination and righteousness. Bose fought through his entire career trying to convince the British administration to set up a world-class physical laboratory in Presidency College. It’s really incredible that at a time when the Swadeshi Movement was taking shape in the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal in 1905, and people were starting to seriously think of liberation from British rule, Bose was thinking of liberation in the form of autonomy and self-reliance through science and innovation. It’s well known now that powerful and prosperous nations like the US, France, Germany, Japan, and others are so only because of their edge over others in science and innovation. India’s track record in scientific innovation is abysmal, which poses a big threat towards making India a self-reliant and powerful nation. We’ve become the service provider to the world, but for many of the basic things, for example, the semiconductors, of which Bose holds the first patent in the world, we can’t but rely on others. Bose’s thrust on scientific innovation is still relevant and remains the only solution for many of India’s problems.
[Shevlin] Did science become a mainstream subject in India, because of Bose, as you have said?
[Sudipto] Yes, that’s true. Higher studies in science wouldn’t have been possible in India without Bose. The Imperial British Government allowed Indians to study medicine, engineering, law, and civil service because all that was needed to run the government machinery. But, science, they already knew, would make the Indians innovative, and self-reliant. Hence, that was very tactfully kept out of reach. There was no employment for a science grad, as is evident from the fact that C V Raman, with a degree in science, came to Calcutta to work as an assistant accountant general in the Indian Finance Department. Presidency College finally got its first laboratory when Bose was on the verge of retirement. Bose made science a mainstream subject and profession.
[Shevlin] You talk a lot about Prana, the universal energy? Can you elaborate a bit on it in the context of Bose’s works?
[Sudipto] Prana in Indian philosophy is the universal energy, complimenting Akasha, the universal matter. Modern concepts of matter and energy and the fact that both are convertible to one another ushered in the quantum age, with Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation, which came into being in 1905. 12 years before that, Vivekananda had met Nikola Tesla in Chicago, where Vivekananda delivered his world-famous lecture at the World Religion Conference and Tesla lighted the entire city with AC for the first time. Both Tesla and Vivekananda were attracted towards each other and would have discussed Prana and Akasha. Referring to these interactions, Vivekananda later wrote in a letter that Tesla believed he could demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy, which, given the pre-Einstein era, was actually incredible. That was perhaps the first time someone was talking about the convertibility of matter and energy before Einstein. Vivekananda saw in Tesla a scientific validation of Indian concepts from the Vedas and Upanishads.
When Vivekananda met Bose a few years later, he became a major inspiration for Bose for connecting science with the Indian Knowledge System. Being a firm believer in Advaita Vedanta, like Tagore, Aurobindo and many others, the driving force behind Bose’s science became this verse from the Rig Veda: Ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti, only “One” exists, and the wise call it variously. Simplistically put, it means, whether it’s the energy or matter, it’s all “That One,” Tat Ekam. This gave Bose a sort of purpose for his science, to prove, with elaborate experiments, that plants and also sentient beings, to a great extent like humans and animals, and that it’s our ignorance that we are not able to realize that. That plants can also have some form of consciousness, might not be at the same level as humans, was a radical thought 125 years ago, but not anymore as “Plant Cognition” is a mainstream thing now. Back then, when Bose started talking about all this, many secular scientists, and even non-scientific people, felt that he was dragging Indian spirituality and philosophy too much into the realm of science. This became a nemesis for him, distancing him from the scientific fraternity. And, there was no one to fight for him after Nivedita.
In today’s world of Artificial Intelligence and the fear about what might become of the world when machines become “conscious,” Bose’s views on intelligence and consciousness are very relevant. But we might not have time to discuss that today – some other time.
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