Jagadish Chandra Bose’s new biography demystifies the Bosean myth.
Dr Debanjan Chakrabarti is the Director of the British Council, East and Northeast India. He has over 20 years of experience in leading education, development and cultural collaboration programmes in the UK-India corridor and internationally. A triple gold medallist in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Debanjan was awarded the prestigious Felix Scholarship from India for his PhD - in literature and media studies - from the University of Reading, UK. In his substantive role as the Area Director for East and Northeast India, he leads all of the British Council's education and cultural relations work in East and Northeast India, covering 13 states and Bhutan. Debanjan is a trustee of the International Language and Development Conference and sits on the education and heritage committees of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
[Debanjan] Namaskar. Good evening. Thank you for being here with us this evening for a fascinating conversation, I hope, [about] one of the doyens of Indian science and much more. I have with me Sudipto, Sudipto Das. Sudipto is the writer of four books. Three of them are fiction before this. This is his first non-fiction. The previous ones were fiction, The Ekkos Clan, The Aryabhata Clan, and The Broken Amoretti. And this, his latest book, is a brilliant biography of Jagdish Chandra Bose. And it's got a very intriguing subtitle – The Reluctant Physicist.
Sudipto and I went to the same school. The first two schools and colleges were the same. But the similarity ends right there, and he went on to do many more exciting things. As you heard, he is a doyen of India's semiconductor industry. He is a brilliant musician, and he has harnessed the power of tech for good for those who are socio-economically marginalised, particularly during the pandemic.
Sudipto, if I may just kick things off: First, a huge thanks for this fantastic biography you wrote. I think it brings out the nuances of the kind of polymath of a personality JC Bose was. He lived in the best of times and the worst of times in some ways. Could you tell us a little bit about the very interesting cusp of history when Jagdish Chandra Bose started his fantastic career?
[Sudipto] Jagdish Chandra Bose lived for almost 80 years, from 1858 to 1937. But the two decades of his life, mainly the 1890s and 1900s that I have covered extensively in my book, truly symbolise "the best of times and the worst of times" in many ways. They stand at a crucial juncture in the history of humanity, ushering in not only a new century but an altogether new era. We can call it the era of science and technology. Perhaps, the most critical aspect of these 20 years was the invention of wireless and electricity. That was doubtless the most significant thing since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century when the steam engine was invented. After that, the entire geopolitics of the world, from imperial security to warfare, was somehow related to wireless and electricity.
There were also ominous signs during these two decades of the tectonic changes that would shape the next two centuries. It was imminent that a World War was not far off. England fought the Dutch (Boer War, 1899-1902, Ref. page 227) and the French (Fashoda Incident, 1898) in Africa. They were also confronting the Russians in Afghanistan, in what was called the Great Game (stretching till the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907).
More importantly, the extractive and non-inclusive practices of the colonial rulers across the world had attained such an oppressive level that it was undeniable that there would soon be a tipping point. Consequently, India gained independence in 1947, and most of the erstwhile European colonies were freed by the 50s. The ominous signs of the last leg of India's struggle for freedom were visible between 1890 and 1910 in the form of the Swadeshi Movement.
[Debanjan] The great thing about Sudipto's biography of Jagdish Bose is that he brilliantly weaves this grand historical background into the narrative. Just staying on that historical question, Sudipto, you know, Jagdish Bose also represents, within the flow of Indian history and Bengal's history, almost the pinnacle of Bengal's Renaissance, one which starts with Raja Rammohun Roy and carries on right through Rabindranath. And Rabindranath and Jagadish Bose were contemporaries. Would you like to throw some light on this and how Jagadish Bose was also a product of this Bengal Renaissance and not just a scientist?
[Sudipto] The period between 1890 and 1910 saw the confluence of many a luminary and their incredible acts. Swami Vivekananda reinvigorated a modern Indian nation through his epoch-creating speech in Chicago in 1893. Rabindranath Tagore became more than a poet; his social activism and entrepreneurship finally led to India's self-reliance movement. And Jagadish Chandra Bose resurrected Indian Science.
Today, science or science education is taken for granted in India. But the British government, very consciously, had kept higher education in science out of reach for the Indians. Jagadish Bose was the first Indian scientist in modern India. He was also the first Indian science professor. Before him, only the whites could teach science in the Presidency College.
Bose realised quite early that India would never attain self-reliance without science and innovation. He wanted India to gain its position in science, which it had in ancient times, but not being exclusive of the West. At a time when Indians were not even allowed to do science, he envisaged that Western and Indian science should go hand in hand. That was, indeed, the pinnacle of Renaissance, which is all about rebirth, reinventing the past, and using that as a unifying force to create a modern nation out of diverse sets of people of various creeds, colours and cultures sharing a common ancestry and cultural and civilisational heritage.
Bose wanted to unite India on a cultural basis. The unique poetry collection Katha (The Fables, 1900, Ref. page 207), dedicated to Jagadish Chandra Bose, was a collaboration between the poet and the scientist. That was the first time such a literary work had been created, binding the vast expanse of India with a cultural thread. Katha had inspiring stories of love, sacrifice, and dharma curated from history, mythologies, and folklore around the Buddha, Shivaji, the Sikh Gurus, Kabir, and many others, uniting the Marathas with Rajputana, the Punjab with the ancient Magadha of the Buddha's time, comprising the present-day Bihar and West Bengal, the East with the West, the North with the South. It created a sphere where the entire India could be united.
[Debanjan] This is not a very well-known facet – the collaboration of Rabindranath Thakur and Jagdish Chandra Bose on such an essential book of pedagogy, almost nationalist pedagogy. In one of your recent Instagram reels, you have also spoken about Jagdish Chandra Bose's house and Jagadish Chandra Bose's institute, Bose Institute, incorporating elements of Indian design or Buddhist design, etcetera…
[Sudipto] Jagadish Bose organised the world's first exhibition of the Ajanta paintings at his Circular Road home in Calcutta. The world did not know about the Ajanta paintings until an English woman took the pain of leading an expedition to Ajanta (December 1909, Ref. page 351) with many young and enthusiastic painters. Nandalal Bose was part of that group, camping there for a few months and painstakingly recreating the paintings. Jagdish Chandra Bose was there, too, for a few weeks with Sister Nivedita. When the paintings were brought back to Calcutta, he organised the exhibition at his home, inviting the Viceroy's wife. These are the different facets that define Jagadish Bose – a scientist but, at the same time, a very nationalistic art aficionado who wanted to revive the ancient Indian art form. Doubtless, the inspiration came from Sister Nivedita, the mother of the modern Indian School of Art. The Bose Institute looks like an Art Museum, with all its artefacts, motifs, and symbols, especially the Vajra, the institute's logo, a typical Buddhist motif.
[Debanjan] We will dive into Bose the Scientist in a moment… In one of your previous interviews, you have mentioned that Sunil Ganguli's Prothom Alo (First Light) and Shei Samay (Those Days) were sort of influences or inspirations behind your approach to Jagadish Bose's biography, and I think it shows in the exquisite research that you have done on this book. Tell us a little bit more about the literary influences that have inspired you.
[Sudipto] From the beginning, I wanted to write a biography that would read like Prothom Alo or Shei Samay. I didn't want to write a typical academic biography, many of which are already available. I wanted to write a biography, which would read like a story and would be for the non-scientific audience, too, but not do away with the references to science. Sunil Gangopadhyay has very nicely shown the way to do that.
The more challenging part of that is the background research. Prothom Alo reads so lovely because you actually visualise the background: the minutest detail of the setting, the food, the clothes, the music, etc. All the small, insignificant things around us, like what we have heard about the fragrance and food in the previous session, make a narrative enjoyable…
[Debanjan] I call it the Downton Abbey effect.
[Sudipto] Yeah!
[Debanjan] Because Downton Abbey, those of you who are Downton Abbey fans will realise the enormous amount of background details on cars, on food. Everything changes as the decades change. So again, it's a plus for Sudipto's book. It's beautifully written. It's a compelling read. You never get bored for a minute, and, I think, the way it flips back and forth between time, it's almost a novelistic-fictional device rather than kind of a straightforward chronological biography. So that's absolutely brilliantly done. Tell us a little bit about the very intriguing subtitle of your book: Reluctant Physicist. Why do you think Bose was a reluctant physicist? Was he a reluctant scientist, too?
[Sudipto] He was not a reluctant scientist, but he was indeed a reluctant physicist. He researched physics only for four years, from 1896 to 1900, dedicating the rest of his life to plants. He is the father of Plant Neurobiology and Plant Cognition. Lately, mainstream research has accepted that plants also have some form of nervous system. Non-human intelligence, which we now call Artificial Intelligence, has been gaining ground in recent years. Anything non-human is generally termed artificial. Almost 120 years back, Bose talked about plant intelligence as a form of non-human intelligence, which is not artificial but natural. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence in the past few decades has brought some focus on Plant Cognition.
Bose researched plants for more than thirty years. That's unsurprising because he had been a naturalist since childhood. He loved plants, animals, and rivers. He was a horse rider (Ref. page 31). He was a rower (Ref. page 48). He rowed in the Ganga and also in the deep sea in England. He was a hunter. He was a person who loved nature. He was introduced to physics in St. Xavier's when he came under the tutelage of Father Lafont, another amazing personality that Calcutta should be proud of (Ref. page 45). Father Lafont was a physics enthusiast. He influenced Jagdish Bose to take up physics.
As fate would have it, Bose went to England to study medicine, not physics. But as he had kala azar, the scent of chloroform on the dissection table troubled him a lot. He couldn't continue with medicine. Reluctantly, he went to Cambridge and took up the Natural Science Tripos, which included physics and botany. And there, too, he came across someone like Father Lafont – Lord Rayleigh, his physics teacher, who took the young, adventurous boy from rural Bengal under his tutelage (Ref. page 53). He studied physics there and worked in one of the best laboratories in the world. But he was a naturalist by heart. His heart and soul were in plants, animals and rivers. So, I think fate brought him back to the plants and animals…
[Debanjan] But, I think, for many Bengalis, many Indians, there is this feeling that Jagadish Chandra Bose was almost duped of the credit of having invented wireless or the radio. To what extent does your research throw light on it? Was it a myth? Or there is an element of truth in that.
[Sudipto] Marconi is no longer considered the inventor of the radio. The academic world has acknowledged that Nikola Tesla and Jagadish Bose are co-inventors of radio, along with Marconi and many others. Marconi's claim to fame was the first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission in 1901. After a detailed examination and forensic investigation in the 1990s, it was proved beyond doubt that Marconi had used Jagadish Bose's receiver and Nikola Tesla's transmitter in the trans-Atlantic feat. So, it is no longer a myth.
Moreover, it has been widely acknowledged that the gigahertz frequency used in 5G communication, and for which we use something called the millimetre waves, which is nothing but the electromagnetic or radio waves a few millimetres in length, was first used by Jagadish Bose in the 1890s. So, the genesis of the wireless communication you see in 5G goes back to Jagadish Bose. These are well-known facts. But I feel the Bengalis, too, who are proud of their heritage, might not know about these facts.
[Debanjan] Before I open it out to the audience, I'm sure there are many questions bubbling away. A question that I really want to put to you is again going back to your very meticulous research… Our culture is not very focused on the preservation of documents or even… our buildings and monuments. We have a particular challenge. I mean, I'm not making a value statement. It's how some cultures are. Western culture places enormous value on written records and preserving buildings and monuments. We probably don't. From an academic researcher's perspective, did you face any challenges in collecting or locating materials, sourcing materials, and getting everything lined up?
[Sudipto] The only challenge was accessing old Indian newspapers. I don't know where to get the first edition of Times of India from 1838 or the first editions of Jugantar and Ananda Bazar Patrika. But I have access to all the editions of the New York Times, Times London, or any insignificant, small tabloid paper from Scotland. Yes, getting archival access to Indian newspapers is an unsurmountable problem.
[Debanjan] Yes, this is a really interesting thing you touch upon because during my PhD research, a lot of it is on 1930s newspapers in Britain, and everything is available at the click of a button. I mean, all of it, from, as you said, very insignificant journals to the Times, everything, it's searchable, and that's the beauty of it. So, there is something for us to consider here in Kolkata in a literature festival. I would like to invite questions. I'm sure the number of hands has gone up, so starting in the front row, we will take two quick questions: the lady in red and then the gentleman. Thank you.
[Audience 1] This was a very engaging session. I had read that Jagdish Chandra Bose was very interested in science fiction. He used to collect science fiction, and he tried writing some. Apparently, this was an interest encouraged by his Cambridge supervisor as well, so if you could throw some light on it.
[Sudipto] Jagdish Chandra Bose was also a mountaineer. He was a trekker. Apart from science fiction, he wrote the world's first Himalayan travelogue in any language. The travelogue was about a trek to the Pindari Glacier, the origin of the Pindar River, which, like Alakananda, Mandakini and Bhagirathi, is one of the channels that flows into the Ganges River. In Bangla, it's called Bhagirathir Utsa Sandhane (In Quest of the Ganges' Source, 1895, Ref. page 109). The next Himalayan travelogue in English (perhaps Francis Younghusband's "The Heart of a Continent," 1896) came at least a year later than this.
He also wrote one of the first science fiction in any Indian language. I tried discovering if that could be India's first science fiction. There are a few other contenders: one in Bangla (Hemlal Dutta, 1882) and one in Hindi (Pandit Ambika Dutt Vyas, 1884).
[Audience 2] Your book is very interesting indeed, and I really enjoyed reading it. My question is also something that this discussion started with, which is the subtitle of "Reluctant Physicist." He transcended the narrow confines within which different disciplines used to be constrained, and he had an inter-disciplinary mind. And, as someone now recognised as one of the pioneering biophysicists and who taught physics in Presidency College throughout his professional life, would it then be correct to call him a reluctant physicist?
[Sudipto] Bose wrote his last paper on physics in 1902 (On Electromotive Wave accompanying Mechanical Disturbance in Metals in Contact with Electrolyte). After that, all his papers submitted to the Royal Society were in Botany. Sub-fields like Plant Neurobiology, Plant Cognition, and Biophysics were unknown, so he had to submit his papers under "Botany." But he was more interested in biophysics rather than botany. He totally dismissed the divisions between biology, botany, and physics. He researched plants but with instruments which used a lot of physics. He invented those intricate instruments, which were unheard of in botany. Yes, he taught physics because that was his vocation. He had to, for a living. He couldn't have got a lectureship in botany. But in Presidency College, too, his research from 1902 till he retired was all on plants.
[Audience 3] As a physics lover myself, I really liked the discussion. You have mentioned a lot of contemporaries, like Nikola Tesla and others. Was he in correspondence with these people or, for example, Tesla, Niels Bohr, Einstein? If you can share some stories, that would be amazing. Thank you.
[Sudipto] Bose didn't collaborate or communicate with Nikola Tesla. However, there is a very important link between the two: Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda and Tesla did meet (first in Chicago in 1893). Going through Swamiji's letters written after meeting Tesla, there's a subtle change in his, Swamiji's, perspective of science. He talks about Prana and Akasha: Prana is the universal energy in Indian philosophy, and Akasha is the matter.
Swamiji writes in 1896 (Letter to E. T. Sturdy, 13 Feb), almost a decade before Einstein would publish the Special Theory of Relativity and the E = MC2 equation, that Tesla was very excited after hearing about Akasha and Prana. Swamiji then adds that Tesla had claimed, "I can prove mathematically that matter and energy are convertible." Incredibly, Swami Vivekananda is discussing with Nikola Tesla something that Einstein would do a decade later.
Vivekananda was very closely associated with Bose, too. Bose had read Nikola Tesla's books. (Ref. page 86). I haven't found any proof that Tesla and Jagadish Bose had interacted with each other. But Jagdish Bose would have learnt quite a bit about Tesla from Vivekananda.
Einstein did meet Jagadish Bose in 1926. Both Einstein and Jagdish Bose were members of a committee under the League of Nations. The committee, called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, later became UNESCO. Jagadish Bose's co-members in the committee were Einstein, Mary Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson, all Nobel laureates. When Bose first went to Geneva in 1926 to attend the committee's meeting, he was so extremely popular that Einstein had to jostle for a seat in a lecture that Bose gave there. Bose spoke about the unity of life in plants, animals and human beings. Einstein was so excited that he told the newspapers that only for this research should Dr. Bose have his statue built in every European university (Ref. page 22).
[Debanjan] What a brilliant way to end this session. Everyone here, this is a brilliantly researched book, and as you can make out, Sudipto doesn't make any claim in the book that is not verifiable through data and, evidence and research. So, thank you, Sudipto, for presenting us with this brilliant book, making us all very proud as Indians and as Bangalis. So, thank you very much, and, as always, it is a great pleasure speaking to you; a big thanks to Apeejay Kolkata Literary Meet [AKLF], and a big thanks to Anjum for having us here.
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