At 63, Gulbadan Banu Begum, the only woman historian of the Mughals, was prompted by her nephew Emperor Akbar to write about his dynasty
Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath, a pioneer in wireless communication and plant electrophysiology. In 1917, he set up the Bose Institute in Calcutta dedicated to scientific research, but as a scientist he was misunderstood, as is clear from this letter to Patrick Geddes, written in 1917: “I do not belong to any special fold — the physicists think that I have given up physics and gone over to the botanists; the vegetists think that I am the physiologist and so on...” In his new book, Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist, Sudipto Das profiles Bose and his contribution to science. Edited excerpts from an interview: ‘Jagadish Chandra Bose’s biggest patrons were from the West,’ says Sudipto Das.
Bose’s relationships with Swami Vivekananda, Tagore, and European figures play a pivotal role in your book. How did you explore the intricate nature of these relationships? Vivekananda and Tagore were both global citizens, as was Bose, whose life and work had a universal appeal, thus making his associations with westerners natural and spontaneous. Though a staunch nationalist, thriving on the idea of achieving India’s selfreliance through science and technology, he always believed that India and the West should go hand in hand in all their endeavours. That was a deviation from the antiBritish sentiment that was brewing in India at that time. No wonder, some of Bose’s biggest patrons were from the West. These relationships tell of his belief that knowledge and human progress are a collective affair, not fragmented, or divided between borders.
A:Jagadish
Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist
How did you uncover Bose’s overlooked role as a radio inventor in the late 1990s, and what methods did you employ to navigate historical records for this significant revelation?
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers brought out a series of publications in the 1990s unearthing the truth that eluded us for many decades. It was settled that Bose had set up one of the world’s first functioning wireless systems before Marconi, and that Marconi later used Bose’s radio receiver to receive the first transAtlantic wireless transmission in 1901, without giving any credit to Bose.
Q:A:How did you portray him as a multifaceted personality?
From the beginning, my aim was to get under the skin of the person and explore the man he was, with his share of virtues and vices, rather than present him only as a scientist. That naturally brought out his multiple facades, from a hunter chasing tigers in the Terai jungles to sculling in the freezing waters of the Cam River in Cambridge, writing the first Himalayan travelogue in any language, influencing Tagore to write poems inspired by stories of love and sacrifice from Indian history and mythologies, or even surreptitiously keeping quiet when, he perhaps knew, lab aides planted by Sister Nivedita in Presidency College were regularly taking out explosive materials from the laboratory to make bombs.
Q: A:TYour book is divided into four parts exploring the theme of unity. Can you elaborate on the significance of this theme in the context of Jagadish Chandra Bose’s life and contributions?
Bose belonged to the Unitarian Brahmo fraternity, like Rabindranath Tagore, Raja Rammohan Roy and other eminent Bengalis. Brahmoism was founded on the principles of Advaita Vedanta, the genesis of which can be captured in these words from a verse from the Rig Veda: “Ekam sat, vipra vahudha vadanti” or there exists only “One, the wise call It variously.” At its core is the universal concept of unity in everything.
Bose’s pursuit of unity leads him to find a commonality in life in a plant and human. He prophesied that plants, too, like humans and animals, can feel pain, thus creating the foundation of new disciplines like plantneurobiology and plant cognition.
Q:he shadows of the past follow us all our lives. Our history becomes our inheritance; its events, our legacy. Indira Varma, seven years old in the autumn of
1947, inherited the loss — of her childhood, her home, family, and their life in Peshawar — amidst the new found, bittersweet “independence”. Overnight, her home is in “another country”, no longer theirs. She carries the weight of this legacy all her life. In all new beginnings, she reminisces the loss of what is left behind — the gardens, fields and farms, a house with hundred rooms, rich fruit and richer meat, horses, sports, pigeons, and guns that her grandfather polished with great pride. Lest We Forget follows the transition and reinvention of their lives.
At the announcement of partition, Indira Varma, her two sisters, a mother and grandparents, leave their life of abundance behind and enter a ₹795 life of decades of uncertainty, hardship and depravation. The three sisters, of which Indira is the middlechild, grow up before their time. The exaristocratic Singh family lives between Kanpur, Aligarh, Dehradun and Delhi, doing odd jobs like pasting stickers on bottles and making candles. For the elders, “the loss of home was the loss of identity, the loss of roots, a way of living... it was the loss of self.”
Kindness amid adversity
However, in the face of every adversity — displacement, hunger, poverty, unemployment — kindness is found in strangers. Slowly, with resilience, the three sisters start building a life for themselves. The eldest, Uma, who had started earning at 13, later finds a stable job at Delhi’s Cottage Industries Emporium. The youngest, Roopy, becomes a stewardess and later settles in London. Indira, who once wanted to be a doctor, marries into a stable, large family, to a husband with cultural tastes like hers. After