This article has been shamelessly taken over from The Telegraph....
Wade through any of the standard encyclopaedia or reference book published from London or New York running into 1,500 to 2,000 closely-printed pages and with possibly 25,000 entries or thereabouts. You are sure to find two separate entries, one for Enrico Fermi and another for fermion, the subatomic particle named after him. To satisfy curiosity, you turn back the pages until, yes, you do find an entry under ‘boson’; it is described as another subatomic particle with properties distinct from those of fermion; there may even be a reference to the fact that forces carrying such particles as photons, gluons and gravitons are all bosons. Almost as an afterthought, it will be mentioned that boson is named after an Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose. It is though not considered worthwhile to accord him a separate entry, unlike in the case of Fermi. The reason is straightforward. The Italian-born physicist, besides having a role in putting together the first nuclear reactor in the United States of America, had won the Nobel Prize; Bose had not.
It is not for an encyclopaedia or a reference book to take into account the environment in which Bose tracked down bosons almost a decade ahead of Fermi’s discovery of fermions. A fledgling department of physics in a fledgling new university at Dhaka, even the minimal equipment were yet to be assembled in the laboratory, scientific journals from overseas were arriving in driblets, Satyendra Nath Bose’s most dependable capital asset was the precision with which he sorted out his mathematical thoughts, the only person he could quietly discuss with when stuck with a problem was himself.
He was, however, not allowed even that quiet. It is a lurid story, but deserves to be told to illustrate the kind of petty-mindedness that marked the relations between communities in the colonial era. Bengali Hindu nationalism reached its apotheosis in the swadeshi movement. It succeeded, in a manner of speaking: the 1905 decision to carve out of Bengal Presidency a separate province, East Bengal, which was to be joined with Assam, was abandoned in 1911 even as the country’s administrative centre was shifted from Calcutta to Delhi. While the ‘nationalists’ celebrated, Muslims in general were disappointed. It was important for the raj to assuage their hurt feelings. The foreign masters had a brainwave. The new township at Ramna, right across Dhaka city proper, had all the infrastructures needed for a university enclave, its new secretariat building, architecture half-Mughal and half-ersatz Gothic, with its winding, seemingly-unending corridors, provided assurance of more than adequate space for lecture and office rooms. Equally handy for meeting the residential requirements of the faculty were the indolent-looking bungalows intended for occupation by senior civil servants who were to be functionaries of the now-aborted provincial government. Acres and acres of khas land were also available for further construction activities. If the minority community were to be denied their province, why not gift them a university instead by availing of the physical facilities made ready for the provincial government that did not finally come up? A decision was quickly arrived at, and preparatory work on the new university started in earnest as soon as World War I ended. The intention was to create an institute of the highest academic excellence, something along the lines of Oxbridge, featuring halls of residence. A don from Cambridge was invited to be the first vice-chancellor, and he was encouraged to gather the best faculty from all over the country as well as from overseas. To help him in the matter, salary scales suggested for the faculty were alluringly high. For instance, a full professor was offered the time scale of Rs 1,000-2,000 and a reader that of Rs 800-1,500. Such high scales were unheard of in all other universities in British India and caused some heart-burning. The authorities were undeterred: they wanted to demonstrate to the Muslims that they, the foreign rulers, would always remain solicitous of the interests of the minority community, which is why a galaxy of first-rate scholars capable of generating an academic ambience that would be the envy of the rest of the country was being assembled.
There was, in fact, plenty of feeling of envy and resentment elsewhere in the country, most of all in Calcutta, particularly within the precincts of the Calcutta University, where Asutosh Mookerjee was the presiding deity. Mookerjee had opposed tooth and nail the establishment of a new university in Dhaka; and for two reasons. He was concerned that, with the setting up of this second university in the province, the educational empire he had built through his supreme overlordship of the Calcutta University was likely to come under severe threat. His second reason reflected the archetypal attitude of an upper-class Bengali Hindu: taking the message of higher education to the Muslim community, Asutosh Mookerjee was convinced, was like displaying pearls before animals of the lowest species.
He failed in his mission to prevent the founding of the University of Dhaka. And, of course, he was outraged by the luscious salaries for the faculty Dhaka proposed and which he could not compete with. He made it known that it would be considered an unfriendly act if any member of the Calcutta University teaching staff, or, for the matter, any alumnus of the university, joined the University of Dhaka. He was truly a holy terror in those times in Bengal’s academic circles. Most obeyed his writ. A few, nonetheless, either for financial reasons or in the hope of superior research opportunities, dared to defy. These few include the young scientists, Satyendra Nath Bose and Jnan Chandra Ghosh as well as the young historian, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar.
Bose joined at Dhaka as the new university started functioning from the academic year 1921-22. As reader in the department of physics, he drew a monthly salary of Rs 800 in the scheduled scale. The science faculty was located on the Curzon Hall premises, which were separated from the main university building by the sprawling sports complex. Curzon Hall, a beautiful colonial structure, was surrounded by trees and foliage; there was also a quadrangular water-body of ample dimension abutting one side of it. The milieu was as tranquil as it could be. There were only a handful of students in those inaugural years and relatively light teaching and laboratory assignments. Bose, then at the peak of his intellectual powers, plunged into unravelling the mysteries of particles.
Those burning with envy in the provincial capital had other designs. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, awarding a whiff of extremely restricted self-governance in the form of an executive council with some native representation to advise the governor, had meanwhile been ushered in. The member of the executive council in charge of finance was a successful barrister, B.C. Mitter, a former student of Asutosh Mookerjee. One of the first decisions he was prevailed upon to announce was a scaling down, supposedly on ground of acute financial stringency, of the salary scales for the staff of the University of Dhaka. A professor would no longer be entitled to the grand grade of Rs 1,000-2,000, the salary was henceforth to be pegged at Rs 1,000 with no yearly increment. The grade for the reader was lowered from Rs 800-1,500 to Rs 500-800. The governor chose not to intervene, and the circular went out notifying the reduced scales.
Satyendra Nath Bose’s research on the properties of a subatomic particle he had got a hunch of was rudely disturbed. An embarrassed vice-chancellor wrote to Bose to inform him about the lowering of his monthly salary from Rs 800 to Rs 500. This was of course in breach of contract. What was far more serious, it completely upset his personal financial calculations, which entailed maintaining separate establishments in Dhaka and Calcutta. For over a stretch of three months, he would tear himself away from mathematical formulae and sit down to compose, in longhand, letters to the vice-chancellor on the unfairness of what had been communicated to him. The vice-chancellor, who had all his sympathies for Bose and was desperately anxious not to lose the brilliant young physicist, could, in response to Bose’s letters only repeat his helplessness to reverse the government decision. Bose, in turn, would convey his inability to continue on the reduced salary. The correspondence went ding dong, dong dong; adieu to research.
All of a sudden, another turn of the wheel. Bose had sent a paper incorporating some of the early results he had obtained to Albert Einstein with a request to place it in a well-known German scientific journal. Einstein’s excitement knew no bounds on reading the paper, which answered several of the questions he himself was grappling with. Einstein scribbled a hurried postcard thanking and congratulating Bose for his contribution, which was a major breakthrough in man’s quest to learn what lies behind creation.
That postcard was instrumental in frustrating the machinations of those blinded by sectarian malice. Was it not from no less than a Nobel laureate? Had he not testified to the depth of Bose’s learning and the importance of his work? Satyendra Nath Bose was overnight made professor with a salary of Rs 1,000 per month.
Every bit of this episode from the annals of colonial faction-ridden India is based on hard fact, just as it is hard fact that Bose does not find a place in standard reference books because the Nobel committee had passed him over, and he needed the patronage of one whom the committee did not pass over to ensure his continuance at the University of Dhaka and find the tranquillity needed to explore further into the world of what subsequently got known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
