C V Raman

 Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in 1888 in a village in southern India. As a child, Raman was precocious, curious and highly intelligent. His father was a college lecturer in mathematics, physics and physical geography, so the young Raman had immediate access to a wealth of scientific volumes. By the age of 13, he had read Helmholtz’s Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects.

Raman was deeply interested in music and acoustics. While in college, he read the scientific papers of Lord Rayleigh and his treatise on sound as well as the English translation of Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone. This initiated Raman’s later interest in the physics of drums and stringed instruments such as the violin. He used fine-chalk powder and photography to investigate the vibrational nodes of drums; the white chalk remained only at the nodes of the vibrating membrane.

In a culturally anomolous and brazen act, when Raman was 18, he arranged his own marriage to Lokasundari (later called Lady Raman), a 13-year-old woman from Madras. The two then moved to Calcutta, where Raman accepted a position in the Indian Finance Department. During the next ten years—from 1907 to 1917—he struggled to balance his well-paying government job with his drive to be a scientist.

When he wasn’t at the Finance Department, he was conducting experiments at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences (IACS) in Calcutta. The IACS had been formed along the pattern of the Royal Institution in London. Its journal Proceedings was renamed the Indian Journal of Physics in 1926. Raman’s early works become known to an international audience when he published his research in the journals Nature, Philosophical Magazine and the Physical Review.

By 1917, Raman had had enough of his double life. He quit his government position and devoted himself fully to science. He accepted a full-time professorship—the endowed Pailt Chair of Physics—at Calcutta University, where he remained for 15 years.

One of the requirements of that position was to obtain training abroad in order to achieve parity with foreign professionals. Confident in his genius, Raman claimed that he did not need any foreign training; on the contrary, he was prepared to train those from other countries. Moreover, he argued, he had already earned a prestigious international reputation in physics due to his publications. Since Raman refused to budge, the University had no choice but to waive this requirement in order to secure the rising star. In 1924, Raman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is as if he knew he was destined for greatness. Indeed, in 1925, when Raman was attempting to obtain funds to purchase a spectroscope, he told his benefactor: “If I have it, I think I can get a Nobel Prize for India.”

In 1933, Raman became director and professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) at Bangalore. The next year, he established the Indian Academy of Sciences. Over the following decade, he published more than 30 papers in the Proceedings of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Nature, Philosophical Magazine and Physical Review. In 1937, he quit his position following disputes with some staff and members of the Council of the IIS.

At the age of 60, Raman then formed the Raman Research Institute (supported with his own funds and donations that he raised). He also remained a professor, as well as the President of the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore, until his death in 1970.