Book Review | 'Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist' who loved plants

The last couple of years have seen at least three biographies in English of Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), perhaps the greatest Indian scientist of the modern era—Kunal Ghosh’s meticulously researched Unsung Genius (2022) and Meher Wan’s The Scientific Sufi (2023), a joke of a book where apparently one day, the child Jagadish heard that “a lion from the nearby forest was roaming around the village”. There is of course not a single lion to be found within a thousand miles of Bengal. It was a tiger and the event is well-documented in Patrick Geddes’ 1920 biography of Bose.

Now comes Sudipto Das’ Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist. While as thoroughly researched as Unsung Genius, Das also livens up the narrative by imagining conversations that may have taken place between Bose and others—creative reconstructions based on the memories and opinions that Bose and his extraordinary bunch of friends—Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita—wrote in their letters and essays.

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Let me put it very simply. Every Indian should know about Jagadish Chandra Bose.

Bose’s inventions lie at the heart of much of the technology we take for granted today in our everyday lives. Though the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi has been traditionally credited as the inventor of the radio, it is now acknowledged officially that Bose was the father of wireless communications. It is his work, done in the late 19th century, that forms the foundation of technologies that power devices ranging from cellphones to microwave ovens, radios to radar, satellite television to the world’s most powerful space telescopes.

He achieved this while facing extreme racial discrimination from the British Raj.

In 1896, Bose exhibited the devices he had invented at the Royal Institute in London to an audience that included the best scientists in Britain. Marconi was then based in London, working on developing his wireless communication system. It is almost certain that Marconi stole Bose’s design. He could not—or refused to—give a plausible explanation of where he got the design of his radio receiver from. He gave conflicting accounts of its origin and the trial ended with an Italian Navy engineer who claimed that he got the idea from a paper he had read in an English science journal but could remember neither the name of the journal nor the author.

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It was Bose’s 1899 paper published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, the most world’s most prestigious science journal of the time. But Marconi was a very canny businessman extremely well-connected to the European aristocracy (his father was Italian nobility and his mother was an heiress of the Irish distillery that makes Jameson whisky), took credit where none was due and even received the Nobel Prize.

In 1943, years after both of them were dead, the US Supreme Court ruled that Marconi had stolen inventions by the Serbian-American genius Nikola Tesla and patented them in his name. Tesla had sued Marconi’s company for illegal usage of his work. Bose never bothered. His lifelong aversion to making any money out of his inventions defined him.

British companies pleaded with Bose to not make the design of his devices public. They wanted to buy his technology and were willing to share half their profits with him. This would have made Bose enormously wealthy but he refused. He believed that whatever he did should be for the good of mankind and it was against his ideals to earn money from his discoveries. He refused to patent his inventions. So other scientists got all the secrets of whatever he had invented for free.

Bose’s life is fascinating. His father Bhagaban Chandra was a senior civil servant of the British Raj but dedicated to the Indian cause. Bhagaban Chandra ended up losing all his money and in serious debt after all his schemes to help the poor failed. His son spent many years paying off all the debts, in the end selling off their family home.

Bhagaban Chandra’s ideals, as well those of Karna, the tragic warrior in the Mahabharata, powered Jagadish through his life. Many years later, he said, “How small the so-called victories are!—and with this a higher and higher idea of conflict and defeat; and the true success born of defeat. In such ways I have come to feel one with the highest spirit of my race…that the only real and spiritual advantage and victory is to fight fair, never to take crooked ways, keep to the straight path, whatever be in the way.” That sounds like Karna.

Bose’s struggles were epic. After getting his degree from Cambridge University, when he applied for a job as a professor of physics at Presidency College in Calcutta, the British college authorities could not believe that an Indian could be a physicist. They reluctantly gave him a temporary job where his salary was one-third of that of the British professors with the same or even lesser qualifications. In protest, he refused to take a salary. This was satyagraha, much before Mahatma Gandhi invented that term.

Finally, after two years of no salary, the British authorities were embarrassed enough to make amends. They made him a permanent employee and paid him all that they owed him, though he was still paid less than the British professors.

But then Bose wanted to have his own laboratory to study electromagnetic waves and the Presidency bosses again put their foot down. Sure, he was a good teacher, but how could an Indian ever do original research? They gave him a 24 sq ft space—6 feet by 4 feet—next to a toilet and told him that he would have to pay out of his pocket for whatever research he wanted to do.

This is where Bose, with the help of a semi-literate tinsmith called Nankuram, designed his equipment and got them built—the instruments had to be extremely precise. And he achieved what the most well-equipped and well-funded scientists in the US and Europe had failed to. Within eighteen months, he had discovered ‘millimetre waves’, now called microwaves. In 1895, in Calcutta, and the next year in London, he gave a public demonstration of his work, where he used radio waves to ring a bell, fire a gun and blow up a heap of gunpowder that was in another room behind a very thick wall. No one in the world had ever been able to do anything like that. The British were impressed.

He went on to invent what is now recognised as the first-ever semiconductor device. We would not have any laptops or iPads or cellphones without this technology.

But then Bose abandoned electronics and concentrated on plant biology, attempting to prove that plants are living beings as much as we are, and feel joy, sadness and pain just as humans and animals do. He developed a highly sophisticated instrument, the crescograph. This instrument could record and measure a plant’s response to external stimuli and magnify its tiny movements up to 10,000 times. He had invented what we now call the science of biophysics—the use of physics to study biology.

We know today that most of his findings are true. But at that time, European botanists and physiologists, who considered Bose to be an intruder into their domains, ridiculed his research. Scientists whom he believed to be his friends and allies deserted him and even trashed his work, while, as Das documents, plagiarising his experiments and findings.  British science journals refused to publish his papers. Das hints in his book that Bose may have died a crotchety old man—easily angered and even arrogant. Karna would have not liked that.

In The Reluctant Physicist, Das gives a very fair assessment of a man whom we hardly remember and know almost nothing of his achievements in the face of great adversity and discrimination. The book is not a hagiography at all in the way many biographies are today. I may have a few quibbles about facts that Das has taken poetic liberty with. I wish he had written a bit more about Bose’s guiding spirit—Bharat Mata—that he spoke about at length in his letters to Tagore, and Swami Vivekananda’s initial hostility towards the Brahmo Samaj where Bose was a prominent member.

But these are mere quibbles. Das’ biography bridges the gap between science writing and a broader readership to provide a very accessible story about one of the greatest sons of our nation in modern times who has been systematically disregarded and even erased from the history of Indian science. We must know and learn about this extraordinary man.

Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist
Sudipto Das
Niyogi Books
392 pages
Rs795

The reviewer is former managing editor of Outlook, former editor of The Financial Express, and founding editor of Outlook Money, Open, and Swarajya magazines. He has authored books such as ‘The IITians: The Story of an Extraordinary Indian Institution and How its Alumni Are Reshaping the World’, ‘Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta’, and ‘The Last War’. The views expressed in his column are personal, and do not reflect those of Firstpost. You can follow Sandipan Deb on Twitter @sandipanthedeb